“Your shepherds are sleepy, Assyrian King. Your greatest lie in ease. Your nation is scattered across the hills. And you have no one to assemble them. Nothing can break your fall, sick as you are from your wounds. And everyone who hears applauds it; for, your evil has marched through them all” (Nahum 3.18-19).
Turns out, Jonah wasn’t the only one who didn’t care for the people of Assyria and Nineveh. From what Nahum tells us, nobody liked them. In fact, they downright hated them and would have been satisfied to see their whole nation laid to waste.
It can be jarring to approach the words of Nahum. The God whose words he speaks seems like a very different deity than the one we encountered earlier. If we didn’t know better, we might think Jonah and Nahum were speaking for two very different gods.
In high school, I can remember being taught that after Jonah’s visit to Nineveh, its people again turned back toward their wicked ways. This is why, in Nahum, we hear a very different (but not contradictory) message. God was reacting to the Ninevites backsliding.
But that interpretation comes down to placement. There’s no hint as to when the story of Jonah’s journey takes place; so, it may well have come after Nahum. Why not? The warning of destruction penned by Nahum might have come prior to Jonah’s visit there. Maybe Nahum’s prophecies were ringing loud in Jonah’s ears as he discerned his call. Jonah, certainly, fit the mold of someone who would have applauded at Nineveh’s destruction.
When you come right down to it, there’s no reason these two books couldn’t record events that happened at the same time.
Think about it, both prophets could have been calling out their message of doom to Assyria at the same moment. As Jonah was washing up on the shore, Nahum was preaching his warning of coming destruction. And as Nahum wrote the words above about how everyone would applaud Nineveh’s downfall, Jonah was sitting beneath the hot summer sun, watching for the destruction that would never come.
There’s no difference in their messages, after all. In fact their objectives might have been exactly the same—to bring the people of Nineveh and Assyria to repentance. Nahum, for all we know, might have been just as reluctant to speak as Jonah was, knowing his words might produce a reason for God to be merciful and to forgive.
The only real difference in these two books is that one shows us violence and the other forgiveness. And maybe that’s the point.
Assyria, supposedly, was a cruel nation. Perhaps they were perpetrators of atrocities, a people whose hands were stained with blood. Maybe they deserved to be ground into dust, their destruction celebrated.
But, if the names were changed, if Nineveh was instead Democrats or Republicans or Public Health Officials or anti-vaxxers, would you celebrate? What if the applause was for the environmentalists or corporate CEOs, would you mourn?
Perhaps these two books are less about what God is saying and more about how we react to their words. Do we long for destruction and vengeance, or do we desire mercy and forgiveness?
Who, Jonah or Nahum, do we want to have the final word?
Christ you told us to love our enemies and then you showed us what it looked like to reach out in love and tenderness and kindness to everyone. So, you know how hard that is. Help me to do the same.