Context No. 3616 of 4322 · Nahum
Context · Reflection
Nahum 3:14-19: in context
14Draw water for the siege. Strengthen your fortresses. Go into the clay, and tread the mortar. Make the brick kiln strong. 15There the fire will devour you. The sword will cut you off. It will devour you like the grasshopper. Multiply like grasshoppers. Multiply like the locust. 16You have increased your merchants more than the stars of the skies. The grasshopper strips and flees away. 17Your guards are like the locusts, and your officials like the swarms of locusts, which settle on the walls on a cold day, but when the sun appears, they flee away, and their place is not known where they are. 18Your shepherds slumber, king of Assyria. Your nobles lie down. Your people are scattered on the mountains, and there is no one to gather them. 19There is no healing your wound, for your injury is fatal. All who hear the report of you clap their hands over you, for who hasn’t felt your endless cruelty?
Nahum pictures the fall of Nineveh, the capital of cruel Assyria. Her defenses, her fortifications, her merchants and officials, will scatter and fail; her wound, he says, is incurable. And the passage ends with a telling line: all who hear the news about you clap their hands over you, for upon whom has not come your unceasing cruelty?
Nineveh had oppressed and brutalized nation after nation, and when she falls, no one mourns; instead they applaud, so hated was her cruelty. There is a sober justice in this. A power built on cruelty and violence, however great and secure it seemed, comes to an end unlamented, its fall greeted with relief by all it had oppressed. God holds even great empires accountable for how they treat others, and the oppressor's day of reckoning does come. Cruelty may triumph for a season, but it earns no lasting loyalty and leaves no true mourners; the God who sees the oppressed brings the cruel to account.
Do I trust that God holds even the great and cruel to account, so that no power built on the oppression of others endures or is finally mourned?
Sources
- Nahum 3:19: "There is no healing your wound, for your injury is fatal. All who hear the report of you clap their hands over you, for who hasn't felt your endless cruelty?"
- Nahum 3:18: "Your shepherds slumber, king of Assyria... Your people are scattered on the mountains, and there is no one to gather them."
- Proverbs 11:21: "Most certainly, the evil man will not be unpunished."