Wednesday Bible Study: The end of all things- Nahum

 

 

 

1Sa 7:12  Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen and called its name Ebenezer; for he said, "Till now the LORD has helped us."

You might be asking yourself why I'm quoting Samuel at the start of a post on Nahum.  This is my version of a life verse; it reminds me that at my back are a series of monuments to all of what God has done for me, stretching back even before my birth.  And monuments come to mind when I read Nahum 3.  You see, this chapter is a prophecy of the fall of Nineveh, and the idea that tied my study together this week came when I thought about the monuments in Nineveh and other ancient cities that the idiots of ISIS destroyed in the attempt to erase anything that wasn't part of their ideology.  Sound familiar?  But that is not the path I want to go on in this book.

  Before I get to the monuments, though, let me tie into two concepts actually in the book:  The sins, and the truth.

The sins:  Most times, maybe every time, a prophet was given judgment on a nation, the sins that brought down that judgment are listed.  And Nahum gets right to it in our target chapter:

Nah 3:1  Woe to the bloody city, all full of lies and plunder-- no end to the prey!
Nah 3:2  The crack of the whip, and rumble of the wheel, galloping horse and bounding chariot!
Nah 3:3  Horsemen charging, flashing sword and glittering spear, hosts of slain, heaps of corpses, dead bodies without end-- they stumble over the bodies!
Nah 3:4  And all for the countless whorings of the prostitute, graceful and of deadly charms, who betrays nations with her whorings, and peoples with her charms.
Nah 3:5  Behold, I am against you, declares the LORD of hosts, and will lift up your skirts over your face; and I will make nations look at your nakedness and kingdoms at your shame.

Whorings here, translated Harlotries elsewhere, is pure simple idolatry.  Charms is magic or sorceries.  So when added together, you have two crimes.  A physical one- lawlessness that leads to dishonesty in every facet, and people constantly being victimized with none to protect them.  And a spiritual one- a magic based idolatry that isn't surprising for a nation whose own religion is basically a transplanted version of their conquered province, Babylon.  And how did a nation who hadn't long ago repented because of the prophet Jonah return to such a state?  That's where the truth comes in.

It was back in the 800's BC that Jonah came to Nineveh in a time of weak kings, rebellions, and even a major earthquake and eclipse.  But the old saw says that we are never more than a generation away from the extinction of faith, and that proved true.  In 722 BC, Sargon II ascended the throne, and Assyria returned to being the evil, marauding nation that Jonah so hated.  It didn't last:  the 'glory years' would end with the death of Ashurbanipal in 631 BC, and Nineveh's fall would be accomplished within 20 years.  And Nahum's prophecies were SO accurate about that fall, and the disappearance of Nineveh thereafter, that non-Biblical 'scholars' try to say that it was written AFTER the fact.

But there's one BIG problem with that.

Nah 3:8  Are you better than No-amon, seated on the Nile streams, with waters all round her; whose wall was the sea and her earthwork the waters?
Nah 3:9  Ethiopia was her strength and Egyptians without number; Put and Lubim were her helpers.
Nah 3:10  But even she has been taken away, she has gone away as a prisoner: even her young children are smashed to bits at the top of all the streets: the fate of her honoured men is put to the decision of chance, and all her great men are put in chains.

"No-Amon" is Egyptian Thebes, which Assyria herself conquered in 665 BC.  Not only did Nahum write as if this were a recent event, but Thebes was rebuilt within 11 years, a fact that would make it pretty useless to include vv3-10 if you wrote it in, say 610BC as the 'scholars' say.  More honest historians would thus put Nahum's writings somewhere between 665 and 654 BC- some 40 years BEFORE the events occurred.  Thus is God's Word shown to be reliable yet again.

Where's the other proof, you say?  Well, let's look from the angle of not what God wants to prove, but what Satan wants to disprove.  Note this passage from wiki:

Nineveh was not only a political capital, but home to one of the great libraries of Akkadian tablets and a recipient of tribute from across the near east, making it a valuable location to sack. The Assyrian chronicles end abruptly in 639 BC after the destruction of Susa, the capital of Elam, and the subjugation of a rebellious Babylon ruled by Ashurbanipal's own brother Shamash-shum-ukin. Business records are missing after 631 BC. 

The records disappear about 20 years BEFORE the fall, you say?  Pretty strange for a nation who went to the expedient of stealing the ancient records from Babylon to house at Nineveh, wouldn't you say?  Interesting how these records also disappear at other times critical to Bible history:  In Egypt at both the time of the Hebrew exile and after the fall of Jerusalem, when the remnant fled to Egypt (as we saw in Jeremiah); in Persia both at the time of Daniel's ascendancy and when Esther became queen; and in Babylon both at the cursing of Nebuchadnezzar and right before the fall.  Records usually dry with their meticulousness suddenly dry out.  With the Bible, you learn as much from what's NOT there as from what is.

And let me add one more decorative nail to this coffin.  Observe this particular verse:

Nah 3:13  See, the people who are in you are women; the doorways of your land are wide open to your attackers: the locks of your doors have been burned away in the fire.

Unsubstantiated legend says that Sin-shar-ishkun, the king in Nineveh at the time of the fall, was a debauched sort who wore women's clothes; and when the fall came, he piled all his treasure  on top of cages containing his servants, climbed on top and committed suicide by burning the whole pile with fire.  Need I say more there?

Finally, back to the monuments.  Nineveh, the mighty city that figured so prominently in the Old Testament, gets but one more mention in the Bible, by Jesus:

Luk 11:32  The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here. 

See it wasn't EVIL Nineveh that truly became a monument; only the repentant of Nineveh, who will get a prominent place in the hereafter.  This world says, "The evil that men do lives on forever; the good they do is often buried with them."  But in God's eyes, it's the exact opposite.  What and where are YOUR monuments?