Can’t
We Please Get Rid of Nahum?
October
27, 2021
The Scripture
quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible,
copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council
of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
As most of us
know, the Christian Old Testament, which is also the Jewish Bible (or at least
the Protestant Old Testament is), has in it several books with the names of
ancient Hebrew prophets. Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel are long books of prophetic
oracles. There are also books named for the “minor” prophets, which just means
that their books are short. The term isn’t a value assessment. There are twelve
of them. In the Hebrew Bible they’re lumped together and called the book of the
twelve. Although it’s not intended to, the term “minor prophets” suggests that these
books are less significant than the prophetic books not called minor, but that’s
not true of at least some of them. Amos and Micah have wonderful passages in
them about justice, peace, and the life of faith. The Christian story of Palm
Sunday is based on Zechariah 9:9. I see Jonah as wonderful biblical comic
relief. They’re all among the twelve. The books of the twelve “minor” prophets
are worth paying some attention to.
Or at least some
of them are. Unfortunately, there is one of them that, in your author’s not so
humble opinion, ought not be in the Bible at all. It’s the book of Nahum. If
you’re not familiar with Nahum, welcome to the club. Only biblical scholars and
biblical fanatics know Nahum at all. Most of the rest of us don’t. It’s located
between Micah and Habakkuk in the Christian Old Testament canon. It’s short,
having only forty-seven verses arranged into three chapters. It’s there, but it
shouldn’t be there or anywhere else in the Bible. Here’s why.
We start by
recognizing that there is really nothing of spiritual value in Nahum. It does
say:
The Lord is good,
a stronghold in a day of trouble,
he protects those
who take refuge in
him,
even in a rushing flood. Nahum 1:7.
It also says,
Look! On the
mountains the feet
of one who brings good tidings,
who proclaims peace! Nahum 1:15a.
Don’t let those two passages fool
you. Nahum isn’t about a God we would call good, and no one in it proclaims
peace.
There are two
huge problems with Nahum that I want to point out. They are that it says false
and defamatory things about God, and that it glorifies horrendous violence. I’ll
consider those faults in that order. First, Nahum simply gets God wrong. The
text is actually talking about the Hebrew God Yahweh, but we can understand it
to be speaking about the one true God that Yahweh eventually evolved into in
the people’s understanding. After a one line introduction Nahum begins this
way:
A jealous and avenging
God is
the
Lord,
The Lord
is avenging and
wrathful;
The Lord takes vengeance on his
adversaries
and rages against his enemies.
The Lord is slow to anger but great
in power,
and the Lord
will by no means
clear the guilty. Nahum 1:2-3a.
According to Nahum God’s wrath
affects not only God’s enemies but the earth itself:
He rebukes the
sea, and makes it dry,
and he dries up all the rivers;
Bashan and Carmel[1]
wither,
and the bloom of Lebanon fades.
The mountains
quake before him,
and the hills melt;
The earth heaves
before him,
the world and all who live in it.
Nahum 1:3b-5.
Other Hebrew prophets often speak
of God’s wrath, but in Nahum God’s wrath is different than it is in the other
prophetic books. In those other books God’s wrath is directed against God’s
people because of their faithlessness. In Nahum God’s wrath is directed against
Nineveh, the capital city of the
Assyrian Empire which had conquered and destroyed the northern Hebrew kingdom
of Israel in 722
BCE. It’s not hard to dislike the Assyrians quite intensely. Like other empires
ancient and modern they were aggressively militaristic and expansionist. Nahum
presents God as wrathful against them, and that wrathful God is all Nahum gives
us. This God rages against his so-called enemies. Nahum’s God simply is not the
God I know in and through Jesus Christ. We Christians know that God is love not
wrath and vengeance. So do the Jews, whose text Nahum actually is. As I read
Nahum’s depiction of God with which the book begins I just say no. That’s not
who God is. I could never love a God like that. This aspect of Nahum alone is
reason enough for excising it from the Bible.
But wait! There’s
more! Chapters 2 and 3 of Nahum do essentially nothing but celebrate and revel
in bloody violence. It is violence against the bad actor Assyria, but it is
still violence. It glorifies death and destruction. Here’s a sample of this
failing of Nahum, and remember, it’s talking about the Babylonian destruction
of Nineveh:
The shields of
his warriors are red,
his soldiers are clothed in crimson.
The metal on the
chariots flashes
on the day when he musters them;
the chargers prance.
The chariots race
madly through the
streets,
they rush to and fro through
the squares;
their appearance
is like torches,
they
dart like lightning. Nahum 2:3-4.
In chapter 3 we get this:
The crack of whip
and rumble
of wheel,
galloping horse and bounding
chariot!
Horsemen
charging,
flashing sword and glittering spear,
heaps of corpses,
dead bodies without end—
they stumble over the bodies!
There’s more, but I trust you get
the point. In Nahum all that violence is supposed to be a good thing because it
is directed against bad people. This book celebrates the bloody defeat of an
enemy of Israel and Judah. It delights in the thought of piles of the dead
bodies of the Assyrian people, most of whom of course had nothing to do with
Assyria’s defeat of Israel. It rubs Assyria’s destruction in its face and
delights in its bloody fall. And it sees all of that blood and death as the
work of a violent, vengeful, wrathful God.
Do we need a book
like that in our Bible? No, we don’t. We know or can easily find out about
Assyria, its conquest of Israel, and its defeat by the Babylonians. All of that
is just facts of ancient history. We need to know the basics of that history to
understand what some of the Old Testament is talking about. We don’t need to
revel in the shedding of blood and an untold number of deaths. So if I could I
would excise Nahum out of the Bible. It gives a grossly false image of God. It
celebrates what it should mourn. We’d be better off without it.
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