Bible Commentaries

Nahum 3:1. Woe to the bloody city. Nineveh was drunk with blood. She was burdened with the wealth of plundered nations; her feasts and idolatries filled up the measure of her iniquity. Oh how sublimely is her fall described.

Nahum 3:5. I will show the nations thy nakedness. See on Ezekiel 16:37.

Nahum 3:8. Populous No. No-Hammon, the god Hammon, from Ham the son of Noah. Thebes or Diospolis, as called by the Greeks. See the note on Ezekiel 30:15, and Jeremiah 46:25. It was the emporium between the Red sea and the Mediterranean. It had a hundred gates, and abounded with superb architecture.

Nahum 3:9. Ethiopia and Egypt—Put and Lubim were thy helpers. No- Hammon was a sort of mother city to four nations, and she was the only metropolis that could adequately represent the fall of the beautiful Nineveh.

REFLECTIONS.

The catalogue of Nineveh’s crimes and calamities is here continued. She was indeed a bloody city. Babylon is called a golden city; and if she exceeded Nineveh in wealth, she did not excel her in cruelty, and the effusion of blood. No army was ever more ferocious and sanguinary than the Assyrian. “It was in his heart to destroy, and cut off nations not a few.”

Isaiah 10:7. Nineveh also abounded with whoredoms. She was lost in idolatrous superstition, and in all the associate crimes of drunkenness and fornication. How awful also is that vengeance which discovered her skirts, which sobered her by famine, and punished her tyranny by servitude.

The overthrow of Nineveh, compared with the fall of Thebes, is equally instructive. Both were by arms, both fell from equal glory, both were stormed with carnage, and the survivors in both capitals were led away in chains. Surely the fall of Thebes, of Nineveh, of Tyre, and of Babylon, are highly admonitory to future ages. The ruins of those great cities seem to indicate that heaven has set the curse of Jericho on the very foundation where so much wickedness was once committed.

Nineveh in her day of crisis was cursed with confusion of counsel, and abortion of measures. Thy shepherds slumber, oh king of Assyria. It is usual with God so to do, in the last stages of wicked nations and wicked men. He sends strong delusions on those who obey not the truth, but have pleasure in unrighteousness. Surely we should fear this awful spirit next to hell itself.

The fall of Nineveh was a sort of jubilee to the earth. All the nations clapped their hands, having all suffered from her tyranny and scourge. When heaven undertakes to redress the long complaints of injured men, both angels and men rejoice.