Nahum 3

The TorahRooted Bible (TRB), translated directly from the Hebrew and Greek.

Woe to the city of bloodshed

¹ Woe to the city of bloodshed! It is all full of lies and plunder; the prey never departs. ² The crack of the whip, and the rumble of the wheel, galloping horse and bounding chariot! ³ Horsemen charging, flashing sword and glittering spear, a multitude of slain, a mass of corpses, dead bodies without end; they stumble over their bodies. ⁴ All because of the many harlotries of the harlot, graceful and charming, the mistress of witchcrafts, who sells nations through her harlotries, and clans through her witchcrafts. ⁵ See, I am against you, declares Yahweh Tsevaot; I will lift up your skirts over your face, and I will show the nations your nakedness, and the kingdoms your shame. ⁶ I will throw filth on you and treat you with contempt, and I will make you a spectacle. ⁷ And it will come to pass that all who look on you will flee from you and say, "Nineveh is laid waste; who will grieve for her?" Where shall I seek comforters for you?

Thebes could not stand

⁸ Are you better than Thebes, that sat by the streams of the Nile, with water around her, whose rampart was the sea, and the waters her wall? ⁹ Cush was her strength, and Egypt too, without limit; Put and the Libyans were among your helpers. ¹⁰ Yet she too went into exile, she went into captivity; her infants also were dashed in pieces at the head of every street; they cast lots for her honored men, and all her great men were bound in chains. ¹¹ You also will be drunk; you will be hidden away; you also will seek a refuge from the enemy. ¹² All your fortresses are fig trees with first-ripe figs: if they are shaken, they fall into the mouth of the eater. ¹³ See, your people are women in your midst; the gates of your land are wide open to your enemies; fire has devoured your bars. ¹⁴ Draw water for the siege; strengthen your fortresses; go into the clay and tread the mortar; take hold of the brick mold. ¹⁵ There the fire will devour you; the sword will cut you off; it will devour you like the young locust. Multiply yourself like the young locust; multiply yourself like the swarming locust! ¹⁶ You have multiplied your merchants more than the stars of the heavens; the young locust strips and flies away. ¹⁷ Your princes are like the swarming locust, your officials like swarms of locusts settling on the walls on a cold day; when the sun rises they fly away, and no one knows where they are. ¹⁸ Your shepherds slumber, O king of Assyria; your nobles lie down to rest; your people are scattered on the mountains, with no one to gather them. ¹⁹ There is no easing of your hurt; your wound is grievous. All who hear the news of you clap their hands over you, for on whom has your evil not passed continually?

Notes

• 3:1 "City of bloodshed" is literally "city of bloods," the Hebrew plural for blood shed by violence; Ezekiel later gives Jerusalem the same title (Ezekiel 22:2). Assyria's own royal inscriptions boast of massacres, deportations and plunder, so Nahum's charge would have been heard as a fair summary of how the empire ruled.
• 3:4 "Harlotries" (zenunim) and "witchcrafts" (keshafim) are the same pair Jehu used of Jezebel (2 Kings 9:22). Here they describe how Nineveh lured and ensnared nations through trade, alliances and its religion, and then sold them into servitude. Revelation draws on this kind of language for "Babylon the great," with whom the kings of the earth committed immorality and by whose sorcery the nations were deceived (Revelation 18:3, 23).
• 3:8 The Hebrew says No-Amon, "the city of Amon," the great Egyptian capital of Upper Egypt later called Thebes (modern Luxor), the name the TRB uses here as in Jeremiah 46:25 and Ezekiel 30:14-16. The Assyrian king Ashurbanipal sacked it in 663 BC, so Nineveh had seen with its own eyes that a city protected by water and allies could fall. "The sea" is the Nile itself, as in Isaiah 19:5.
• 3:15 Nahum uses two of the locust words of Joel 1:4: yeleq, "the young locust," and arbeh, "the swarming locust." The picture turns in the next verses: Nineveh may make itself as numerous as locusts, yet its merchants and officials will vanish like locusts that warm themselves on a wall and fly off when the sun comes up (3:16-17).
• 3:19 The book ends, as Jonah does, with a question about Nineveh: Jonah asks whether Yahweh should not have pity on the great city (Jonah 4:11), and Nahum asks who had not suffered from its evil. In 3:7 no one could be found to "comfort" (nacham) Nineveh, a sad echo of the prophet's own name, while Judah receives the comfort. Nineveh fell in 612 BC, and its site lay in ruins until it was uncovered by archaeologists in the nineteenth century.

Nahum 2 · Habakkuk 1

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