Nahum1chapter 1

Nahum 1:1

Burden is the prophets' own word for a doom oracle, a weight of judgment laid on the nation named. Nahum's home, Elkosh, is not fixed with certainty, and the bench names the readings without settling one, a village in Galilee, a site in Assyria proper where later Jewish tradition placed his tomb, or a location in Judah lost to memory. The title sets the whole book's target in four words before a line of poetry begins.

Nahum 1:2-3

The chapter opens on a couplet the bench reads as the whole book's theology in miniature, a jealous and revenging God set beside one slow to anger and great in power, wrath and patience both true of the same Lord. Commentators note that these opening verses carry the remains of an alphabetic acrostic, letters aleph through roughly kaph traceable in the Hebrew before the pattern breaks off, a feature the readings discuss without agreement on how much of it survives intact. The whirlwind and the storm as his way, and the clouds as the dust of his feet, borrow the same travelling-in-tempest language the Psalms and Job use of the Lord's approach.

Nahum 1:4-6

The sea dried and the rivers drained recall the Red Sea and the Jordan both stopped at the Lord's rebuke, the same verb of command the Exodus and Joshua narratives use, and the bench reads the memory as deliberate. Bashan, Carmel and Lebanon were the most fertile ground the land had, cattle country, orchard country, forest country, and naming all three languishing together is a merism for the whole earth withering before him. The mountains quaking and the hills melting lead to the question no one in the chapter answers until the next verse gives the Lord's own people their exception.

Nahum 1:7-8

The Lord is good: The couplet turns the same storm two directions at once, a strong hold for them that trust him and an overrunning flood for everyone else, the one Lord acting as shelter and as judgment in consecutive verses. The bench notes the flood language as an early hint of how Nineveh actually fell, since the historical accounts behind chapter 2 record the river itself breaching the city's defenses. He knoweth them that trust in him is the verse Judah is meant to hold onto through everything the chapter says next about her enemy.

Nahum 1:9-11

The question is put directly to Nineveh's own plotters, and the answer follows in the same breath, he will make an utter end, no second affliction needed. Folded together as thorns and drunken as drunkards pictures a tangled, stupefied mass consumed as fast as dry stubble catches fire, an image of how quickly the apparent strength collapses. The one come out of thee, a wicked counsellor against the Lord, is read by much of the bench as Sennacherib or the Rabshakeh who mocked the Lord's power before the walls of Jerusalem in Hezekiah's day, though the verse names no one and the reading is held as a reading.

Nahum 1:12-13

Nineveh's present quiet and her numbers count for nothing when the Lord passes through to cut her down, the security of an empire at its height set against its coming end in one sentence. The oracle turns directly to Judah with the comfort the prophet's own name means, I have afflicted thee, I will afflict thee no more, the yoke Assyria had laid on Judah under tribute now promised broken. Wesley and the older bench read the yoke and bonds as the literal Assyrian tribute Ahaz and Hezekiah's kingdom had carried, not a figure without a history behind it.

Nahum 1:14

The commandment concerning Nineveh reaches her royal line and her gods together, no more of thy name be sown ending the dynasty's continuance while the graven and molten images are cut out of the temple that housed them. I will make thy grave, for thou art vile denies the city even an honorable end, the disgrace the bench reads as complete rather than partial. Clarke and Barnes both note how literally this was kept, Nineveh's very site lost to memory for centuries until nineteenth century excavation uncovered it again.

Nahum 1:15

The mountains and the feet of the messenger of good tidings and peace share their vocabulary with Isaiah 52:7, the same formula for news of deliverance, stated here as the shared phrase it is rather than a claim of direct quotation either way. For Judah the good tidings are Nineveh's fall itself, the wicked cut off and the solemn feasts safe to keep because the destroyer will no more pass through the land. The chapter that opened on a jealous and patient God closes on comfort, the last word before the siege poetry of chapter 2 begins in earnest.