Mining the Minors: Nahum (8)

You may have seen a version of this meme cropping up on social media lately, attributed to one person or another. Best I can figure out, it was a science fiction writer named G. Michael Hopf. It goes something like this: “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.”

This saying is true. It ain’t scripture, but it’s good pattern recognition, and there’s no small value in being able to learn lessons from the past.

A Cycle of History

Hopf’s formulation describes a cycle of history we have been discussing as we moved through Nahum’s prophecy. Empires always end, and they end for many different reasons. There is, however, one constant to the equation, and that is that the empire gets soft. Good times create weak men.

That requires a bit of clarification. I don’t mean that life in an empire is always fun for everyone; it generally is not. There are always haves and have-nots, and the former generally exploit the latter to their own benefit. There are decision-makers, and there are those for whom everything is already decided. By the time they hear about a new policy or initiative, whether it pleases them or not, it’s already a fait accompli. I also don’t mean that weak men are overly compassionate or tolerant. It is quite the opposite. It’s the strong who feel compassion and who are gentle with others. Weak men are draconian and fascistic. They make arbitrary rules for their own benefit and enforce them with brutality.

So when we talk about “good times”, they are not good times for everyone. Life in Nineveh was pretty awful for the poor. It certainly was awful for those non-Assyrians exiled from their own countries and taken there by force. No, those “good times” were enjoyed by a select few Assyrians. In a city of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, a select few is still a large number. It’s just a small percentage of the actual population of the city. When these elites — the merchants, princes, nobles and scribes — become soft, that’s when the empire crumbles.

Sound familiar? It does to me.

Nahum 3:14-17 — Locusts, Locusts Everywhere

“Draw water for the siege; strengthen your forts; go into the clay; tread the mortar; take hold of the brick mold! There will the fire devour you; the sword will cut you off. It will devour you like the locust.

Multiply yourselves like the locust; multiply like the grasshopper! You increased your merchants more than the stars of the heavens. The locust spreads its wings and flies away.

Your princes are like grasshoppers, your scribes like clouds of locusts settling on the fences in a day of cold — when the sun rises, they fly away; no one knows where they are.”

I’ve grouped these four verses together because they are all about locusts.

1/ Babylonian Locusts

Firstly, we have locusts as a metaphor for the attacking Babylonian/Median coalition that would shortly devour Nineveh much like a locust swarm consumes everything in its path. To those under this fierce assault, Nahum says, “Draw water for the siege; strengthen your forts; go into the clay; tread the mortar; take hold of the brick mold.” In other words, he says, do all the things you should have done much earlier but didn’t.

This total unpreparedness is typical of civilizations in decline. Those responsible for making major decisions simply refuse to do anything about their fate until it’s way too late. They are in such a state of denial that they are incapable of action.

I witnessed this psychological phenomenon up close in the wake of the global financial collapse in 1987. Several years later, when the dust had finally settled and the beans were being counted, I sat in an official examiner’s office documenting the stories of rich person after rich person who had lost everything. By the time they registered what was going on and called their brokers to move their investments, there was no investment left to move. Their stocks had shriveled in value to the point that they were worth cents on the dollar, and those companies would not be bouncing back. Over and over, I heard men and women talk about their surprise at how fast they could be overtaken by changing circumstances. It can happen in a single day. In 1987, they called it Black Monday, October 19.

This was only financial ruin. These folks still had the shirts on their backs, even if they weren’t paid for. Some drove cars they had to hide from the repo men. In Nineveh, the ruin would be of an entirely different magnitude. The invading locusts would strip everything of value and take the lives of many. The common factor was a complete lack of preparation. Nobody in Nineveh or in the 1987 financial markets thought it worthwhile to come up with an exit plan or a set of metrics by which they might assess when it was time to run for the hills.

Nahum’s call to action is rhetorical. There was really nothing to be done. The fire, the sword and the locust would cut off the city’s rulers in short order.

2/ Assyrian Locusts

Finally, Nahum repurposes the locust metaphor to describe the elites in Nineveh. The latter group were devourers of a sort too: they parasitized the city in which they lived. The merchants, scribes and princes only knew how to take and take and take. They were as bad for the welfare of the common Assyrians as the invading armies of the enemy; in some respects, they were probably worse. At least an enemy is a known quantity, but who but an eternal cynic expects his own people to turn on him?

But that’s not really Nahum’s point. The Ninevite elites were not like locusts with respect to the savagery and scope of their devouring prowess, but in their sheer numbers. They had multiplied beyond belief, “like the locust”, “like the grasshopper”, “more than the stars of heaven”. The book of Proverbs says, “When a land transgresses, it has many rulers.” Nineveh had transgressed mightily, and now everyone wanted a piece of the action. The city had become top-heavy with people trying to live off the work product of others rather than actually producing anything themselves. Again, the financial markets come to mind. The stock market is a way for investors to make quick money without actually doing anything, but the end result is the destruction of the economy and eventually the fabric of a nation. The Ninevites didn’t have stock markets, but they had merchants who operated with the same parasitic glee as today’s traders, taking every advantage open to them without regard to the long-term consequences.

Something similar to the fall of Nineveh is happening in Western countries today, and catastrophe is only a question of time and magnitude. There’s good reason God forbade the Israelites from charging interest to their own brothers and sisters. Too bad we don’t learn from their example.

One final thing about locusts: they don’t stay in one place. They may arrive in huge, impressive numbers, but “when the sun rises, they fly away”. They are ephemeral, appearing one moment and gone the next. Nineveh’s elites would be like that when the Babylonian armies arrived; they would vanish as if they had never existed.

Nahum 3:18-19 — In Conclusion

“Your shepherds are asleep, O king of Assyria; your nobles slumber. Your people are scattered on the mountains with none to gather them. There is no easing your hurt; your wound is grievous. All who hear the news about you clap their hands over you. For upon whom has not come your unceasing evil?”

Nahum finishes by spelling out the basic problem that would seal Nineveh’s fate: the shepherds were asleep, and the wolves were going to get into the pasture. The prophets of scripture mine the shepherd metaphor to great effect, usually to warn Judah or Israel about the worthlessness of their own ruling class. Ezekiel talks about worthless shepherds who ate the fat of the flock, clothed themselves with the wool and failed to feed the sheep. Those sheep became food for the wild beasts, and the shepherds came under the judgment of God: “No longer shall the shepherds feed themselves.” Leadership provides opportunities for exploitation of the flock, but it is also a responsibility for which God will call men to account. That was true in Israel, and it was true in Nineveh. Those who allow their flocks to be destroyed will themselves be destroyed. There is no getting around this.

Nahum finishes with a reminder that Nineveh’s demise would be cause for celebration among all those they had oppressed and victimized: “All who hear the news about you clap their hands over you.” That’s a very natural reaction, and we should not be surprised how people respond when the fat cats in our societies finally get what’s coming to them.

But it’s not a Christian reaction. We have seen the bigger picture. Weak men create hard times, and hard times affect everyone.