Nahum 1

The book opens with two compact lines that fix its subject and its source: The burden of Nineveh. The book of the vision of Nahum the Elkoshite (v. 1). The word burden is the term the prophets use for a heavy, weighty oracle - a load of revelation laid on the messenger that he is bound to carry and set down. And the load here is of Nineveh, the splendid and terrible capital of Assyria, the empire that had swallowed nations and carried the northern tribes of Israel away. There is a history behind this name the reader is meant to remember: generations earlier, at the preaching of Jonah, this very city had repented and was spared. The mercy was real, but it did not hold across the centuries. Nineveh returned to its violence and its plunder, and now a second prophet receives a vision concerning it. Yet Nahum does not begin by describing Nineveh's crimes or its coming fall. He begins, for five long verses, by describing God - because everything that is about to happen to Nineveh flows from who God is.³

The portrait opens at full intensity: God is jealous, and the LORD revengeth; the LORD revengeth, and is furious; the LORD will take vengeance on his adversaries, and he reserveth wrath for his enemies (v. 2). The word jealous is not the petty thing the English sometimes suggests; it is the burning, protective devotion of one who will not share what is rightly His or stand by while what He loves is harmed. Three times in a single verse the language of vengeance falls - revengeth… revengeth… will take vengeance - like hammer-blows, leaving no doubt that the LORD will not be mocked forever. This is not the random rage of a tyrant. The vengeance is aimed precisely: at His adversaries, His enemies, those who have set themselves against Him and trampled the weak. A God who could look on Nineveh's cruelty - the flayed captives, the emptied villages - and feel nothing would not be good. His anger against such evil is the flip side of His care for its victims. He reserveth wrath: it is stored up, held in reserve, and one day it will be poured out in full.

Then, lest the reader hear only thunder, the next line holds two truths together that must never be torn apart: The LORD is slow to anger, and great in power, and will not at all acquit the wicked (v. 3). Slow to anger - this is the very phrase the LORD proclaimed of Himself to Moses, the mercy that gives Nineveh and every nation room and time to turn. The wrath of verse 2 is not a hair-trigger; it is patient, long-suffering, slow. And yet that same patience is wedded to an unflinching justice: He will not at all acquit the wicked. His slowness is not weakness, and His mercy is not blindness. He will not, in the end, simply wave evil through as though it never mattered. Both clauses are true at once: He waits long, and He does not let the guilty go free forever. The verse then lifts into storm: the LORD hath his way in the whirlwind and in the storm, and the clouds are the dust of his feet. The towering storm clouds, so vast to us, are mere dust stirred up beneath His stride. He is not in the storm as one caught by it; the storm is the hem of His robe, the dust of His passing feet.

The portrait now sweeps across all creation, and everything in it gives way before Him: He rebuketh the sea, and maketh it dry, and drieth up all the rivers: Bashan languisheth, and Carmel, and the flower of Lebanon languisheth (v. 4). The fertile heights of Bashan, the green slopes of Carmel, the famed blossom of Lebanon - the lushest places the people knew - wither at His word. The mountains quake at him, and the hills melt, and the earth is burned at his presence, yea, the world, and all that dwell therein (v. 5). The most permanent things imaginable, the everlasting hills, dissolve before Him. And so the prophet asks the question the whole portrait has been driving toward: Who can stand before his indignation? and who can abide in the fierceness of his anger? his fury is poured out like fire, and the rocks are thrown down by him (v. 6). The question expects the answer no one. If the sea dries and the mountains melt at His presence, what hope has Nineveh, for all its walls and armies, of standing against Him? This is the terror under which the next verse lands like a sudden shaft of light - for the very God before whom no enemy can stand is about to be named good.

Into the middle of the storm, like a clearing in the thunderheads, comes the line the whole book is built around: The LORD is good, a strong hold in the day of trouble; and he knoweth them that trust in him (v. 7). Nothing in the surrounding verses is taken back to make room for it. The same God who is jealous and furious, before whom the mountains melt, is - without contradiction - good. His goodness is not a softer mood that cancels His justice; it is the very heart of the God whose justice we have just seen. And to those who trust Him He is a strong hold, a fortress, a refuge - not in fair weather only but precisely in the day of trouble, when the floods rise and the enemy is at the gate. The verse then closes with words of breathtaking tenderness: he knoweth them that trust in him. The God who knows everything knows them - personally, by name, with the knowing of a shepherd for his own. The trusting are not lost in the crowd of nations facing judgment; they are known. Here is the whole gospel of the chapter in a single line: the God who is terror to His enemies is fortress to those who flee to Him, and He knows every one of them.

The next verse turns the same divine power outward against the proud city, and the contrast with verse 7 is the whole point: But with an overrunning flood he will make an utter end of the place thereof, and darkness shall pursue his enemies (v. 8). The little word but is the hinge. For those who trust, the LORD is a strong hold; for the place that has set itself against Him, He is an overrunning flood - a torrent that sweeps the city away and leaves an utter end. The same God, the same power, two utterly different outcomes - and the difference is not arbitrary. It turns entirely on whether one comes to Him for refuge or stands against Him as an enemy. The flood imagery is fitting and may even be literal: Nineveh, set among rivers, would in time fall partly through the breaching of its waters. And darkness shall pursue his enemies - the very darkness becomes a hunter at their heels. The verse does not gloat; it states a settled fact about reality. To be the LORD's enemy is to have His goodness arrive as a flood; to trust Him is to have that same goodness arrive as a fortress wall.

The word now turns to confront the plotting of the proud: What do ye imagine against the LORD? he will make an utter end: affliction shall not rise up the second time (v. 9). The question is almost incredulous - what schemes do you suppose you can devise against the LORD, the One before whom the mountains melt? Whatever Nineveh imagines, the outcome is fixed: He will make an utter end. And here is the mercy folded inside the judgment - affliction shall not rise up the second time. When the LORD finishes with this oppressor, the oppression will not return for a second round; the deliverance will be complete, not a brief reprieve before the next blow. Verse 10 presses the certainty of it with vivid images of how easily the seemingly formidable will fall: while they be folden together as thorns, and while they are drunken as drunkards, they shall be devoured as stubble fully dry. Tangled thorns and dry stubble are nothing before fire; drunkards are in no state to defend a city. However tangled and many and self-assured Nineveh appears, it is, before the LORD, as stubble fully dry - gone in a single flame.³

Verse 11 names the source of the trouble - There is one come out of thee, that imagineth evil against the LORD, a wicked counsellor - one who has plotted evil and given dark counsel against the LORD and His people. Then the word of the LORD comes directly, and it carries two addresses held together: Thus saith the LORD; Though they be quiet, and likewise many, yet thus shall they be cut down, when he shall pass through. Though I have afflicted thee, I will afflict thee no more (v. 12). To the enemy: though they stand secure and numerous, untroubled and at full strength, they shall be cut down when the LORD passes through in judgment. But in the same breath, to the afflicted people of God, comes a turning so tender it changes the whole key: Though I have afflicted thee, I will afflict thee no more. The LORD does not deny that His people have suffered - nor even that the affliction had passed, in some measure, through His own hand of discipline. But that season is declared over. The chastening will not be repeated; the oppression will not return. The same sentence that seals the enemy's fall lifts the burden from the faithful. Judgment on the oppressor is mercy to the oppressed.

Now the word of release is spoken plainly: For now will I break his yoke from off thee, and will burst thy bonds in sunder (v. 13). The yoke is the heavy wooden beam laid across the neck of a beast or a captive to force its labour; bonds are the ropes and chains that hold a prisoner fast. Both are images of Assyrian domination - the tribute that bled the people dry, the deportations, the boot on the neck of the conquered. And the LORD says He will break and burst them - not loosen, not lighten, but shatter them off. The action is entirely His: I will break… I will burst. Verse 14 then pronounces the enemy's end with terrible finality: the LORD hath given a commandment concerning thee, that no more of thy name be sown - the line will not continue; out of the house of thy gods will I cut off the graven image and the molten image - the idols that could not save will be destroyed in their own temple; I will make thy grave; for thou art vile. The proud city that made graves for so many others will at last be given one of its own. The idols of Nineveh, like all idols, are powerless before the living God; the gods it trusted cannot break a single yoke, while the LORD breaks every one.

The chapter ends on one of the most luminous images in all the prophets: Behold upon the mountains the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace! O Judah, keep thy solemn feasts, perform thy vows: for the wicked shall no more pass through thee; he is utterly cut off (v. 15). Picture it: a watchman on the city wall strains toward the hills, and there - running over the mountain ridges - comes a single figure, a herald, sprinting with news. In the ancient world such a runner brought word from the battlefield, and the whole city waited on what he carried: defeat and dread, or victory and peace. This runner brings good tidings; he publisheth peace. The war is over; the enemy is beaten. And so the call goes up to Judah: resume the worship that the siege had interrupted - keep thy solemn feasts, perform thy vows - for the threat that haunted you shall no more pass through thee; he is utterly cut off. The book that opened with a burden of judgment closes with a herald of peace. And the words are not Nahum's alone; they are the very song of Isaiah, taken up again here, and they will be lifted once more in the New Testament onto the feet of all who carry the gospel.