Nahum
(Nahum 1:1)
(C3304-3374, 700-630 AC)
His name comes from the Hebrew nah?u?m which translates as "comforter" or "consolation" and is the name of the prophetic book of which he is the author.
The name Nahum occurs nowhere else in the Bible except in Luke 3:25, but here it is another person who lived long after him. Virtually nothing is known of Nahum's personal life. He identifies himself as "the Elkoshite", ie an inhabitant of Elkosh, a place which cannot be found with certainty today. There are various traditions, very old, one that puts it in the north, near the excavation of Nineveh, others farther south, in Capernaum, in Galilee or elsewhere.
From the content of the book, which is a prediction of the fall and destruction of Nineveh which took place in 612 BC, it is estimated that Nahum prophesied in the beginning of Josiah's reign, and his message would give encouragement the little kingdom of Judah, always threatened by powerful empire of the Assyrians.
The subject of his prophecy is the complete and final destruction of Nineveh, the capital of the great empire of the Assyrians, still flourishing when the prophecy was received and made public by Naum. Their emperor Ashurbanipal had reached the apex of his glory, and Nineveh was a great city, regarded by the people under its influence as the centre of civilization and commerce of the world.
However, the prophet Nahum said that Nineveh was a "bloody city! It is full of lies and robbery; there is no end to its spoil!“ because it had robbed and plundered all the neighbouring peoples. The city had been surrounded by great walls and fortifications in defiance of all its enemies and seemed impregnable to the armies and weapons that they had.
A similar message had been given out by the prophet Jonah to Nineveh, about a century before, but the townspeople had repented and obtained God's forgiveness. But new generations rejected God and turned to the practice of idolatry, violence and cruelty.
Naum repeated the arraignment of Jonah, and predicted the sudden and irrevocable destruction of that apostate city. The great empire of Assyria who oppressed the people of God would soon fall. After Nahum, Zephaniah also prophesied the destruction of the city (Zephaniah 2:4-15).
This time the prophecies were fulfilled to the letter: the Mede Babylonian army surrounded the city, and in the third year of the siege there was an extraordinary flood of the river that skirted Nineveh, knocking down part of the wall. This large gap in the fortifications allowed the invasion of the enemies’ armies, far greater in number and strength than the weakened defenders of the city.
The city was ransacked, burned and destroyed so completely that its remains were eventually buried by desert sand and forgotten by the world for twenty-five centuries. Some remains of its walls found on the surface were recognized and began to be excavated by archaeologists from the West in 1845 AD until the present day, confirming the vastness of the city, the architecture of its grand palaces and high quality of his sculptures.