Nahum 3: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

The chapter opens with a cry of doom over Nineveh, the city of bloodshed, and pictures the noise and slaughter of an attack on it. The LORD of Hosts says he is against the city and will expose and disgrace it publicly, and it will find no one to comfort it. Nineveh is compared to Thebes in Egypt, which fell despite its water defenses and its allies, and is told that its fortresses, troops, merchants, and officials will all give way. The chapter closes by saying Nineveh's wound has no cure, and that all who hear the news will clap their hands, because of the cruelty they suffered from it.

Claim by Claim

1. 3:1
   • Woe is pronounced on the city of blood.
   • The city is full of lies.
   • The city is full of plunder.
   • Prey does not depart from the city.
2. 3:2
   • There is the sound of a whip.
   • There is the sound of rattling wheels.
   • There are galloping horses.
   • There are bounding chariots.
3. 3:3
   • A horseman charges with his mount rearing up.
   • There is the flash of a sword.
   • There is the glitter of a spear.
   • There is a multitude of slain.
   • There is a mass of corpses.
   • There is no end to the dead bodies.
   • People stumble over the dead bodies.
4. 3:4
   • The judgment comes because of the many harlotries of the harlot.
   • The harlot is attractive in her charm.
   • The harlot is a mistress of sorceries.
   • She sells nations by her harlotries.
   • She sells clans by her sorceries.
5. 3:5
   • The LORD of hosts says he is against her.
   • This is declared by the LORD of hosts.
   • He will uncover her skirts over her face.
   • He will show her nakedness to the nations.
   • He will show her shame to the kingdoms.
6. 3:6
   • He will throw detestable filth upon her.
   • He will make her vile.
   • He will make her a spectacle to be stared at.
7. 3:7
   • All who look upon her will flee from her.
   • They will say that Nineveh is laid waste.
   • They will ask who will grieve for her.
   • The speaker asks where he shall seek comforters for her.
8. 3:8
   • It is asked whether she is better than No-Amon, that is Thebes.
   • That city sat among the Nile streams.
   • Waters were round about that city.
   • That city's rampart was the sea.
   • That city's wall was from the sea.
9. 3:9
   • Cush was that city's strength.
   • Egypt was that city's strength.
   • That strength was without limit.
   • Put and the Libyans were among her helpers.
10. 3:10
    • That city also went into exile.
    • That city went into captivity.
    • Her infants were dashed in pieces at the head of every street.
    • Lots were cast for her honored men.
    • All her great men were bound in chains.
11. 3:11
    • Nineveh also will become drunk.
    • Nineveh will be hidden.
    • Nineveh also will seek a stronghold from the enemy.
12. 3:12
    • All her fortresses are like fig trees with first-ripe figs.
    • If the fig trees are shaken, the figs fall into the mouth of the eater.
13. 3:13
    • Her people in her midst are women.
    • The gates of her land are thrown wide open to her enemies.
    • Fire has devoured the bars of her gates.
14. 3:14
    • She is told to draw water for the siege.
    • She is told to strengthen her fortresses.
    • She is told to go into the clay and tread the mortar.
    • She is told to take hold of the brick mold.
15. 3:15
    • There the fire will devour her.
    • The sword will cut her off.
    • The sword will devour her like the young locust.
    • She is told to make herself many like the young locust.
    • She is told to make herself many like the swarming locust.
16. 3:16
    • She has multiplied her merchants more than the stars of heaven.
    • The young locust strips the land.
    • The young locust flies away.
17. 3:17
    • Her crowned ones are like the swarming locust.
    • Her officials are like a swarm of locusts.
    • Such locusts camp in the walls on a cold day.
    • When the sun rises they flee away.
    • Their place is not known, where they are.
18. 3:18
    • The shepherds of the king of Assyria slumber.
    • The king of Assyria is addressed.
    • His nobles lie down in the dust.
    • His people are scattered upon the mountains.
    • No one gathers them.
19. 3:19
    • There is no relief for his fracture.
    • His wound is grievous.
    • All who hear the report of him clap their hands over him.
    • It is asked upon whom his wickedness has not passed continually.

Words Worth Explaining

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

3:1

The city addressed through this whole chapter is Nineveh, named in verse 7 and identified in verse 18 as the capital of Assyria. Assyria was the dominant empire of the region for roughly two centuries, known for mass deportations and for boasting in its royal inscriptions about the brutality of its campaigns; "city of bloodshed" points at that reputation. Nineveh fell to a coalition of Babylonians and Medes in 612 BC.

3:2

A chariot was a light cart pulled by horses. Armies used them the way we might use fast attack vehicles. These sounds are an enemy army pouring into the city.

3:3

The bodies are Nineveh's own. Nahum is describing an enemy army pouring into the city that used to do this to everyone else; the reader is meant to picture the attack from inside the walls.

3:4

Prophets regularly used the figure of a prostitute for a city or nation that seduces others (through alliances, trade and treaty-making) and then betrays them. The point of the image is treachery for gain, not the literal sexual conduct of the city's inhabitants. "Witchcraft" or sorcery is part of the same picture: Assyria was famous for divination, omen-reading and spells, and the word here casts that as a means of entrapping other peoples.

3:5

Stripping a woman and exposing her in public was a known ancient punishment for a convicted prostitute or adulteress. The image continues the figure from verse 4: the city that acted the prostitute is now given a prostitute's public humiliation. "LORD" printed in capitals stands in for the personal name of Israel's God, four Hebrew letters usually written YHWH, which readers of the Hebrew text did not pronounce aloud.

3:6

"Gazingstock" is old English for something people stop and stare at, the way a crowd gathers around a public punishment.

3:7

This is the first time in the chapter the city is named. "Comforters" were the friends and neighbors who came and sat with a grieving family; Nahum's point is that Nineveh has made so many enemies that when she falls nobody will perform even that basic courtesy.

3:8

Thebes was the great city of southern Egypt, on the Nile. Assyria itself had sacked it in 663 BC, within living memory of Nahum's first hearers, so the comparison names a disaster the audience had watched happen. The Hebrew calls the Nile and its flood-channels a "sea"; the river and its canals functioned as the city's moat and defensive barrier.

3:9

Cush was the region south of Egypt, along the Nile in what is now Sudan; at the time of Thebes' fall Egypt was ruled by a dynasty of Cushite kings, which is why Cush is listed first. Put was a North African territory whose exact location is disputed, most often placed in Libya, sometimes further along the African coast. These were the allies whose troops made Thebes look unbeatable.

3:10

Casting lots was drawing straws or throwing marked stones to decide something. Here it is how victorious soldiers divided captured nobles among themselves as spoil, high-ranking prisoners were valuable, for ransom or for sale.

3:11

Being made to drink until you stagger is a standard prophetic image for a nation forced to undergo a punishment it cannot refuse: like a drunk, it loses its footing and its dignity in public.

3:12

Fig trees produce a small early crop that ripens before the main harvest. Those first figs hang loosely and drop at the slightest shake, proverbially the easiest fruit there is to get. The comparison is about how little effort the attacker will need.

3:13

In the military language of the time, calling an army "women" was a standard taunt meaning the defenders can no longer fight, Assyrian treaty-curses use the same insult against their own enemies. It is a jibe about fighting capacity, not a comment on women. The "bars" are the heavy timber beams dropped across city gates to hold them shut; burning them was the normal way to force a gate.

3:14

These are the ordinary preparations for a siege. Water had to be stored in cisterns before the enemy cut the supply outside the walls. Mesopotamian city walls were built of mud brick, so repairing them meant digging clay, treading it with straw into mortar underfoot, and firing new bricks in a kiln. The commands are addressed to a city that will not be saved by doing any of it.

3:15

Hebrew has several distinct words for locusts, apparently for different stages or swarming types, and verses 15 to 17 play on them; older English versions render one of them "cankerworm." A locust swarm was the standard image for a force too numerous to count that eats a region bare and then vanishes overnight.

3:16

Nineveh sat on the trade routes and grew rich on them. The sting is in the comparison: merchants, like locusts, gather where there is something to consume and are gone the moment it runs out.

3:17

The two terms behind "guards" and "officers" are Assyrian administrative titles borrowed into Hebrew, the officials and military scribes who ran the empire's bureaucracy. Locusts genuinely do cluster motionless on walls in cold weather and take off once the sun warms them, which is the observation the comparison rests on.

3:18

"Shepherd" was a routine title for a king or governor throughout the ancient Near East, so this is about Assyria's rulers and commanders, not herdsmen. "Slumber" and "lie down" are being used as they often are in Hebrew, as a way of saying the leaders are dead. With no shepherds, the people scatter like a flock with no one to drive it home.

3:19

Clapping the hands here is a gesture of derision at an enemy's downfall, closer to jeering than to applause; it appears elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible as an expression of scorn or malicious satisfaction.