The deserved obscurity of the Book of Nahum within the Old Testament canon may be attributed in part to the fact that it is a poem, in Hebrew, and, as has been said, "poetry is what gets lost in translation." Nevertheless it is possible to detect, in the English of the Revised Standard Version, an unrestrained force that might put an American in mind of Walt Whitman:
Desolate! Desolation and ruin!
Hearts faint and knees tremble,
anguish is on all loins, all faces grow pale!
Where is the lions' den, the cave of the young lions,
where the lion brought his prey, where his cubs were, with none to disturb?
The lion tore enough for his whelps and strangled prey for his lionesses;
he filled his caves with prey and his dens with torn flesh.
Maybe you can agree that an exclamatory yawp is here joined to dusky meaning. I’m tempted to say it’s “vivid” despite being in the fog concerning what it might be about. The whole book is only three pages long, so the above lines represent a consequential part of the whole, but the fore and aft don't do much to lighten the shade. A general reader, falling back upon the commentaries, soon learns more about the history of the ancient Near East than she perhaps was curious about.
The city of Nineveh, on the east bank of the Tigris River across from present-day Mosul in northern Iraq, was in the middle of the 7th century B.C. the world's largest city and the thriving center of the Assyrian Empire. In 612 B.C., however, the city was sacked by a rainbow coalition of Persians and Babylonians, former subjects of the empire. This ended a long period of Assyrian hegemony in the region and was cause for celebration among peoples, including Israel, who had suffered under Assyrian domination. The book of Nahum is about the fall of Nineveh. The prophet revels, or luxuriates, in the defeat of the hated Assyrians, who were known for pitiless cruelty. The above passage, featuring lions, is part of the mocking celebration—lions having figured prominently in Assyrian art. The idea is that the marauding beast (the Assyrian Empire), returning to its den (Nineveh), discovers only desolation and waste. That the beast is a lion sharpens the barb, as it would if the target were America and a bald eagle deployed.
But it seems odd that such fare should survive the cut for inclusion in the canon. The Old Testament is the story of God's dealings with the people of Israel, who are here only a geopolitical beneficiary of the action of Babylonians and Persians. In the book of Joshua, one is repelled by the coarse notion that our God is truer and stronger than yours, which justifies our savagery, our strut and swagger. But it is at least part of Israel's story. Israel was in that fight. The fall of Nineveh wasn't Israel's fight, and Nahum's ebullience, instead of being morally dubious, just seems peculiar. It's certainly difficult to locate the religious significance. The book has the form and vocabulary of other works of Old Testament prophecy. The prophet, speaking for God, decries the wickedness of the Assyrians and predicts the destruction of their principal city. All this, however, is to one side of the ongoing story relating to God and his chosen people.
Perhaps the way to illustrate this point is to recall the opening to the book of Amos. The first chapter is made entirely of the prophet's denunciation of Israel's neighbors. One after the other, they are condemned: Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom, the Ammonites, Moab. The same formulaic phrases are used:
For three transgressions of [place name],
and for four, I will not revoke the punishment. . . .
You grow familiar with the drill, are almost lulled to sleep, and then:
For three transgressions of Israel,
and for four, I will not revoke the punishment;
because they sell the righteous for silver,
and the needy for a pair of shoes. . . .
The denunciation being introduced with the same formulaic expressions emphasizes that Israel is held to the same standard as its neighbors—and is found deficient. The details are interesting, too. The named offenses of Israel's neighbors are largely geopolitical in nature, or they are charged with excessive ruthlessness in the pursuit of geopolitical goals. But Israel: you have sold out the needy for a pair of shoes. As the indictment is developed, it's clear what repels Amos (and God) about the behavior of the people of Israel: lax morality and cheating put to the service of money-making, no care for social justice, all coated over with shallow, self-satisfied religious observance. It's another installation in the story of God's dealings with his wayward people.
The book of Nahum is the first chapter of the book of Amos. You other people are bad! Our God will punish you! And that is the end of it.
The scholarly commentary devoted to Nahum sometimes seems to me almost humorous. For example, the date of composition must belong to the early 7th century B.C., since Nineveh fell in 612 B.C. But was it written before or after 612 B.C.? There is much discussion of the meaning of Hebrew verb tenses to illuminate whether the "prophecy" of Nineveh's fall came before or after Nineveh fell. The problem of dating the book is complicated by evidence indicating that, notwithstanding its brevity, parts were written after other parts. For example, the first of its three chapters appears to be a poem, inserted by Nahum or an editor at a later date, that introduces the main poem. The text of this introductory poem is a mess. There is enough of it for scholars to tell that it’s supposed to be an alphabetic acrostic: that is, each line begins with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet (such as in a 26-line English poem in which the first word of the first line began with "A," the first word of the second line with "B," and so on). But in the text that has come down to us not all the Hebrew letters are used, and, of those that are, the order is garbled. You can see why a 21st-century general reader of the Revised Standard Version, trying to make sense of it, might feel at sea. Apparently the Hebrew is bad enough.
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