Whether it's the first or one hundredth reading of Nahum, it's hard to make a constructive alignment between that prophet of vengeance and violence, and the Sermon on the Mount. And they both sit between the covers of the Bible. I've never liked Nahum. To be honest, I've never studied this angry prophet with anything like the care and humility that I bring to Isaiah, Amos and Micah; even Ezekiel and Jeremiah seem to have more to offer than rage and poetic genius dedicated to gloating.
So, recently I have read Nahum again, and again...This time I'm trying to listen to what he says and pay attention to what he writes. Listening to the text gets harder as you get older, I find! Because familiarity breeds assumptions, often unexamined assumptions. For example, having read it those first times, I concluded it was about vengeance, and vengefulness as a settled disposition is a sub-Christian and unethical mindset. Consequently, it seemed like a good hermeneutical move to put this prophecy into quarantine where it can't infect essential Christian values of peace-making, forgiveness, and love of enemy.
Which is the old trick of setting the Old Testament God against the New Testament revelation of God in Christ, and thereby avoiding the discomfort and theological potency of competing voices within the Bible. But as I've read Nahum recently, I've also re-read another prophet for whom I have much more time - Jonah. Mind you, Jonah too was out for vengeance, so much so that he managed to be offended by God's mercy and opposed to God's steadfast and faithful love in forgiving those who repent.
What makes Jonah more palatable is that vengefulness, the desire to see retribution and justice through punishment, is finally and at the last moment thwarted by God's steadfast refusal to go back on his promise of forgiveness to those who truly repent. And, of course, both Nahum and Jonah have Nineveh in their sights. For those who suffered under the excessive cruelty and merciless power of Nineveh, that city was the focus of their greatest fears and most intense hatred. Those who suffered most at Nineveh's hands prayed to see it destroyed, dreamed of witnessing its violation and humiliation, and wanted to gloat over the impotence of mighty Nineveh before the unstoppable judgement of Israel's Almighty omnipotent God.
That longing for a changed world where the oppressor is oppressed, where the practitioners of cruelty experience some of the torture and trauma of the victims, is a deeply human form of psychological survival. In recent years trauma studies have begun to be used as an hermeneutical key to unlock the nature and motivation behind texts of terror, trauma, lament, grief and rage. The application of trauma studies to Lamentations and Jeremiah has opened up new ways of reading lament and texts of judgement as they issued from the experiences of the Exile, and the people's lived horror of suffering, loss, forced migration, cultural dislocation, and religious failure and humiliation.
Against such a background, and allowing for Nahum being written before the final Fall of Jerusalem, the end of the Judaean state in 587BCE and subsequent Babylonian exile of the people, this too is a text written out of trauma and the threat to the religious survival of a people. The book is unabashed in its language. The poetic skill of Nahum is in full flow, using a conveyor belt of fear-inspiring metaphors and a pervasive tone of joyous gloating over Nineveh getting its come-uppance with a vengeance! There is mockery and relief, rage and laughter, at long-remembered grievances and concentrated hatred of Assyria for unforgivable atrocities. The fall of Nineveh in 612 BCE was cause for unrestrained celebration by Assyria's conquered vassal states. The dam that had held back hatred and grief, rage and despair, collapsed under the weight of historical circumstance engineered by the God of Israel, vindicating the religious faith of an entire people disillusioned by the long nightmare that was Nineveh. But even in their worst nightmares, they had refused to disaffiliate from the Covenant God. No wonder what we get in this short prophetic book is Nahum unplugged.
But what to do with such a text of terror aimed at enemies who deserve all they get? How as a 21st Century Christian do I read Nahum and find some valid and viable application to where our world now stands? Why do we feel it necessary to harmonise the diversity of voices and biblical theologies that form our canon of Scripture? Is there an important place for those biblical voices that cry out in complaint and express longing for freedom, justice and the right to live without fear of oppression, suffering and the whim of the powerful? If so, have we any right to sanitise, or quarantine those voices born out of pain and sufferings borne, that many of us will never know in our own so limited and protected experience of life in a world broken, and we hope not beyond repair.
Over the next few weeks I'll try to work some of that out, and report back here when there's more to say.
It is about Ashur. I look forward to hearing about what you learn.
Thus says Yahweh, א If ש ׁthose at peace ו and so
ר many! And so they will be sheared. And he
passes through.
Though I have afflicted you, I will not afflict you
any more.
Posted by: Bob MacDonald | June 20, 2021 at 02:03 AM