Nahum

2 Tim 3:16 "All scripture is inspired by God and useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness."

Nahum and Obadiah often strain the reader to fulfill this expectation.

Nahum is active at the time of the fall of Nineveh (612 b.c.), perhaps during Josiah's reforms.

Nahum 3:8-10 refers to Thebes, the great Egyptian city of the upper Nile destroyed by Ashur-bani-pal of Assyria in 663. The ruins are the most extensive of Egypt and include the temples of Karnak and Luxor and the necropolis of the valley of kings (eg. Ramses II) and the valley of queens.

Nahum 1:2-8 describes a series of natural disasters that constitute God's avenging wrath: A tornado, a dust story, a drought, an earthquake, a volcanic eruption and a flood.

Nahum 1:1-11 contains thirteen different words also found in Micah 7:11-20. The editors of the canon seem to have lined the books together through the use of Stichwoerter or catchwords.

Micah 7:11-20

Nahum 1:2-11

A day for the building of your walls! In that day the boundary wall be far extended. In that day they will come to your from Assyria to Egypt, and from Egypt to the river, from sea to sea and from mountain to mountain. But the earth will be desolate because of its inhabitants, for the fruit of their doings. Shepherd your people with your staff, the flock that belongs to you, which lives alone in a forest in the midst of a garden land; let them feed in Bashan and Gilead as in the days of old. As in the days when you came out of the land of Egypt, show us marvelous things. The nations shall see and be ashamed of all their might they shall lay their hands on their mouths; their ears shall be deaf; they shall lick dust like a snake, like the crawling things of the earth; they shall come trembling out of their fortresses; they shall turn in dread to the Lord our God and they shall stand in fear of you. Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over the transgression of the remnant of your possession? He does not retain his anger forever because he delights in showing clemency. He will again have compassion upon us; he will tread our iniquities under foot. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea.

A jealous and avenging God is the Lord, the Lord is avenging and wrathful; the Lord takes vengeance on his adversaries and rages against his enemies. The Lord is slow to anger but great in power, and the Lord will by no means clear the guilty. His way is in whirlwind and storm, and the clouds are the dust of his feet. He rebukes the sea and makes it dry, and he dries up all the rivers; Bashan and Carmel wither, and the bloom of Lebanon fades. The mountains quake before him, and the hills melt; the earth heaves before him, the world and all who live in it. Who can stand before his indignation? Who can endure the heat of his anger? His wrath is poured out like fire, and by him the rocks are broken in pieces. 7. The Lord is good, a stronghold in a day of trouble; he protects those who take refuge in him, even in a rushing flood. He will make a full end of his adversaries and will pursue his enemies into darkness Why do you plot against the Lord He will make an end; no adversary will rise up twice. Like thorns they are entangled, like drunkards they are drunk; they are consumed like dry straw. From you one has gone out who plots evil against the Lord, who counsels wickedness.

What do we do with this? The New Testament never quotes Nahum.

The Qumran community reinterprets it allegorically to refer to its one time (Pesher Nahum)

Kittim is Rome. The young lion is King Demetrius who sought to enter Jerusalem and whom the Pharisees encourage. In 88 b.c., Alexander Jannaeus orders 800 pharisees executed by hanging - in violation to the law -- as a consequence of their actions.

In order to maintain the level of invective, one needs to shift the action from the past to the present. The natural disasters are happening now! But is this a satisfying or biblically sanctioned exegetical strategy?

Obadiah

This prophetic work, like Nahum, contains a condemnation of another nation, in this case, Edom. In 587, the Edomites assisted Babylon in the siege of Jerusalem (Lam 4:21-22; Ps 137:7). Several other prophets include oracles against Edom (Amos 1:11-12; Isaiah 34:5-17; 63:1-6; Jer 49:7-22; Ezek 25:12-17; 35; Mal 1:2-4), but no other is consumed by the subject. Edom was eventually expelled from the highlands of the Dead Sea sometime between 500 and 450 b.c.e. and in 312 b.c.e. the Nabateans took residence in Petra, the former Edomite capital.

 

This leaves us to wonder if Obadiah was included in the canon as a piece of vindicated venom, a "sordid example of petty Jewish nationalism and hatred" as one scholar, who perhaps betrays his own antisemitism, puts it.

 

The Uppsala school of form critics perhaps provides us with another way of looking at Obadiah, one that makes us reflect upon the limitations of our own way of reading. Form critics place the reading of Obadiah in the Sitz im Leben of the celebration of the New Year's festival. The Day of the Lord is then to be taken as a time of covenantal judgment and renewal. In this setting Edom ceases to be the historic people but rather stands for the powers of chaos, just as bohemian no longer refers to someone from Bohemia, but rather, to someone who is unconventional.

 

On what basis can we equate Edom with Chaos? The answer lies perhaps in the intertestamental telling of the story of Jacob and Esau, the ancestral father of the Edomites according to biblical tradition. Cf. Jubilees 24-38.

 

This investigation of Obadiah puts us in a very awkward position. If the form critics are correct and Obadiah is included in the canon because of an allegorical meaning imposed upon the text by its post-exilic readers, is the correct interpretation of Obadiah the one intended by its author or the one intended by its canonizers. How far can our scruples about another's peoples' literature extend?

This last question, makes me think about western scholars' criticism of Indian Epic Narrative, the Ramayana, that treats Sri Lanka as the abode of demons. I recently asked a student from Sri Lanka if it had bothered her as a child when she heard the story of the Ramayana. She said that she has always been please that the story named her country and that she had never taken personal offense.