431 INTRODUCTION TO NAHUM. NAHUM has come down to us with two titles. We read first, what was probably added last. The nearer to the book, which seems the older title, describes the Prophet as a native of Elkosh. If we could trust St. Jerome to refrain from emphasising a conjecture into an assertion, this had been a village in Galilee, of which his guide shewed him the ruins. (Prolog. in Nahum.) Such has been the tradition of the Church, though from the manner of Cyril's mentioning it, (πάντως που, and ἐκληψόμεθα,) we must conclude it was the offspring of conjecture. If we receive it as of the birth-place, we cannot extend it to the residence, for the Prophet apparently lived in exile, certainly made Judah, and not Ephraim, the centre of his affections. He may have emigrated to Judah or Egypt, and yet have retained a title of origin. Such, however, is hardly the Jewish tradition. The saying of the scribes (St. John vii. 52), that no prophet arose out of Galilee, is inconsistent with either a Galilean site for Elkosh, or with an ingenious suggestion that Caper-naum was the Prophet's village. Benjamin of Tudela, in the 12th century, found a synagogue (at Mosul,) near the site of Nineveh, which claimed sanctity from Nahum's residence and tomb. Though the village has been Christianized, it is still a resort of Jewish pilgrims, as recent travellers attest. (Layard, i. Nineveh, p. 233.) If the question depended on a balance of traditions, either of which may be fabulous, St. Jerome's priority might weigh against Jewish nationality, and our predilection would turn the scale. But the book itself, in which the turn of a syllable outweighs volumes of tradition, has some right to be heard. That Assyrian words are traced in it, I cannot urge, for they scem to me to admit of a Hebrew explanation. The Huzzab of A. V. is the familiar passive of a verb, meaning to fix. Minnězārim may be explained easily from Nazar, to crown, or separate; Taphsarim, with but the anomaly of an exchanged sibilant, may mean the offspring of princes.' Not the less, the life-like description of Nineveh, the familiarity with her watery site, the appropriate imagery of the lions, the allusions to the brick-kiln, the sketch of what the city had been in her thronged streets and cruel victories, resemble most the work of an eye-witness. The leonine sculpture which we gaze at dreamingly in our museums and crystal palaces, had drawn from the Hebrew exile glances of antipathy, as it symbolized too well the lordly rapine of his masters. The allusion to Judah is an anticipation how she will receive the news from afar; the description of the scarlet Medes, and of the river-gates bursting, is by one who had seen with his eyes. When Scripture is thus fertile in suggestions, the tradition prolonged throughout generations of the race out of whose creative agony the volume itself sprang, has the fullest right to offer itself as a supplementary document. Hence the general voice of modern critics seems justified in accepting the Assyrian site of Elkosh. The book is by a captive Hebrew, whose ancestors, rather than himself, we may conceive as carried from Palestine to Assyria in one of many deportations between Pul and Esarhaddon. A prosaic picture of the feelings with which such exiles regarded the Median insurrection against Nineveh appears in the first and last chapters of Tobit. The far grander strain of Micah iv. 11. (A. V. v. 6,) has suggested a question, whether the Hebrew element, often of old insubordinate, might not contribute to the agitation of realms in which it dwelt against its will. Some might deem themselves called to work with the God of their fathers. What at least they desired, and exulted over, we read in Nahum. Our older divines,' misled by the account from Ctesias, preserved in Diodorus, imagined two great captures of Nineveh, both by Medes and Babylonians, but one as early as 804 to 747, the other as late as 625 to 606. The first of these is now admitted to be so far imaginary, as to be a duplicate by anticipation of the second. Arbaces and Belesys are forecasts of Cyaxares and Nabo-pol-assar; Sardanapalus perhaps should be Saracus; the events are one. Ctesias has not only kings as fictitious as any in the prehistoric romance of Scotland, but represents as effeminate the most warlike captains of antiquity, and is quite untrustworthy. We do not deny a far earlier empire of Assyria, but find between 800 and 600, from Pul to Saracus, the realities which concern us in relation to Hebrew prophecy. This result is not affected by collision of authorities or confusion of names, such as Assuerus for Cyaxares, (compare Newcome's note on the end of Nahum,) and may be verified by comparison of Marsham's Canon Chronicus with Clinton's Fasti H., Grote, H. G. ch. xix., and the recent works of Mr Rawlinson, which on this question are exhaustive and trustworthy. It does not follow, because Ctesias is fabulous, that everything in him is fable; for, as his leading fiction is founded on a true event, the same may be conceived of his more striking details. We can understand that in the halfcentury of Assyrian decline, one account would represent Media and Babylonia as owned by tributary princes, ano 1 Prideaux, Conn. i. p. 1; Jahn, Hebr. C. B. v. S. 40-1. Comp. Davison; Lect. Proph. on Nahum. Davidson, Introd. Old Test. iii. pp. 292-300, but more especially, Henry Browne's Ordo sæculorum, App. iii. pp. 546-566. 2 F VOL. I. ther by altogether kings. Hence I have not felt obliged to change the inundation described in Nahum into a stream of nations, though eminent scholars do so. The first impression left by a dispassionate perusal of our Prophet, is that of contemporaneousness, or subsequence, to the events which he narrates. The defenders are fallen, the assailants hasten to the wall, the sicge-screen is set fast, the city is taken, her daughters moan as doves, her people refuse to rally, she becomes a pool of waters. This impression need not be removed by the subsequent reflexion, with which in his closing Epode the Prophet travels back into the counsels of Eternity for the causes of the event over which he exults. Here, unhappily, dignitaries, who must be treated respectfully, assure the State in Senate or Judgment-hall, and the Church in her solemn assemblies, that, whoever takes so simple a view must be logically striking at the Supernatural, the Atonement, the Holy Trinity, the Resurrection to eternal life. Whether those doctrines are believed less, or perhaps more, by an interpreter who unmistakeably teaches them, than by such accusers, he may plead that no disinclination to them is actually or logically implied in the belief that the Prophet of God meant what he said, when he affirmed Nineveh to have been captured.—I can not so read Aristotle as to think a false premiss the way to a true conclusion; nor so learn Christ, as to apprehend it a duty to read the Bible, and a sin to understand it. It is unfortunate, if men are so little accustomed to reasoning, that because with inane simulation of dialectics they are "invited to notice assumptions," they suppose something must have been "assumed" by some one else, when in reality an issue has been feigned for the convenience of the inviter. After all, the most reverential course is the simplest, to take the Prophet at his word. He On the other hand, it has been thought decisive, and formerly retarded my own judgment, that Josephus (A. J. ix. 11.) distinctly places Nahum a hundred and fifteen years before Nineveh's fall. If we concede this writer's good faith, we may doubt his accuracy; the more, because his citation hardly corresponds to our text. may have followed any tradition, or, observing appearance of allusion to Sennacherib, may have conjectured the book to have followed closely upon the invasion as an oracle of retribution; again, he may have been swayed by proximity of arrangement to Jonah, although subject, and not time, had determined that arrangement: at best, he is not a writer to outweigh any strong probability of internal evidence. Upon the same ground, the absence of consonance with the language of the book, some modern conjectures that the abortive siege of Phraortes, or the first attempt of Cyaxares, gave occasion to the Poem, may be respectfully dismissed. The style of Nahum has features of its own. He writes an artist with the highest rhythmical finish. He abounds in sharply defined images, as one who lingered over his thought, until he gave it the utmost precision. Each word conveys an idea, each couplet almost a sentence: the balance of antithesis is even more between phrases than sentences. His originality may be more questionablo than his art. He borrows from Joel and from Isaiah, as he will be imitated by the second Isaiah. The book has so manifest an unity, that it throws indirectly light upon the manner of composition of other Prophets, whom we are accustomed, needlessly, to break into divisions. If there is a tinge of obscurity, it arises perhaps once from transposition of phrase; oftener from rapid transition between Nineveh whose ruin the Prophet describes, and Judah whose freedom he felicitates. Such hovering be |