The Burden of Nahum

I have said it before; I will probably say it again.  I don’t like Nahum.  And I don’t think I’m likely to change my opinion here.  I don’t like the book of Nahum.  We don’t know enough about the man, Nahum, whose name means “Comfort” or “Consolation,” for me to say I don’t like Nahum the man.  But I do not, do not, do not like his book.

Is that a strange admission for a pastor to make?  I mean, this isn’t just a matter of preference – like I prefer the Mark’s gospel over Luke’s or I like the letter to the Hebrews more than Paul’s letter to the Corinthians.  No.  This is a thorough dislike of the book of Nahum.  I just don’t like it.

And yet, I have purposefully brought myself to preach from it.  I could have avoided this. I crafted the preaching calendar we’re using this year to bring us through each of the prophets, and I could have slipped right past Nahum’s three chapters – and some of you probably wouldn’t have noticed or cared.  Hardly anyone reads or preaches from Nahum.  In fact, none of the official church lectionaries include Nahum.  In the history of Christian sermons, there have been relatively few drawn from Nahum’s oracle.

Though, I will make this concession.  Nahum’s writing is powerful.  He has the poet’s descriptive skill.  To read his book is to be overwhelmed by the chaotic sights and sounds of war.  Reading Nahum you can hear and see and almost feel the battle being fought around you.  There is intensity and power in his writing.

The book is described for us in the first verse of the first chapter as “An oracle concerning Nineveh, the book of the visions of Nahum.” An oracle is a form of prophetic speech in which information is transmitted from God to his followers to answer important questions, to respond to feelings of doubt, or to reveal future events.  Sometimes the prophet would seek out an answer to a question and be given an oracle in response, other times God would speak without having been sought out.

Curiously, the Hebrew word for Oracle is also sometimes translated as “burden.”  It is something lifted up – the prophet who speaks the oracle must lift up his voice.  But it is heavy; it is something that must be carried; it is a load upon the prophet’s shoulders.  It is a burden. And it is this burden that the prophet Nahum has left us. 

What are we to do with this oracle? What should we do with this burden?  I ask the question, but I’m getting ahead of myself. How can you understand that question or begin to form a response, until you know more about the book, until you’ve felt its weight?  

So let us pick up this book together, let’s carry it a little while, you and I. 

Ready?  Lift (remember to use your legs, not your back…).

The Assyrian Empire (more specifically known to historians and scholars as the Neo-Assyrian Empire) was the world’s first military superpower.  With a vast hoard of military men armed with iron weapons and covered with strong armor, and countless chariots – used as mobile firing platforms for archers – the Assyrian army would launch merciless attacks against its foes. First a devastating charge of cavalry and chariots to smash the enemy’s lines followed by a swarm of infantrymen to purse and slaughter the now divided forces.  The Assyrians preferred this kind of bloody frontal assault designed to surprise and shock their enemies. 

“At the command of the god Ashur, the great Lord, I rushed upon the enemy like the approach of a hurricane...I put them to rout and turned them back. I transfixed the troops of the enemy with javelins and arrows....I cut their throats like sheep...My prancing steeds, trained to harness, plunged into their welling blood as into a river; the wheels of my battle chariot were bespattered with blood and filth. I filled the plain with corpses of their warriors like herbage” —Sennacherib, (704 – 682 B.C.)

The populations of captured cities were deported to other portions of the vast and expanding Assyrian empire.  This undermined the ability of restless and angry subjects to rebel. And, perhaps more significantly, it was a psychological weapon. The threat of deportation or slaughter kept the empire settled and encouraged those cities and nations that might have otherwise resisted the Assyrian expansion to settle peaceably.

Those who refused to surrender and those who attempted to rebel against their Assyrian overlords were publicly tortured; they were flayed, impaled, beheaded, and burnt alive. Their eyes were ripped out, and their fingers, noses and ears cut off. Women were raped, men mutilated until death, and their heads, arms, hands and even lower lips were placed on the conquered city's walls, skulls and noses atop stakes as a warning to others. On some occasions, people were blinded so that as they wandered throughout the land they could tell others of the Assyrian terrors.

The Assyrian Empire was powerful and it was cruel. 

In 722 B.C. the Assyrian Empire conquered the kingdom of Israel and destroyed its capital city, Samaria.  Its inhabitants were scattered throughout the empire.  And for nearly one hundred years the Assyrian Empire threatened and attacked and invaded the southernkingdom of Judah.  They demanded tribute and taxes. Their armies raided Judean villages. 

So this is where we start, with the long memory of torture and fear and terror and violence from the Assyrian Empire.  Can we feel that burden?  The Assyrians have been the dominant power for as long as anyone can remember. They have been calling the shots.  The people of Israel – those survivors who fled south into the kingdom of Judah, and the people of Judah had lived in continual fear of the Assyrian Empire. They’d suffered and died under the Assyrians for generations…

And now…

And now Nahum has a word – an oracle (a burden) from Yahweh concerning Nineveh, the capital city of Assyria.

“Victims of injustice have a long memory, for the traces of their suffering are deeply engraved.” Jurgen Moltman -The Tortured Christ

While most of the words of Nahum’s oracle are addressed to the people of Nineveh, it is unlikely that he actually spoke them in that great city, or that he wrote them down to be delivered in the mail.  It’s as if he’s speaking over Nineveh’s shoulder to the people of Judah.  The oracle of doom and death and destruction for Nineveh wasn’t given in order to encourage them to repent, but to give “consolation” and “comfort” to Israel and Judah and her many other victims.

Nahum begins with what almost sounds like an incantation:  

Yahweh is a jealous and vengeful God, 
Yahweh takes vengeance, he is rich in wrath; 
Yahweh takes vengeance on his foes, 
he stores up fury for his enemies.
Yahweh is slow to anger but great in power.
Nahum 1: 2 – 3

It’s as if by repeating the name of God, Nahum intends to invoke his God – to awaken the sleeping divine warrior and to summon him to battle.  And that’s the kind of God we find in Nahum’s oracle – a warrior God.  Nahum sees him striding forth in the upper regions of the atmosphere, in the storms and winds – the clouds of the sky are the dust stirred up by his feet as he goes forth to war. (1: 3)

And this warrior God is powerful.  He speaks and rivers and oceans dry up, garden lands wither for lack of moisture, mountains collapse, hills reel, the earth and its inhabitants quake in the heat of his volcanic wrath. (1: 4 – 6)  Nothing and no one can withstand him or stand up against his righteous indignation.

But in all of this, Nahum’s God begins to sound a bit like the Assyrians that he hates – powerful, cruel, and merciless. I wonder if this is too much of a burden.

Verses 9 – 15 of chapter 1 contain a series of shifting judgments and promises – left ambiguously in the original language with unidentified pronouns.  Except for the promises in verse 15, it isn’t immediately clear who is being addressed. Is it Nineveh? Is it Judah? Who is the “you”?  Who are “they”?

What do you plot against Yahweh?
He will make a full end;
his adversaries will not rise up a second time.
Like  entangled thorns they are consumed, 
like dry stubble.

From you has emerged 
someone plotting evil against Yahweh,
one who counseled villainy.

Yahweh says this:
“Unopposed and many though they be,
they will be cut down and pass away.
Though I have made you suffer,
I shall make you suffer no more, 
for now I shall break his yoke which presses hard upon you
and I will snap your chains.”

As for you, this is Yahweh’s decree:
“You will have no heirs to your name,
from the temple of your gods I will remove
the carved and cast image,
and I will make your grave a heap of filth.”

See on the mountains, the feet of the herald!
“Peace!” he proclaims.
Judah, celebrate your feasts,
carry out your vows,
for Belial will never pass through you again:
he has been utterly cut off.
Nahum 1: 9 – 15

And though some translations like the NIV offer to interpret for us inserting “O Nineveh” or “O Judah” in order to clarify the subject of these pronouncements, I prefer to leave them as Nahum wrote them – slightly ambiguous. The interpretive insertions probably are correct, but the ambiguity, slight as it is, helps me. Otherwise it’s all to easy to assume that Nahum’s voice is God’s voice – that Nahum’s enemies were, in fact, God’s enemies, and that I can do the same with my voice and my enemies.

The prophet Jonah was reluctant to offer God’s mercy and love to the people of Assyria.  He sat in the shade of vine and pouted when his predicted judgment of imminent destruction failed to occur.  God asked him “Should I not be have compassion on Nineveh?” (Jonah 4: 11)

Compassion for Nineveh?  Nahum – whose name means compassion – certainly had none for that great city.   He seems to celebrate the slaughter of its people.  It was clobberin’ time.  It was comeuppance time.  It was time for the abusers to be abused, for the torturer to be tortured, for the killer to be killed. 

I can understand the appeal of this, though.  We all want justice. Made as we are, in the image of God; we want to see justice and righteousness in this world.  We want to see the righteous rewarded and the wicked punished.  But sometimes that desire for justice gets twisted into a desire for revenge.  Like Nahum, we like it when evil men get what’s coming to them.  Remember the parties and the dancing in the street when it was announced that Osama bin Laden was dead?

But I’m not convinced that this is God’s way.  Despite Nahum, I’m not convinced that God takes pleasure in the pursuit of revenge (or justice).  Another Hebrew prophet, from a slightly later time, recorded these words from God:

“Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked?” declares the Sovereign LORD. Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live?  (Ezekiel 18:23)

From you has emerged someone plotting evil against Yahweh,one who counseled villainy.

From whom?  Nineveh? The NIV insertion would say so.  And I think Nahum would have agreed. But what about Israel?  What aboutJudah?  Certainly evil and villainy came from them as well.  The other prophets had much to say about the sin and wickedness among God’s people even if Nahum didn’t. 

Though I have made you suffer,I shall make you suffer no more, for now I shall break his yoke which presses hard upon youand I will snap your chains.

If it was Yahweh’s will being enacted in history with the Babylonian invasion of Nineveh, could this ambiguously pronounced promise of rescue and release be given to Assyria?

As for you, this is Yahweh’s decree:“You will have no heirs to your name,

The people of Israel captured by the Assyrians and taken away into captivity never came back.  They remain the “lost tribes” of Israel. Though I’m sure Nahum intended this threat for Assyria (and it was true for Assyria as well), I can’t help but wonder if it fits just as well for Israel.

It’s the ambiguity of these verses, I think, that lightens this burden a little bit.  The ambiguity of these verses makes Nahum a little easier to accept.  As he stands, I think that the fire of Nahum’s fury puts off more smoke than light, that he obscures as much (if not more) than he reveals of God. 

But the ambiguity (slight as it is) allows us to challenge the prophet, and to challenge ourselves.  

Otherwise Nahum’s rant is too much of a burden and not enough of an oracle.


Other Nahum posts:
Kill 'em All, Let God Sort 'em Out!
I Don't Like Nahum