Nahum

Nahum the Elkoshite prophesied against Nineveh approximately a century after Jonah's preaching had prompted the city's temporary repentance.The contrast between Jonah and Nahum illustrates both divine attributes: God's mercy extends to repentant Gentiles (Jonah), yet persistent wickedness ultimately exhausts patience (Nahum). Assyrian brutality was legendary—their own monuments boast of flaying enemies alive, impaling captives, building pyramids of severed heads, and deporting entire populations. Nineveh's fall in 612 BC to combined Babylonian-Median forces was so complete that Greek historians centuries later doubted the city had existed. Sir Austen Henry Layard's 1840s excavations near Mosul, Iraq, rediscovered the city and Ashurbanipal's massive library, vindicating biblical accuracy. The Assyrian capital had returned to its brutal ways, becoming the most feared empire of the ancient world. Nahum's oracle—'the burden of Nineveh'—proclaimed the city's certain, irreversible destruction. While Jonah emphasized God's mercy to repentant sinners, Nahum reveals that mercy exhausted becomes judgment executed. The prophet's vivid imagery depicts attacking armies, flashing swords, galloping horses, and Nineveh's fall as divine vengeance for centuries of atrocities. Yet the message comforts Judah: 'The LORD is good, a strong hold in the day of trouble; and he knoweth them that trust in him.' Nineveh fell to the Babylonians and Medes in 612 BC, exactly as prophesied, and was so thoroughly destroyed that its location was lost until archaeological excavation in the nineteenth century.