Nahum the Elkoshite נחום האלקושי

Of Nahum himself nothing is known but the epithet—the Elkoshite, after a place no one can now point to with certainty. The book carries no dating; Seder Olam Rabbah places him, with Joel and Habakkuk, in the days of Manasseh, and that is the only anchor. The book has three chapters, and all three are on one thing.

The subject, though, is named in the first verse: "an oracle concerning Nineveh." The same city that fasted in Jonah's day and was spared. Between the two books lie a century and a half in which Assyria wiped out the Northern Kingdom, carried off the ten tribes and came up to the walls of Jerusalem.

Nahum does not write a sermon but a picture of a siege, and writes it so that it is audible: "the crack of the whip and the rumble of wheels, galloping horse and bounding chariot; charging horseman, flashing sword and glittering spear, a mass of slain and heaps of corpses." The city is called "the city of blood"—all lies and plunder, "the prey does not depart from it."

The end is known: "Nineveh is devastated, plundered, laid waste." Assyria fell at the end of the seventh century BCE, and of the city there remained a mound that was not dug up until the nineteenth. In the Jewish reading the point of the book is not gloating but a rule: a reprieve granted once is not granted forever—it has to be maintained by deeds.