Book of Nahum

The Book of Nahum is the seventh book of the 12 minor prophets of the Hebrew Bible. The book has three chapters. It is attributed to the prophet Nahum. The most general historical setting of Nahum as a prophet was 663 BC to 612 BC, while the historical setting that produced the book of Nahum is debated, with proposed timeframes ranging from shortly after the fall of Thebes in 663 BC to the Maccabean period around 175-165 BC. Another view, held by the ancient historian Josephus, proposes that the book of Nahum was from the reign of Jotham. This identification is supported by both the Greek Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate, both of which refer to Thebes in the present tense rather than the past tense. Its principal theme is the destruction of the Assyrian city of Nineveh.

Background

Scholars with a preference for Hebrew manuscripts place the writing of the book after the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal's Sack of Thebes in 663 BC. This view is the current majority opinion because the city of Thebes is referred to in the past tense in the Masoretic Text of Nahum 3:8-10. However, both the Septuagint and Vulgate refer to the city in the present tense, and the former opinion held by scholars was that Nahum lived about a century earlier, before both the captivity of the ten lost tribes and the Sack of Thebes.

The first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus places Nahum's life during the reign of Jotham. This view was also held by the Catholic scholar Thomas Worthington in his notes for the original Douay-Rheims Bible, writing: "Nahum prophesied about 50 years after Jonah ...