Nahum the Prophet

In the Scriptures

Almost nothing of Nahum's life is recorded. The single verse of biography is the superscription of his own book: "The burden of Nineveh. The book of the vision of Nahum the Elkoshite" (Nahum 1:1). His name — נַחוּם, Naḥum — is formed from the root meaning "to comfort," and is understood by the tradition as "God consoles"; the Fathers heard in it the paradox of the book, that the overthrow of the tyrant is the consolation of the tyrant's victims.

Where "the Elkoshite" places him is disputed (see below). His book gives no dates and issues no call to repentance — unlike almost every other prophet, Nahum neither denounces Israel for infidelity nor summons anyone to turn back; his whole vision is fixed on Nineveh. Its historical horizon can nonetheless be fixed within narrow bounds. Nahum speaks of the sack of the Egyptian city of No-Amon, that is Thebes, as a past event (Nahum 3:8–10) — Thebes fell to the Assyrian Ashurbanipal in 663 BC — and he foretells as still to come the fall of Nineveh, which the Medes and Babylonians took and destroyed in 612 BC. His prophecy therefore belongs to the third quarter of the seventh century BC, in the reign of the Assyrian empire's last strength and the beginning of its swift collapse after Ashurbanipal's death (traditionally 632 BC). He was thus a younger contemporary of Zephaniah and an elder of Jeremiah, prophesying in the kingdom of Judah in the generation before the Exile.

The book and its message

The Book of Nahum is three chapters of some of the most vivid poetry in the prophetic corpus. It opens with a theophany — an alphabetic hymn, partly acrostic in the Hebrew, to the God who is "jealous and avenging," "slow to anger and great in power," before whom the mountains quake and the sea is dried up, yet who "is a stronghold in the day of trouble, and knoweth them that trust in him" (Nahum 1:2–7). From this double confession — terror to his enemies, refuge to his own — the prophet turns to Nineveh.

The second and third chapters are a single, headlong description of the city's siege and sack: the scarlet shields and flashing chariots of the attackers, the river-gates opened and the palace dissolved, the plunder of "silver and gold," the empty city — "Nineveh is like a pool of water… Halt, halt! but none looketh back." The prophet names the sin for which she falls: she is "the bloody city, all full of lies and robbery," a harlot and sorceress who "sold nations through her whoredoms," a den of lions that "filled his caves with prey." The Assyrian war-machine that had deported the ten tribes of Israel and boasted against the God of Hezekiah — the blasphemy of Sennacherib is in the prophet's memory — will find no mourners: "all that hear the bruit of thee shall clap the hands over thee: for upon whom hath not thy wickedness passed continually?" (Nahum 3:19). The book that began as "the burden of Nineveh" ends on that unanswered question, a verdict rather than a lament.

Nahum and Jonah

The Church reads Nahum in deliberate counterpoint to Jonah. Both prophets are sent against Nineveh, the one to save it and the other to condemn it. Under Jonah, in the eighth century, the city heard the eight-word sermon of doom, repented in sackcloth from the king to the cattle, and was spared. Under Nahum, in the seventh, the repentance long forgotten and the cruelty resumed, the same city is told there is no reprieve. The Fathers took the pair as a lesson on the patience and the justice of God together: mercy is real and repentance is heard, but a nation that returns to its blood-guilt after being spared stores up a heavier reckoning. So the two books, set a century apart in the record and a few months apart in the calendar (Jonah on September 21, Nahum on December 1), frame the single history of Nineveh between mercy and judgment.

Traditions and tomb claims

The para-biblical Lives of the Prophets, attributed to Epiphanius, supplies the only ancient "biography": Nahum was of Elkesh beyond Bethabara, of the tribe of Simeon; after his prophecy against Nineveh he died in peace and was buried in his own land. The Greek synaxaria and the Menologion of Basil II repeat this in brief; a later notice, reflected in the OCA's synaxarion, gives his age at death as forty-five.

His tomb has been claimed, like those of most prophets, in more than one place. The most famous claim is at Alqosh, a town on the plain north of Mosul in northern Iraq, where a shrine of "Nahum the prophet" was for centuries the centre of a pilgrimage kept by the Jews of Kurdistan and revered by the Assyrian Christians around it; the derelict shrine, in the care of the Chaldean Church, survived the twentieth century and has been the object of recent restoration. A rival tradition, following the Lives of the Prophets, sets Elkosh in Galilee — some have connected the name with Capernaum, Kefar-Naḥum, "the village of Nahum" — while other ancient authorities placed the Elkoshite in the territory of Judah or of Simeon in the south. No claim can be verified; the disagreement over "the Elkoshite" is as old as the earliest commentators.