Nahum 1:10
“For while they be folden together as thorns, and while they are drunken as drunkards, they shall be devoured as stubble fully dry.”
King James Version (KJV)
Read this verse in context with translation switching:
Read Full Chapter →Tangled in their own plots and senseless as drunkards, Nineveh's people will be consumed as easily as dry stubble in fire.
What Does Nahum 1:10 Mean?
Three vivid pictures stack up to show how helpless the proud city will be. Thorns folded together are a tangled, worthless mass, good only for burning. Drunkards are stupefied, unable to defend themselves, perhaps a hint of the carousing said to mark Nineveh's final night. Stubble fully dry is the most flammable thing in the field, gone in an instant. Together they portray a defense that looks formidable but will vanish like a flash of flame.
The verse exposes the emptiness of strength built on cruelty and self-indulgence. What seemed an unbreakable empire was, before God, no sturdier than brittle thornbushes. There is a sober warning here for any life or institution that grows tangled in its own schemes and dull to its danger. Yet the same fire that consumes the worthless can purify the precious. The God who burns away dry stubble also tends the living branch, and the call beneath the warning is to leave the tangle and find shelter in Him before the day of burning comes.