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.
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.
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