Introduction To The Nahum/Jonah Study

Introduction

            Our introduction to the books of Nahum & Jonah will be given as a single unit, as both books focus around the same city: Nineveh. One of the things we will focus on in both Bible studies  is the contrasting attitudes of the two writers towards this city. Throughout our various studies of the “Little Books of the Bible” we have touched upon the varying attitudes that the Hebrew scriptures display concerning nations other than Israel. Some of the books like the Book of Obadiah, have been in a camp that we have labeled ‘particularist’. This camp tended to see God’s salvation as something that was reserved for the Jews alone, and emphasized God’s special relationship with the Israelite people. Other books, like Ruth, took a more universalist stance, insisting that God’s salvation was for all people, and that His special relationship with the Jews was a part of His plan for the whole world. Nahum and Jonah, while they both focus on the same city, express the two opposing points of view, with Nahum being extremely particularist and Jonah being far more universalist. As we proceed through each book, we will examine both points of view from the writers’ different perspectives. There could be no better examination of this tension in the Old Testament, than working through Nahum and Jonah in tandem. This is why both books are introduced together.

            Before we proceed it is important to know something about the city at the center of the two books. Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian Empire. This was the first of the great empires that would at varying times become dominant in the Middle East. It was followed by the Babylonian, Persian, Alexandrian (Greek) and finally Roman Empires. After centuries of people living in what were basically tribal groups, around 1000 AD real nation-states began to form. Before this point only Egypt really existed as a national entity. Now real countries began to develop. One of them was Assyria. As various tribes were brought into the fold of the Assyrian nation, either by truce or domination, it soon became clear that Assyria was far superior in terms of size and strength to other nations. It used this increased strength to spread it’s dominance, and the Assyrian Empire truly took shape. It dominated the Middle East from 934 BC until 609 BC.

            The Assyrian Empire ruled by the threat of exile. Any nation that opposed it was captured and led off in bondage. Most of the men were taken and either sold into slavery, or settled in other parts of the Empire. The women were often left to be wed to Assyrian men. The goal was to essentially “breed out” the indigenous population. Assyria’s rule was extremely brutal, the most brutal of any other empire. Punishments for crime could be visited upon family members. So, whereas, in the Babylonian empire theft might be punished by the removal of the thief’s hand, in the Assyrian Empire the thief’s child’s hand might be cut off. For this reason, the Assyrians were terribly resented and hated. Other Empires learned from their example, and were sure to never be as harsh.

            The Assyrians play a big role in the Old Testament. After David united the tribes of Israel into a nation, Solomon ruled the united kingdom. But Solomon sinned terribly, taking on foreign wives and worshipping their gods. Solomon’s foray into polytheism led to God breaking up the kingdom. The northern ten tribes formed the Nation of Israel, also known as Ephraim, and were ruled by men not related to David. Southern Kingdom of Judah remained within David’s family, and consisted of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin. The Davidic Dynasty ruled in the Southern Kingdom for another 300 years or so. But in Ephraim, the monarchy often changed hands and coups were common.

            Eventually Assyria destroyed the Northern Kingdom, exiling their men and marrying their women off to Assyrians. The nation was no longer Israelite. It was replaced by a people who were the offspring of the inter-marriage of the Assyrians and the Israelite women. These people came to be known as Samaritans, and the region became known as Samaria. The Southern Kingdom of Judah experienced this as a supreme disaster. Despite the political split, the tribes still shared a language and religion, and often fought together against common enemies. There had long been a hope that the nation would be united again. That hope seemed all but dashed, though there was always a belief among the Judahites that by some miracle the Northern Tribes would return, and Assyria’s evil would be undone.

Eventually, the Assyrians threatened the Southern Kingdom as well. They pushed all the way to Jerusalem and put it under siege. Isaiah prophesied during this time, and while at first he seemed to predict an Assyrian victory, the prideful boasting of the Assyrian general seems to have caused God to have a change of heart. The Assyrian army was destroyed by a terrible plague, and Jerusalem was saved, along with Judah. This led to the belief that Jerusalem was under God’s special protection and so could never fall.

            Nineveh, being the capital of Assyria, enjoyed all the fruits of Assyria’s political and military success. But for just this reason it was particularly hated. It was often called the ‘bloody city’. It’s sins were notorious, and its indifference to the suffering of other nations equally well-known. Eventually Nineveh would fall to the Babylonians, whose empire would eventually eclipse the Assyrians’. The Babylonians would eventually exile the Nation of Judah, but their policy towards exiles was different. They simply place nations elsewhere in Babylon, rather than breaking them up. The Judahites flourished in Babylon, where they became known as “Jews”. When Babylon was overtaken by Persia, the Jews were sent home, and return to Judah. All of this must be kept in mind when we reflect on the Books of Nahum and Jonah, which focus on Nineveh.

            Nahum is a book of straight prophecy, a series of songs, poems and monologues dealing with God’s judgment against Nineveh, in the same style as Joel, Obadiah, and Habakkuk. Nahum has a lot in common with Obadiah, in that like Obadiah it focuses not primarily on Israel, but on a foreign power, in this case Nineveh. Also like Obadiah, Nahum is a book of almost complete condemnation, it lacks the balance of justice and mercy which is the mark of the other prophets. It was written right before Nineveh fell to the Babylonians, ending Assyrian rule and resulting in Nineveh finally experiencing the kind so of horrors its leaders had so often visited on other nations.

            Nahum is triumphant in the condemnation he proclaims and rejoices at the destruction of the mighty city. All the horrors of siege and destruction which are about to be visited upon Nineveh are experienced as joyful and wonderful, indeed a glorious act of God. So joyful is the attitude of the writer over the destruction of this nation, that it can be off-putting. There is no call to repentance, no sense that somehow God could have any mercy over a people such as this. All there is for Nineveh is God’s punishment and Nahum’s ecstasy at seeing it. The Babylonians were seen by prophets like Jeremiah and Habakkuk as God’s hand punishing the Judahites for their disobedience to God. For Nahum, they are God’s righteous hand punishing the terrible Assyrian Empire. Nahum’s joy over the destruction of Nineveh is ironic, then, as it will not be long before Nineveh’s fate is shared by Jerusalem.

            But in the moment when it is written, Nahum represents a feeling that is shared by many across the earth at the time. The horrors of Assyria were so great, that it’s destruction at the hand of Babylon was seen by all as the righteous act of some divinity. We must understand Nahum’s joy before destruction, within the context of Assyria’s terrible imperial reign. However, the particularism of Nahum is clear. Nahum’s words of mercy are reserved for the Israelite people alone. For Nahum, the End of Days is a time when the Northern Kingdom will be restored, with the long-lost exiles in Assyria miraculously returning to Samaria, and the Northern and Southern Kingdoms being reunited into a single Israelite nation. Assyria, for Nahum, had been the instrument of his punishment and correction for the Israelites. Now that Assyria is being destroyed, Nahum sees a vision of a restored Israel, who lives and safety and security under the power of God alone. Nahum cannot imagine that in a few short decades Babylon will be proclaimed as God’s instrument for punishing Judah, nor that Ephraim has been so completely destroyed that a return of the Ten Lost Tribes is all but impossible. For Nahum, God’s grace is about the Israelites alone, and it is only their fate that will be dealt with at the End of Days, which from Nahum’s point of view is about to take place.

            This is a completely political vision of God’s Kingdom, which is bound up solely with the fate of Israel. Assyria was at one time the instrument of God’s punishment. Now it is being destroyed, and God’s punishment has ended. God is punishing the punishers. Those who were being corrected are about to have all of their political hopes and ambitions brought to fruition. This is the particularist vision of Nahum.

            Jonah is a radically different book from Nahum, even as the prophets themselves are very similar. Jonah is the only book in the prophetic tradition that is not a collection of prophecies about a particular nation. It is, rather, a story about a prophet. All of the prophetic books we’ve dealt with have been from the group or school known as the “Classical Prophets” this group includes Ezekiel and Isaiah, and represents a line of thinkers that begins right before the exiles of Ephraim and Judah and spans to the era right before the rise of the Alexandrian Empire. These prophets, of which Nahum is a perfect example, wrote in song and psalm messages of judgment and mercy to various peoples. Before this period, prophetic writing takes place more in story form. The stories of the prophet Samuel in 1 & 2 Samuel are perfect examples. Rather than learning the prophetic lessons from the prophets themselves, we learn the lessons from stories about them. Jonah is unique in that he is a classical prophet like Nahum, but the book that bears his name is written in the style of pre-classical prophets like Samuel.

            Jonah bears the mark of Greek irony, and so may be written as late as 250 BC. But it is hard to date, and it could have been written any time during the Persian rule of Judah, after the return of the exiles from Babylon. So any time between 500-250 BC is possible. One thing is clear: Jonah is similar in many ways to Ruth, and is written for many of the same reasons.  Both are simple and straightforward stories, bearing the mark of later narrative styles that became popular in Israel after the Babylonian exile. The story telling is simple, sublime, and memorable. What is more, Jonah is concerned with advancing a universalist position over particularism. Like Ruth, the writer is concerned with the almost racist attitude among some Jews during the Persian Era. It lampoons and criticizes Jews who hold particularist attitudes, and tries to express through vivid storytelling the humanity of non-Jewish people and the love God can have for them.

            The setting for the story is difficult to discern. Whereas the story is written during the Persian period, during this time Nineveh was not the great nation it was during the Assyrian Empire. Within the Persian Empire, Nineveh was more a collection of small villages than a mighty city. But it is difficult to imagine the events recounted in Jonah proceeding as they do, during the Assyrian Empire.  So it is likely we are meant to assume the events took place during the Persian Era, but that the city is made up to look like the great city it was under Assyria. Nineveh is idealized in the story for effect. The main character of the story is a Jew who holds to strong particularist positions. He does not like the idea that God loves people other than the Jews, and resents being called to be a prophet to a nation like Nineveh. For he fears that once he prophesies destruction for Nineveh, which he himself obviously wants, that God will forgive the people and thereby decrease the place of the Jews in the eyes of the world, by equalizing their place with that of other nations. In other words, Jonah does not want to be a vehicle whereby God proves that He loves all people the same. He wants to be a vehicle whereby God shows that He has a special relationship with Israel. The call to Nineveh is not a call Jonah wants to heed.

            So he runs. God punishes him for his running and forces him to return to his prophetic duties in Nineveh. Which he does. But Jonah feared, God forgives Nineveh and Jonah is the vehicle by which God’s univeralist plan is revealed, a position Jonah resents. The end of the story is quite amazing. You have God arguing with an Judahite prophet over God’s love for all people. God insists, despite the protests of Jonah, that His love for the Ninevites is justified, and that Jonah is wrong to be angry at his love for all people. God’s speech about His love for all is one of the most beautiful in all of scripture. In many ways Jonah is a fulcrum upon which the Bible sits. It represents a shift in attitude that will be a vital undercurrent in the New Testament.

But the difference between Nahum and Jonah cannot be glossed over easily. Jonah represents a move towards a vision of God’s Kingdom that includes all people. But Nahum’s vision of that kingdom is very different. Both books are scripture, and so are divinely inspired. Both deal with the same city. Yet their attitudes about God and about that city differ pretty widely. How does one account for this shift? There are only a few possibilities:

God changed His mind. This may seem almost heretical, but in truth there are many places where God seems to change His mind. God relents of His creation of mankind, and so floods the earth (Genesis 6:5-6). We then read that God regrets the decision to flood the earth, realizing that the problem is as much with human nature as with human decision-making (Genesis 8:21). We can understand these descriptions of God ‘regretting’ and ‘relenting’ as metaphorical, or as pointing to a mystery we cannot understand. But the Biblical text itself allows for the attribution of regret to God. In point of fact, as we shall see when we get into the book, this is probably the explanation the writer of Jonah accepts. God has relented of His animosity towards the rest of humanity, and has now accepted them as His children, as He first did for Israel.

The Jews’ Understanding of God Changed. On this view, it is not a shift in God’s view that we see, but a shift in the Jews’ views on other peoples. The Word of God is, in all of the Books of the Bible, filtered through the mind of men, and sometimes their prejudices can bleed through. Whereas Nineveh had once been a bitter enemy of the Hebrew people during Nahum’s time, during Jonah’s time both Nineveh and Jerusalem were cities within the Persian Empire, where they enjoyed relative peace and economic ties. The Jews’ attitude towards other nations softened, as they lived in peace with those nations under Persian rule. So they were  now in a position to see the full meaning of God’s Word, and that is what we see in Jonah.

Gods revelation is progressive. Some see the Old Testament as being in a state of evolution. The idea is that an infinite God needs a lot of time to explain Himself to a finite humanity. God uses ‘baby talk’ to try to explain Himself to His people, and He can only tell them what they are capable of understanding. On this view, during Nahum’s time the Jews were incapable of accepting God’s full plan for the world. By Jonah’s time, they were in a better person to do so.

The Ninevites Changed. On  this view, God was waiting until the world become more positively inclined to the idea of one God to include other nations in His plan. For most of human history, polytheism, the view that there are many gods, prevailed. God had a tough enough time trying to get the Jews to fully accept the idea that there was only one God, and most of His early efforts center around His attempt to establish worship of Yahweh alone among the Jews. But with the rise of the Persian religion of Zoarastrianism, and the rise of Greek views on the superiority of monotheism over polytheism, the world was now ready for the message that Yahweh alone was God. So Nahum is writing at a time when God’s anger burned against a polytheistic world. Jonah is written when that world has turned towards the idea of One God, and so the True One God is inviting them in.

            Whichever position seems right to you, the important point is that Nahum and Jonah are radically different on the issue of what God’s attitude is and should be towards Nineveh. It is interesting that Jonah himself is so much like Nahum on the issue. The writer of the Book of Jonah is indirectly commenting on the Book of Nahum. His proclamation that God loves all people was an important step forward on the road to Jesus Christ. For that and for so many other reasons, a study of the two books, in tandem, can be very edifying for the religious searcher.