The Book of Nahum: "An attacker advances against you, Nineveh."

The Book of Nahum is a short one – three straightforward chapters in two pages – so I think we can sort it out pretty quickly.  Keep in mind that I’m a dope; no doubt there are Nahum specialists who dedicate a lifetime to uncovering the rich tapestry of meaning and inspiration that’s embedded in these two pages.  No doubt there’s a school of thought that Nahum is the keystone to the whole Bible, the crux of the entire Judeo-Christian tradition and experience.  I’ve been known to miss that kind of thing.

But what I see is, Nahum is predicting some serious hurt for the city of Nineveh.  It looks like they’ve been exerting a bit of the ol’ oppressive hegemony over Judah, that nobody much cares for their too-successful businessmen, and that everybody – at least, everybody in Judah – would like to see them brought down a peg.

God, too, has had enough of Nineveh.  He was merciful with them when they heeded the prophecies of Jonah, but that is in the past.  Or maybe the future, or on an alternative timeline, I'm not sure.  In any event, instead of smiting the Israelites, this time he’s going to smite their opponents on their behalf.

1:12 This is what the Lord says:

“Although they have allies and are numerous,
    they will be destroyed and pass away.
Although I have afflicted you, Judah,
    I will afflict you no more.
13 Now I will break their yoke from your neck
    and tear your shackles away.”

As I’ve been observing in the other books of the Prophets, not frequently but for years now, there continues in Nahum the whiplash alternation between (mostly) the God of vengeance and violence and (occasionally) the God of peace and forgiveness.  Well, in the dog-eat-dog world of the time, vengeance and violence towards other people may well have felt like peace and forgiveness for oneself.

1:6 Who can withstand his indignation?
    Who can endure his fierce anger?
His wrath is poured out like fire;
    the rocks are shattered before him.
7 The Lord is good,
    a refuge in times of trouble.
He cares for those who trust in him,
8  but with an overwhelming flood
he will make an end of Nineveh;
    he will pursue his foes into the realm of darkness.

And that, really, is that.  Filling out Chapters 2 and 3 is little more than an elegant stream of what we’d call “trash talk” – taunts, threats, the smug warnings of someone who is pretty confident they’re going to win the fight.

1:14 "...I will prepare your grave,
    for you are vile.”

 

2:1 An attacker advances against you, Nineveh.
    Guard the fortress,
    watch the road,
    brace yourselves,
    marshal all your strength!

 

3:5-6 “I am against you,” declares the Lord Almighty.
    “I will lift your skirts over your face.
I will show the nations your nakedness
    and the kingdoms your shame.
I will pelt you with filth,
    I will treat you with contempt
    and make you a spectacle.

 

3:12-13 All your fortresses are like fig trees
    with their first ripe fruit;
when they are shaken,
    the figs fall into the mouth of the eater.
Look at your troops—
    they are all women!

…or so says my NIV, which was printed in 1983.  It looks like these days the NIV says “weaklings” instead of “women,” and ditches the jeering exclamation point.  Hmm.  I wonder whether that was a much needed fix to the translation, or if the actual sexist taunt has been bowdlerized, or if “it’s complicated.”  Hang on….  OK, cross-checking with the other translations, I’m pretty sure the actual sexist taunt has been bowdlerized.  It appears that the armed forces of Nineveh were indeed a bunch of girly-men.

And once God has knocked them flat, is anybody going to feel sorry for them?  No way!

3:19 Nothing can heal you;
    your wound is fatal.
All who hear the news about you
    clap their hands at your fall,
for who has not felt
    your endless cruelty?

Wrapping up Micah

In the course of my obviously inadequate religious education, I’d occasionally ask why the Old Testament was still kept in the Christian Bible – indeed, why it still makes up MOST of the Christian Bible – if it had been, as I was told, superseded by the New Testament.  The answers amounted to so much hemming and hawing, but one thing I picked up is that it was important to have the Old Testament on hand since it contains the prophecies of the coming of Christ that are then fulfilled in the New Testament.

In retrospect, it was probably a little naïve to expect those prophecies to actually be there.  They’ve certainly been conspicuous by their absence up to now, and even desperate stretches like “the fourth guy in the furnace with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego is obviously Jesus” have been pretty thin on the ground.  So, it commands some attention that the heading for Micah 5 is “A Promised Ruler From Bethlehem.”  You have my full attention, Mr. Micah!
 

2 But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah,
though you are small among the clans[b] of Judah,
out of you will come for me
    one who will be ruler over Israel,
whose origins are from of old,
    from ancient times.”

3 Therefore Israel will be abandoned
    until the time when she who is in labor bears a son,
and the rest of his brothers return
    to join the Israelites.

4 He will stand and shepherd his flock
    in the strength of the Lord,
    in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God.
And they will live securely, for then his greatness
    will reach to the ends of the earth.

5 And he will be our peace

Hmm.  Jesus famously comes from Bethlehem, from a really distinguished family.  Verses 4 and 5 certainly hold up, from a Christian perspective.  Really, the only line that doesn’t quite fit is “one who will be ruler over Israel.”  Otherwise, 90% of the prophecy pans out, which is about as flamboyant of a slam dunk as one ever sees in the predicting-the-future business.

The only problem is, the ruling over Israel part is really what Micah himself is interested in.  If you back out just a little and capture 5:1 and the entirety of 5:5, you see that this is a prophecy about not just any leader from Bethlehem, but a leader from Bethlehem who will lead the Israelites to victory against the Assyrians next time they invade.  And, as you continue into 5:6, it gets a little fuzzy whether the guy from Bethlehem is going to be individually awesome, or the foremost among a group of seven or eight guys who will “rule the land of Assyria with the sword.” (6)  Ultimately, for the Israelites, their “hand will be lifted up in triumph over [their] enemies, and all [their] foes will be destroyed.” (9)  And you know what?  Suddenly I’m not really feeling like this prophecy has been very successful.  Certainly it no longer seems to have much to do with Jesus Christ.

In Chapter 6 we turn briefly to the genre of courtroom drama.  I’m speaking literally, for – at least in NIV translation – God announces through Micah that “the Lord has a case against his people; he is lodging a charge against Israel.”  The complaint is that God has done a lot for the Israelites on the understanding that they will behave, and they don’t behave.  He reminds them that he freed them from Egypt, set them up with their own country, and set them up with a complete manual of how to live rightly, and all he asks in return is for them “to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with [their] God.” (8)

Put that way, it sounds pretty reasonable.  “My people, what have I done to you?” asks God (through Micah) in verse 3.  “How have I burdened you?  Answer me.” (3)  Oh snap!  There’s no way for the Israelites to answer that!  I mean, God has been nothing but good to the Israelites, as long as you leave out the long litany of plagues, famines, and conquests which God has inflicted on the Israelites ever since he required them to “go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor” (Genesis 32:37) after the Golden Calf incident.

The Israelites don’t mount this defense, though.  Presumably they blurt out a full confession under questioning, like a Perry Mason villain, because we proceed directly from accusation to the punishment phase: “Therefore, I have begun to destroy you, to ruin you because of your sins….  Therefore I will give you over to ruin and your people to derision; you will bear the scorn of the nations.” (13, 16)  Wow, I didn’t see that coming!  Oh wait, actually I did.  This is the punchline for a great many, if not most, of the prophecies.

But in the final chapter, Micah 7, there’s something else that we have also seen before in the prophets: after all of the anger, the vindictiveness, and the gleeful, disproportionate punishments, there is a sudden transition to a vision of merciful, compassionate God.  Here’s Micah:

18 Who is a God like you,
    who pardons sin and forgives the transgression
    of the remnant of his inheritance?
You do not stay angry forever
    but delight to show mercy.
19 You will again have compassion on us;
    you will tread our sins underfoot
    and hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea.
20 You will be faithful to Jacob,
    and show love to Abraham,
as you pledged on oath to our ancestors
    in days long ago.

It’s a compelling, even beautiful way to end the book of Micah.  And I suppose that an infinite and complex God, a God beyond understanding, could exhibit mercy and a vengeful spirit at the same time.  The problem of course that we humans aren’t really capable of receiving mercy and punishment simultaneously.  The very concept of mercy requires a withholding of punishment.  So, the Prophets’ merciful/punishing God is hard to make coherent sense of.  At best, it is an incomprehensible mystery.  

Michael Reads Micah

Jan van Eyck, Micah, from the Ghent altarpiece, 1432.

 

It has been not quite two years since the last entry in this enterprise, which was begun 15 years ago this month.  I guess it’s reasonable to stand back from myself and say “Lo, here is a guy who has had trouble staying excited about reading the Bible.” 

At the very least, I have trouble staying excited about reading the prophets.  Most of what they have to say is reiteration of the formula that God will punish the people because he’s angry about their bad behavior, and occasionally reward the people for their good behavior.  Since “the people” means a whole bunch of people, of whom most are surely behaving well part of the time and behaving poorly part of the other time – we’re talking about humans, here – this is much like saying “God is random.”  Well, it’s not, because the prophets also define what good behavior is, which is to say doing what the prophets want.  This makes their message more like “God is an incredibly powerful bully who will beat you up if you don’t do what I say.”

That’s my memory of it, anyway.  But Micah seems to jump right back into this groove.  The first section heading of Chapter 1 is “Judgement Against Samaria and Jerusalem,” the big cities of Israel and Judah respectively.  The second section heading is “Weeping and Mourning.”  I actually don’t know where the section headings come from – they’re just traditional editorial markings, I think, more or less consistent among translations.  But they definitely summarize Micah 1 well enough.

In Micah 2, we start with “Man’s Plans and God.”  The first two verses warn of woe to thieves, especially those who seize fields and houses.  Then, in the third to fifth verses, God says that he is going to crush “this people,” humiliate and cast them off the land.  As written, it’s one of any number of examples of the “because some people are dodgy, everybody’s going to get it” mechanism.

Micah 2:6 to 11 is labelled “False Prophets,” but that’s not actually what it’s about.  It’s about people complaining about the gloom and doom of prophets like Micah.  He mocks them for wanting more joyful prophecies.  Then, we end the chapter with “Deliverance Promised,” in which God promises to gather up the “remnant of Israel” like a happy, prosperous herd of sheep.  So I guess Micah is capable of busting out a little optimism after all.

Micah 3 is a fiery if vague condemnation of Israel’s civil and religious elite – they “despise justice and distort all that is right” – whereas Micah 4 is back in the joyful mode, predicting a happy future of Jerusalem in which “every man will sit under his own vine and under his own fig tree” and the Jews will live happy in the protection of God:

All the nations may walk in the name of their gods;
We will walk in the name of the Lord our God for ever and ever. (5)

Also in Chapter 4, Micah makes reference to the Jews being taken into captivity in Babylon and then being rescued and returned to their homeland (10).  Without any better sense of the context than what I’ve learned in this project, I am pretty sure that that’s what all of Micah, or at least all that we're looking at so far, is about. 

To recap: after a long line of kings, Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians and many of the elites were hauled off to that city.  There, they forged a strong religious identity, to the point which when they were allowed to return to their homeland many years later, the relatively scruffy folks who had been living their lives in the meantime seemed like so many heathens.  Obviously they needed to be put back in their place, and fairly obviously, I think, the Book of Micah was part of this campaign.

Now, Chapter 1 begins by saying that it was written “during the reigns of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah,” so the ruin he predicts for Samaria and Jerusalem was a spot-on prediction!  Chapter 2’s language about punishing those who steal fields and houses, and gathering up the remnant of Israel, sounds like invective against people who took possession of the property left vacant by the exiles.  The happy ending in Chapter 4 is about the wonderful new era of prosperity and serious religion that will return to Jerusalem, once the exiles have reimposed their will over the riff-raff.

I will make the lame a remnant, those driven away a strong nation.
The Lord will rule over them in Mount Zion from that day and forever.
As for you, O watchtower of the flock, O stronghold of the Daughter of Zion,
The former dominion will be restored to you; Kingship will come to the Daughter of Jerusalem. (7-8)

Micah is a seven-chapter book, so we’ll be back sometime within the next two years with coverage of Chapters 5, 6, and 7!