Commentary - Nahum 1:1

Bird's-eye view

The book of Nahum is a thunderclap from a clear blue sky. A century after Jonah's reluctant sermon led to Nineveh's astonishing repentance, the Assyrian capital has reverted to its old ways, and then some. Their reprieve has expired, their cup of iniquity is full, and God is now rendering His final verdict. This prophecy is not a call to repentance; the time for that is past. It is an announcement of irreversible doom. Nahum, whose name means "comfort," brings a message of profound comfort to Judah, but it is a comfort wrapped in the terrifying news of the utter destruction of their most brutal and godless oppressor. The book is a magnificent and terrifying poem celebrating the warrior justice of God. He is the avenger of His people, and He will not by any means clear the guilty. The central theme is the absolute sovereignty of God over the nations and His unwavering commitment to both His covenant wrath and His covenant faithfulness.

This book serves as a necessary corrective to a sentimental view of God. The same God who is a stronghold for those who trust in Him is also the God who pursues His enemies into darkness with an overrunning flood. The cross of Christ is where these two truths meet most profoundly, but Nahum shows us the raw justice of God in the theater of international politics. For Judah, languishing under the Assyrian shadow, this prophecy was exceedingly good news. For Nineveh, it was the formal notification of their corporate death sentence.

Outline

Context In Nahum

Nahum 1:1 is the superscription for the entire work, the title page of the book. It sets the stage by answering three fundamental questions: What is this about? (Nineveh). What kind of message is it? (An oracle, a vision). And who is delivering it? (Nahum the Elkoshite). This verse immediately follows the story of Jonah in the canonical arrangement of the Minor Prophets, and the contrast is stark and intentional. Jonah brought a message of conditional judgment that led to repentance and mercy. Nahum brings a message of absolute judgment with no "off-ramp." The historical setting is sometime after the fall of Thebes in Egypt (663 B.C.), which Nahum mentions as a past event (Nahum 3:8), and before the fall of Nineveh itself (612 B.C.). Assyria was the reigning superpower, a cruel and bloody empire that had already taken the northern kingdom of Israel into exile and remained a constant threat to Judah. This introduction, therefore, frames the entire book as a formal, divine declaration of war against the greatest and most feared empire on earth.

Key Issues

The Comfort of a Terrible Justice

The name of the prophet, Nahum, means comfort or consolation. This is a glorious irony. How can a book filled with such violent imagery of destruction, military overthrow, and divine vengeance be a comfort? It is a comfort to those who have been on the receiving end of the wickedness being judged. For Judah, who had been bled white by the Assyrians, whose northern brothers had been carried off into exile, and who lived under the constant threat of this brutal regime, the news of Nineveh's demise was the greatest comfort imaginable. It was the assurance that God had not forgotten His people, that He saw their suffering, and that He was moving in history to settle accounts.

We live in an age that wants a God of comfort without a God of wrath. We want a God who is a "safe space" for everyone, but we forget that true safety for the righteous requires a God who is terrifyingly unsafe for the wicked. The comfort Nahum brings is the comfort of knowing that evil has a shelf life. Injustice will not have the last word. God is a just judge, and His justice is not an abstract concept; it manifests itself in real time, in real history, with real armies and real floods. The comfort of Nahum is the assurance that the story of the world is not a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It is a story governed by a holy and just God who will, in His own time, make all things right, and sometimes that means making things terribly wrong for those who have set themselves against Him.

Verse by Verse Commentary

1 The oracle of Nineveh. The book of the vision of Nahum the Elkoshite.

The oracle of Nineveh. The Hebrew word here is massa, which means "burden." This is not a light or speculative word. It is a heavy, weighty pronouncement from God, delivered through His prophet. This prophecy is a burden that Nahum must carry and deliver, and it is a burden that Nineveh must bear. The word itself carries the sense of a divine sentence, a verdict handed down from the high court of heaven. And the object of this sentence is stated plainly: Nineveh. This was the capital of the Assyrian empire, a city renowned for its military might, its immense wealth, and its unspeakable cruelty. To a Judean in the seventh century B.C., Nineveh was the Death Star. And this opening phrase declares that God is targeting it for destruction. This is a covenant lawsuit, and God is declaring His intentions right at the outset.

The book of the vision... This phrase tells us about the nature and authority of the message. First, it is a book. This is not a fleeting, spoken word that might be misremembered. It has been written down, fixed, and preserved. This gives it a sense of permanence and legal finality. It is an official document. Second, it is a vision. This is not the product of Nahum's geopolitical analysis or his poetic imagination. The source of this information is supernatural. God pulled back the curtain of history and showed His prophet what He was about to do. Nahum saw the coming destruction of Nineveh as an accomplished fact in the mind of God. Prophecy is not guesswork; it is seeing what God has revealed. So, we have a weighty burden, written down in a book, sourced from a divine vision. The authority of what is to follow is being established on multiple levels.

...of Nahum the Elkoshite. Finally, we are introduced to the human instrument. We know almost nothing about Nahum apart from this designation. He is "the Elkoshite," meaning he was from a town called Elkosh, the location of which is now unknown. But in a way, his obscurity is the point. He is not the story. He is not a political pundit or a military strategist. He is simply the messenger, the vessel through whom the divine vision is transmitted. His authority comes not from his resume, but from the God who commissioned him. The message is everything, and the messenger is simply the one tasked with its faithful delivery. The focus is meant to be on the God who judges Nineveh, not the man from Elkosh who wrote it down.

Application

The first verse of Nahum serves as the foundation for all that follows, and it grounds us in a number of crucial realities. First, God is intensely interested in geopolitics. He is not a distant deity, unconcerned with the rise and fall of empires. He is the Lord of history, and He raises up nations and He casts them down according to His good pleasure. The arrogance of a superpower like Assyria is an offense to Him, and He will not tolerate it indefinitely. This should be a sobering thought for any nation, including our own, that boasts in its own strength and forgets the God who gave it.

Second, God's word is authoritative and final. This oracle was written down as a book, a permanent testimony to the fact that God says what He means and means what He says. When God speaks, reality conforms. The fall of Nineveh was a settled matter in heaven long before its walls were breached. We must approach all of Scripture with this same conviction. It is not a collection of suggestions; it is the book of the vision of God, His revealed will for us.

Lastly, we see the pattern of God's comfort. The comfort for Judah came through the promise of judgment on their enemies. In the gospel, our ultimate comfort comes in the same way. The good news of our salvation is inextricably bound to the terrible news of God's judgment on sin. But the wonder of the gospel is that this judgment, this burden, this massa, fell not upon us, but upon our substitute. Jesus Christ, on the cross, became our Nineveh. The full measure of God's holy wrath against our pride, our cruelty, our rebellion, was poured out upon Him. He bore the burden so that we could receive the comfort. The only safe place to be when the terrible justice of God is unleashed is in the shadow of the cross, clinging to the one who absorbed it all for us.