Nahum 1: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

This chapter opens the book of Nahum with a message of judgment against Nineveh. It first describes the LORD as slow to anger yet certain to punish the guilty, before whom sea, mountains and land give way, and who is also a safe place for those who trust him. It then announces the end of Nineveh and its idols, and tells Judah that its suffering under Assyria is over and a messenger is coming with news of peace.

Claim by Claim

1. 1:1
   • This is a burden concerning Nineveh.
   • This is the book of the vision of Nahum.
   • Nahum is called the Elkoshite.
2. 1:2
   • God is jealous.
   • The LORD takes vengeance.
   • The LORD takes vengeance and is a master of wrath.
   • The LORD takes vengeance on his adversaries.
   • The LORD reserves wrath for his enemies.
3. 1:3
   • The LORD is slow to anger.
   • The LORD is great in power.
   • The LORD will by no means leave the guilty unpunished.
   • The LORD's way is in the whirlwind and in the storm.
   • The clouds are the dust of his feet.
4. 1:4
   • He rebukes the sea.
   • He makes the sea dry.
   • He dries up all the rivers.
   • Bashan withers.
   • Carmel withers.
   • The bloom of Lebanon withers.
5. 1:5
   • The mountains quake because of him.
   • The hills melt.
   • The earth is consumed at his presence.
   • The world and all who dwell in it are affected at his presence.
6. 1:6
   • No one can stand before his indignation.
   • No one can endure the fierceness of his anger.
   • His fury is poured out like fire.
   • The rocks are broken down by him.
7. 1:7
   • The LORD is good.
   • The LORD is a stronghold in the day of trouble.
   • The LORD knows those who take refuge in him.
8. 1:8
   • With an overflowing flood he will make a complete end of her place.
   • Darkness will pursue his enemies.
9. 1:9
   • He asks what they are plotting against the LORD.
   • He will make a complete end.
   • Affliction will not rise up a second time.
10. 1:10
    • They are tangled together like thorns.
    • They are drunken as with their drink.
    • They will be devoured like fully dry stubble.
11. 1:11
    • Someone has come out from you.
    • That one plots evil against the LORD.
    • That one is a counselor of wickedness.
12. 1:12
    • This is what the LORD says.
    • Though they are intact and likewise many, they will be cut down.
    • He will pass through.
    • The LORD says he has afflicted you.
    • The LORD says he will afflict you no more.
13. 1:13
    • The LORD says he will now break his yoke from off you.
    • The LORD says he will burst your bonds apart.
14. 1:14
    • The LORD has given a command concerning you.
    • No more of your name will be sown.
    • The LORD will cut off the carved image and the cast image from the house of your gods.
    • The LORD will make your grave.
    • You are vile.
15. 1:15
    • On the mountains are the feet of one who brings good tidings.
    • That one proclaims peace.
    • Judah is told to keep its appointed feasts.
    • Judah is told to perform its vows.
    • The wicked one will no more pass through you.
    • The wicked one is utterly cut off.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

1:1

Nineveh was the capital of Assyria, the empire that had wiped out the northern kingdom of Israel and forced Judah to pay tribute for roughly a century. Its fall in 612 BC is the event this book announces. "Burden" translates massa, a technical term for a prophetic announcement, almost always one of doom; the same word means a load that has to be carried, and the pun is deliberate. Elkosh was Nahum's home village; nobody now knows where it was.

1:2

"LORD" printed in capitals stands for the personal name of Israel's God, four Hebrew consonants usually written YHWH, which readers avoided saying aloud. "Jealous" renders a Hebrew word used almost only of God: it means refusing to share what is rightfully yours with a rival, closer to a husband's exclusive claim than to envying what someone else has.

1:3

"Slow to anger... will not acquit the guilty" quotes a fixed formula about God's character that Israelites knew by heart (Exodus 34:6-7); "acquit" is courtroom language, to declare someone not guilty. Storm, whirlwind and thundercloud were the standard way the ancient Near East pictured a god arriving in force, so the imagery would have read to the first hearers as a war god on the march.

1:4

Bashan, Carmel and Lebanon were the three most dependably green places Israelites knew: Bashan the rich grazing plateau east of the Sea of Galilee, Carmel the wooded ridge on the coast, Lebanon the cedar-covered mountains to the north. Naming all three is a way of saying that even the places that never dry out are drying out.

1:5

The Hebrew verb behind "the earth is burned" is uncertain. Ancient translators read it as "heaves" or "lifts up," which is why modern versions say the earth trembles or quakes; the older reading "burned" is a guess at the same consonants.

1:6

"Abide" in 1611 English meant to withstand or endure something, not to live somewhere; the question is who could survive this, not who could live in it. "Indignation" is anger at a wrong that has been done.

1:7

A "strong hold" is a fortified refuge, typically a walled height people fled to when raiders came. "Knoweth" here translates a Hebrew verb that means recognizing someone as your own and looking after them, not merely knowing facts about them.

1:8

The Hebrew says only "he will make an utter end of her place", the feminine pronoun has no stated owner in this verse, and it is understood from the book's opening to mean Nineveh. Nineveh stood on the river Tigris, so a flood could be meant literally, or as the standard image of an invading army pouring over a country.

1:9

"Imagine" in 1611 English meant to devise or scheme, not to picture something in the mind. The same word appears again in verse 11.

1:10

This is one of the most damaged and disputed sentences in the Hebrew Bible; the three images (tangled thorn bushes, drunkenness, and dry stubble that catches fire instantly) are clear enough separately, but how they connect grammatically is genuinely unrecoverable. Translations differ widely here, and any smooth English version is a reconstruction.

1:11

The plotter is not named. Ancient and modern readers alike have taken him to be an Assyrian king, most often Sennacherib, who besieged Jerusalem in 701 BC. "Wicked counsellor" is literally "a counsellor of belial", belial meant worthlessness or ruin, and only in later Jewish writing became a name for a demonic figure.

1:12

"Though they be quiet" renders a Hebrew word that may mean at full strength and unharmed, or bound together in alliance; both readings are current. Midway through the verse the person being addressed changes from Nineveh to Judah, though the Hebrew does not say so: it simply switches, and translators supply the name.

1:13

A yoke was the wooden bar fastened across the necks of plow animals to control them. Breaking a yoke was the standard image for the end of foreign domination: an empire's yoke meant tribute payments, forced labor and conscripted soldiers.

1:14

"That no more of thy name be sown" uses farming language for descendants, to have your seed cut off is to have your family line and your name end with you. "Graven" and "molten" images are two manufacturing methods: idols carved from wood or stone, and idols cast from poured metal. "I will make thy grave" can mean either that God will prepare the burial, or that the temple just mentioned will become the grave; the Hebrew allows both.

1:15

In Hebrew Bibles this verse is numbered as chapter 2, verse 1. The picture is of a runner appearing on the skyline ahead of the army, carrying word of how a distant battle went, the identical wording appears in Isaiah 52:7. The "solemn feasts" are the pilgrimage festivals that required travel to Jerusalem, which an occupied or raided country could not safely hold; "vows" were promises to bring an offering if God rescued you, paid at the temple once the danger passed.