Xenophon later led a retreat of Greeks over the site of Nineveh, and he hardly suspected that it had ever been inhabited.
- God’s judgment is thorough.
- 1:8-10. The Assyrian kings were cruel. Ashurbanipal: I built a pillar over against his city gate, and I flayed all the chief men who had revolted, and I covered the pillar with their skins; some I walled up within the pillar, and some upon the pillar on stakes I impaled, and others I fixed to stakes round about the pillar; many within the borders of my own land I flayed, and I spread out their skins upon the walls; and I cut off the limbs of the high officers, of the high royal officers who had rebelled.
- 1:11; ‘a son of Belial’, meaning a worthless son of the devil.
- Blessing can come through affliction.
- 1:12-14 In the NIV there is the addition of the words ‘O Judah’ to make sense of the text. Those words are not in the Hebrew, but that is surely the idea. Assyria will be crushed; Judah will be afflicted.
- Psalm 119:67, 71; Heb.12:11.
- Look to the Messenger to come.
- 1:15. Martin Luther said this was the only prophecy of the Messiah in the book of Nahum. We are to pay attention: ‘Behold!’ or ‘Look!’
- Isa. 52:7 and Rom.10:15. The language is exuberant. The feasts must be their fulfilments – in the death of the true Passover Lamb, in the coming of the Holy Spirit, and in living as pilgrims on the way to the true Promised Land, which is the new heaven and new earth.
- Luke 2:10-14.