An Atheist Explores the Bible Part 181: And now on Nineveh FM, the Travel News with Nahum (Nahum 1-3)

Nahum 1-3
And now on Nineveh FM, the Travel News with Nahum.

Welcome to another instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Bible version).
In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the King James Bible, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology.

For more detail, see the introductory post http://bit.ly/2F8f9JT
For the online KJV I use, see here http://bit.ly/2m0zVUP

And now:

Nahum 1
“God is jealous, and the LORD revengeth; the LORD revengeth, and is furious; the LORD will take vengeance on his adversaries, and he reserveth wrath for his enemies.”

Nahum the Elkoshite is preaching the “burden of Nineveh”, and it’s familiar fare. There is “one come out of thee” (I assume the Ninevites) who “imagineth evil of the Lord”. Nahum predicts dire consequences for those who follow this example. (The “one” is quite vague and I can see it being interpreted in metaphysical terms, i.e. the devil). There’s the usual stuff about God making seas dry up and mountains shake, as well as hills melting. This has been mentioned before, but this time it suddenly came to me that hills don’t typically melt. Floods, droughts and earthquakes can usually be ascribed to most of the destructive acts of God, but melted hills? A mudslide, perhaps?

Nahum 2
“He that dasheth in pieces is come up before thy face: keep the munition, watch the way, make thy loins strong, fortify thy power mightily.”

Trouble is on its way. Whether the Assyrian Empire or something more metaphysical again is open to interpretation. Unfortunately God seems to have left Nineveh to its own devices and so they are pretty much doomed. This is much like the preaching of Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel concerning Jerusalem (and the wider world), only this time specific to one city. Nahum is a small-scale local prophet, it would seem. He also would appear to be predicting traffic jams – “The chariots shall rage in the streets, they shall justle one against another in the broad ways: they shall seem like torches, they shall run like the lightnings”. Sounds like rush hour to me.

Nahum 3
“All thy strong holds shall be like fig trees with the firstripe figs: if they be shaken, they shall even fall into the mouth of the eater.”

I liked that imagery in the quoted verse above, and there’s a lot of varied imagery in this chapter which is basically one long harangue against Nineveh full of threats. Chariots in the street, children killed, the city likened to a woman shamed and mocked in her nakedness, and various uses of cankerworms and locusts; not only as a threat but also as an example to follow (“make yourself many”) and not follow (“the leaders all fly away”).


Well, I don’t get a lot from Nahum apart from someone who really has it in for Nineveh and like devising grisly threats against the city. Unlike most of the preceding prophets there’s no balancing out with God’s mercy, nor even much of a call to turn from apostacy to avoid the fate. One for the ranters in the street, I think.

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