Nahum2chapter 2

Nahum 2:1-2

The dasher in pieces is announced to Nineveh's face with mock military orders: keep the munition, watch the way, make thy loins strong, the prophet drilling a city he knows will fall. Verse 2 gives the ground in a parenthesis: the Lord hath turned away the excellency of Jacob, the emptiers who emptied Israel now to be emptied, which the bench reads as the book's hinge between the comfort of chapter 1 and the assault of chapter 2. Nahum's name means comfort, and the comfort is Judah's precisely here, as Pusey notes: the oppressor's end announced is the oppressed's consolation.

Nahum 2:3-5

The assault is painted in color and speed: shields red, valiant men in scarlet, chariots with flaming torches raging in the streets and justling in the broad ways, running like the lightnings. The commentators weigh the red, dyed shields or bronze catching sun or blood anticipated, and the readings stand named; the scarlet matches what the monuments show of the Medes and Babylonians who took the city. The recounted worthies stumbling in their walk carry the defense's panic inside the attack's momentum, one poem holding both armies.

Nahum 2:6-8

The gates of the rivers shall be opened, and the palace shall be dissolved: the chapter's exactest stroke, and the evidence lane carries it, since the accounts of Nineveh's fall record the river turned against the city and a stretch of wall carried away, water doing what siege engines could not. Huzzab led away with her maids mourning as with the voice of doves takes the readings named, the queen, or the city personified, or a name; the bench does not settle it and neither does the note. Nineveh of old like a pool of water, and now the pool drains: stand, stand, shall they cry, but none shall look back.

Nahum 2:9-10

The plunder order is given to the attackers in the oracle's own voice, take ye the spoil of silver, take the spoil of gold, for there is none end of the store: the wealth of a century of empires' tribute handed over in a sentence. Then the after-picture in three Hebrew words the King James renders empty, and void, and waste, a rising rhyme of desolation the commentators note as sound made meaning. The heart melting, knees smiting, faces gathering blackness: the body's inventory of terror, the same anatomy Joel and Isaiah use for the day of the Lord, stated as the shared vocabulary it is.

Nahum 2:11-13

The taunt closes the chapter at the empty den: where is the dwelling of the lions, where the lion walked and none made them afraid? The lion was Assyria's own royal emblem, carved on its palace walls, and the prophet turns the heraldry into an epitaph, the lion that tore for his whelps and filled his holes with prey now hunted out of history, which the bench sets beside the monuments' lion hunts. The last word is not the armies' but the Lord's, behold, I am against thee, saith the Lord of hosts, the sentence repeated at 3:5: one adversary decided this siege, and the voice of thy messengers shall no more be heard, the empire's dispatches ended.