Nahum 2

World English Bible 86 include this book

1 He who dashes in pieces has come up against you. Keep the fortress! Watch the way! Strengthen your waist! Fortify your power mightily!

2 For the LORD restores the excellency of Jacob as the excellency of Israel, for the destroyers have destroyed them and ruined their vine branches.

3 The shield of his mighty men is made red. The valiant men are in scarlet. The chariots flash with steel in the day of his preparation, and the pine spears are brandished.

4 The chariots rage in the streets. They rush back and forth in the wide ways. Their appearance is like torches. They run like the lightnings.

5 He summons his picked troops. They stumble on their way. They dash to its wall, and the protective shield is put in place.

6 The gates of the rivers are opened, and the palace is dissolved.

7 It is decreed: she is uncovered, she is carried away; and her servants moan as with the voice of doves, beating on their breasts.

8 But Nineveh has been from of old like a pool of water, yet they flee away. “Stop! Stop!” they cry, but no one looks back.

9 Take the plunder of silver. Take the plunder of gold, for there is no end of treasure, an abundance of every precious thing.

10 She is empty, void, and waste. The heart melts, the knees knock together, their bodies and faces have grown pale.

11 Where is the den of the lions, and the feeding place of the young lions, where the lion and the lioness walked with the lion’s cubs, and no one made them afraid?

12 The lion tore in pieces enough for his cubs, and strangled prey for his lionesses, and filled his caves with the kill and his dens with prey.

13 “Behold, I am against you,” says the LORD of Armies, “and I will burn her chariots in the smoke, and the sword will devour your young lions; and I will cut off your prey from the earth, and the voice of your messengers will no longer be heard.”

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1 place named in this chapter.

Where this was written

Jerusalem traditional A Judean oracle against Nineveh.

When this was written

The traditions broadly agree on this one.

Broad agreement: 663 BC–612 BC Nahum
After the fall of Thebes, which it mentions, and before the fall of Nineveh, which it foretells.

Elsewhere in the world

Events overlapping the period this book is dated to (663 BC–612 BC).

1200 BC–400 BC Olmec civilisation Mesoamerica
The earliest major Mesoamerican civilisation, known for colossal stone heads and an early calendar.
1200 BC–600 BC Zoroaster teaches in Persia Persia
Founder of Zoroastrianism, whose dating is disputed by as much as six centuries. His teaching on a cosmic struggle between good and evil later touched Jewish and Christian thought.
1070 BC–350 AD The kingdom of Kush Africa
A Nubian power on the upper Nile that ruled Egypt itself as its twenty-fifth dynasty.
750 BC–650 BC Homeric epics take written form Greece
The Iliad and Odyssey were fixed in writing after generations of oral transmission.
745 BC–609 BC Neo-Assyrian empire at its height Mesopotamia
Assyria dominated the Near East, deporting conquered populations as policy, including the northern kingdom of Israel.
620 BC–560 BC Coinage invented in Lydia Anatolia
Stamped electrum coins of guaranteed weight, an idea that spread across the ancient world within a century.
624 BC–546 BC Greek philosophy begins at Miletus Greece
Thales sought natural rather than mythic explanations, the beginning of Greek science.

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