Mining the Minors: Nahum (9)

The New Testament is full of staggering numbers of quotes and allusions to the Old. Its writers directly cite or make passing reference to all but four Old Testament books at least once: Ezra/Nehemiah (a single volume in Hebrew), Esther, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon. If we are going to be technically correct, we should probably add Nahum to these, as I will shortly demonstrate.

So here’s a question for you: if the New Testament writers can find no reason to quote Nahum, what good is the book to Christians?

Nahum in the New Testament?

1/ Romans 10:15 and Nahum 1:15 quote the same verse in Isaiah

In Romans 10, Paul asks a series of rhetorical questions that provide the rationale for the preaching of the gospel in the first century and beyond. If everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved, how do we achieve that?

“How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed?
  And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard?
  And how are they to hear without someone preaching?
  And how are they to preach unless they are sent?”

Paul’s last line is this one, and the translators have set it in quotations:

“As it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!’ ”

Communications had their limitations in the first century AD, just as they did six centuries prior. News traveled on horseback or by foot, depending on the geography and the person carrying it, and nobody carrying an important message was sporting Air Jordans; the feet of the messenger probably took quite a beating over miles of rough terrain. The saying is probably ironic. That said, if the message was a joyous one, everybody loved to see the messenger coming. Those beat-up feet were a sign of good things to come and a reason to celebrate.

The language of Romans is similar enough to a line in Nahum that if we were not familiar with Isaiah, we might be tempted to attribute it to him. However, it’s all but certain Isaiah beat Nahum to the punch with this one, having started his ministry considerably earlier. It’s even possible Isaiah was quoting some common Hebrew proverb to the effect that people don’t generally shoot the messenger when his message is a favorable one. We can’t be sure of that, as the line doesn’t appear in scripture pre-Isaiah, but it’s the sort of pithy statement that might have easily become a proverb; certainly, later writers use it that way.

Isaiah makes passing reference to Assyria but only as the latest instalment in Israel’s misery. The prophet is looking at Israel’s entire history as one of slavery and oppression: at its beginning, Egypt; lately, Assyria exercising its will over them. The good news in Isaiah is “Your God reigns.” The gods of both Egypt and Assyria have been roundly defeated.

In Nahum, the message has nothing to do either with the preaching of the gospel or the future reign of Christ. In Nahum, the news in question is that of Nineveh’s fall. The line “Behold, upon the mountains, the feet of him who brings good news, who publishes peace!” is sandwiched between a promise from God to the city of Nineveh, “I will make your grave, for you are vile” and a promise to his people in Judah, “Never again shall the worthless pass through you; he is utterly cut off.” By no stretch of the imagination is this a traditional gospel message. It is simply good news to a people who had been oppressed by Assyrians for the better part of a century.

We have similar language, but we don’t really have a quote from Nahum in Romans, though commentators tend to refer to it that way.

2/ Revelation 18:3 repurposes similar language to Nahum 3:4

The other New Testament instance of language similar to that used by Nahum comes in Revelation. In his final chapter, the prophet had described Nineveh, the “bloody city” as “the prostitute”:

“And all for the countless whorings of the prostitute, graceful and of deadly charms, who betrays nations with her whorings, and peoples with her charms.”

In Revelation, the language is not John’s; rather, it is the message of “another angel” with great authority and glory. He calls out with a mighty voice, “All nations have drunk the wine of the passion of her sexual immorality, and the kings of the earth have committed immorality with her, and the merchants of the earth have grown rich from the power of her luxurious living.”

This is little more than an allusion, if in fact the angel is making an intentional connection with Nahum at all. The prostitute image for idolaters is common in the Old Testament, used in connection with Babylon, Israel, Judah, Assyria and probably others. Here it is not explicitly the idolatry of Nineveh that Nahum condemned: that city was unquestionably given over to idolatry, but both Nahum and Jonah speak to the issues of violence and oppression rather than idol worship as the primary source of God’s wrath against it. Nineveh’s “prostitution” consisted in her enticement of other nations, which then became her prey.

There are other differences: Nahum was calling Nineveh “the prostitute” while John is referring not to the capital of Assyria but to mystery Babylon, which is not a city at all, but rather a pseudo-religious system spanning centuries.

Again, we are hard pressed to find clear reference to Nahum’s prophecy in here. There is simply a confluence of ideas.

The Point of Nahum

So then, what was the point of Nahum? His prophecy not explicitly messianic. He’s not unambiguously apocalyptic, though there are moments he certainly could be. Is Nahum’s message to be reduced to “Those who oppress others will eventually get theirs”?

That’s not the worst message, though it’s certainly not unique in the Old Testament. Our next stop in the Minor Prophets, Lord willing, will be Habakkuk, whose message of judgment for Babylon has quite a few similarities to Nahum’s for Nineveh. When men oppress other men, they make God their enemy, and those who make God their enemy will eventually reap what they have sown, even if he has used them to accomplish his purposes in the process. That is not just the OT equivalent of karma; judgment for the oppressor also means deliverance for the oppressor’s victims. This too is good news of a sort.

We must also remember not everything in scripture is about us. It is hardly reasonable to make the church the motive of every act God has performed or the centerpiece of Bible history. Nahum tells us plenty about the character of God, the nature of evil and the inevitability of judgment, truths vitally important for the Judeans of late seventh century BC to internalize. If we cannot anticipate, enjoy, tremble at and profit from these truths in the absence of an obvious application to our personal experience, we are saying more about our own deficiencies than those of Nahum.