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 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.