Old Testament Shorts: Nahum

A sermon by Canon Edward Probert
28/07/24
(Nahum 1.1-8)

From today, my colleagues and I are embarking on a series of sermons under the title ‘Old Testament Shorts’.

We will each be looking at a single one of the short books which come towards the end of the Old Testament.

I suspect there is more chance that you have heard of Nahum Tate – an obscure Poet Laureate whose name you may have seen at the bottom of verses including ‘While shepherds watched their flocks by night’, than that you will have read or heard anything of the prophet Nahum, after whom he was named.

My subject this morning was not my first choice, nor my second. My first pick had been Jonah; my second was Obadiah. Both proved to have been already bagged by colleagues, so in desperation I chose a book I knew literally nothing about – Nahum, who occupies a mere 3 pages in my Old Testament. Earlier in the week Diana, our reader this morning of the passage from the prophet, approached me to say that she couldn’t possibly bring herself to say ‘This is the word of the Lord’ at the end of it. She is not alone in gagging at this text: I understand that this book is in the unusual position of not figuring at all in the Church’s lectionary, which explains why in 39 years of daily hearing 2 passages from the Old Testament I have never come across it.

We are a long way from ‘gentle Jesus’ here: these 3 chapters are littered with scorn, anger, invective, gloating at the defeat of an enemy, and images of warfare, destruction, and humiliation. I only asked Diana to read 8 verses; when you get home it won’t take much time to read the whole book, and I suggest you do, if only to see what you’ve been missing all these years, and to reflect on why that’s been the case.

Very little is known about Nahum. He is described as coming from Elkosh, but it’s not clear where that is. His book has allusions to other Biblical texts, but the main indications about its meaning and purposes are in its historical references. First verse: ‘An oracle concerning Nineveh.’ The vitriol which gushes from these pages is directed at the capital of Assyria, the mighty empire which had conquered and eradicated the northern Hebrew kingdom of Israel in 721 BC, the empire to which the continuing Davidic kingdom of Judah and its capital Jerusalem paid tribute; a byword for power and cruelty. You can see wonderful evidence of that city’s culture, wealth, and martial prowess in the British Museum’s galleries. Assyria reached its zenith in 664, when it conquered Egypt and despoiled its capital city Thebes; then, just half a century later in 612, Nineveh itself was conquered by Babylon and its allies. This event is what Nahum’s book crows over, giving expression to the gloatings of a subject people at the humiliation of its oppressors. Here’s a short excerpt from chapter 3: ‘I will throw filth at you and treat you with contempt, and make you a spectacle. Then all who see you will shrink from you and say, “Nineveh is devastated; who will bemoan her?” Where shall I seek comforters for you? Are you better than Thebes, that sat by the Nile?…..Yet she became an exile….’

It’s safe to say that Nahum dates to either just before or just after that fall of Nineveh in 612, when for a short while the heat was off the little kingdom of Judah, and its God seemed to have acted through the Babylonian king. That confidence in a golden present for Jerusalem did not last; just a few decades later the Babylonians came calling and with the Exile put a full stop to the kingdom of the house of David.

The various prophets had different messages; they did not necessarily speak in unison. Micah and Jeremiah, for example, were like Nahum prophets in Jerusalem; but they spoke critically to its people and elites, and demanded they change, or their God would judge them. Nahum by contrast speaks no word of criticism to the chosen people; the God for whom he speaks is their vindicator. He could be just the kind of prophet Jeremiah attacks for giving a rosy assessment of affairs – for preaching ‘Peace, peace, where there is no peace.’ Here’s a verse from the end of Nahum’s first chapter – you may recognise it in part: ‘Look! On the mountains the feet of one who brings good tidings, who proclaims peace! Celebrate your festivals, O Judah, fulfil your vows, for never again shall the wicked invade you; they are utterly cut off.’

I cannot read Hebrew; the literary qualities of this book are mitigated by the bumpy process of translation. It’s easy to hear some echoes of other Old Testament texts – chapter 1 verse 3’s ‘The Lord is slow to anger’ is a familiar phrase, usually continuing ‘….. and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness’, but here ‘…..but great in power, and the Lord will by no means clear the guilty’; and we can tell that Nahum writes powerfully and dramatically, with imagery and allusions to other literature as well as to current and historic events; BUT unless I’d read commentaries I would never have known that in the opening passage of the book, the part we heard today, there is a partial acrostic poem – structured around the first 11 letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

In no particular order, are a few points you may care to chew upon:

Nahum is a text which is unabashedly partisan: it gloats on the fact that the almighty God is on the same side, and is going to bring horrible punishment on Nineveh. But contrast this with another of these OT shorts – the story of Jonah: sent to that same city to tell its people to repent, and then sulking because they do repent. At which point that book ends with God asking his sullen prophet this question: ‘Should I not be concerned about Nineveh?’ Should we hear the vindictiveness of Nahum’s book alongside the generosity in Jonah’s?

Should we shun distasteful Biblical texts? Is it ever right to hear things like Nahum, which give voice to some of the darker sides of human nature, and speak of a God we hardly recognise?

What do we make of the jarring comparison between Jesus in the gospels, a strange, isolated kind of royal power, and all the various martial imagery we encounter in the Hebrew scriptures?

Nahum’s book was for his time, and from a very particular perspective. It feels very remote. But we encountering it now do so in the light of the modern history of Israel, the crushing of Gaza, and the extinction of political hope for the Palestinian people at large. Can we separate these two experiences? Should we?

In the 3rd chapter of Nahum there is a distasteful section which addresses Nineveh as a prostitute, enslaving ‘nations through her debaucheries’, and describing how God will publicly humiliate her. It’s remarkable how closely this resembles some remarks by Jeremy Clarkson a few months ago about the Duchess of Sussex, which stirred public distaste and which he quickly retracted. How can we address constructively the undercurrents of misogyny in our scriptures and in our society?

Has there been any value in encountering this book?

If you would like to reflect further on these or other themes explored in this sermon or stirred by reading Nahum for yourself, I will be leading a discussion by Zoom at 7pm tomorrow, Monday 29th.

To apply for the Zoom code please use the link on the Sunday notice sheet. If you are watching this online, today’s notice sheet can be accessed by Googling ‘Salisbury Cathedral Sunday notices’.

Thank God for our scriptures; thank God for our minds, and for the gift of discernment.