Nahum

Alqosh in northern Iraq, about forty miles north of the ruins of Nineveh

held by a long local tradition among the Jews and Christians of the region, where a tomb of Nahum has been shown to visitors for centuries

This reading would place the prophet inside Assyria itself, among the descendants of the northern kingdom deported there after 722 BC, which would explain how closely he knows the city. The weakness is that the tradition cannot be traced back before the medieval period.

A Galilean village called Elkesi

held by Jerome, who writes in the preface to his Commentary on Nahum (AD 393) that a guide pointed out the village to him in Galilee

Jerome is the earliest named witness on the question, which gives this position its weight. He is reporting what he was shown rather than what he could verify.

Capernaum, read as kephar Nahum, the village of Nahum

held by readers who take the town's name at face value

The name does mean the village of Nahum, and that is the whole of the evidence. Nothing connects the Galilean town to this prophet rather than to any other man of the same common name.

A village in southern Judah

held by the Lives of the Prophets, a Jewish work usually dated to the first century AD, which places Nahum in the territory of Simeon; and modern commentators who note that the book addresses Judah and its feasts directly

The book speaks to Judah as a people under a yoke that is about to break (1:13, 1:15), which sits naturally in the south.

Soon after 663 BC, in the reign of Manasseh

held by commentators who read the Thebes taunt as a recent wound, at a time when Assyria was at the height of its reach and a prophecy of its collapse would have sounded impossible

On this reading the book's force is that it was spoken when nothing in the world suggested it.

In the reign of Josiah, roughly 640 to 620 BC

held by readers who tie the book to the loosening of Assyrian control over Judah that made Josiah's reform possible, and who take 1:13, 'And now will I break his yoke from off thee, and will burst thy bonds in sunder', as spoken while that yoke was actually lifting

Shortly before 612 BC, with the coalition already moving

held by the majority of modern commentaries, arguing from the specific military detail of chapter 2 and from the accuracy of the sequence in which the city fell

The Babylonian Chronicle tablet BM 21901, published by C. J. Gadd as The Fall of Nineveh (1923), covers the campaigns of 616 to 609 BC and shows the Medes and Babylonians closing on the city over several seasons, which is the situation this position places the book in.

After the fall, as a liturgy composed to celebrate it

held by a critical proposal that reads chapters 2 and 3 as description rather than prophecy

The proposal has to account for 3:8, where Thebes has fallen and Nineveh has not, and for the fact that the book expects Judah to keep feasts in a temple that stood until 586 BC.