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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comJamieson Fausset Brown Commentary - Nahum 1:9 - 1:9
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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
What do ye imagine against the Lord? - abrupt address to the Assyrians. How mad is your attempt, O Assyrians, to resist so powerful a God! What can ye do against such an adversary, successful though ye have been against all other adversaries? Ye imagine ye have to do merely with mortals and with a weak people, and that so you will gain an easy victory; but you have to encounter God, the protector of His people. Parallel to Isa 37:23-29; compare Psa 1:1.
he will make an utter end - The utter overthrow of Sennacherib’s host, soon about to take place, is an earnest of the “utter end” of Nineveh itself.
affliction shall not rise up the second time - Judah’s “affliction” caused by the invasion shall never rise again. So Nah 1:12. But Calvin takes the “affliction” to be that of Assyria: “There will be no need of His inflicting on you a second blow: He will make an utter end of you once for all” (1Sa 3:12; 1Sa 26:8; 2Sa 20:10). If so, this verse, in contrast to Nah 1:12, will express, Affliction shall visit the Assyrian no more, in a sense very different from that in which God will afflict Judah no more. In the Assyrian’s case, because the blow will be fatally final; the latter, because God will make lasting blessedness in Judah’s case succeed temporary chastisement. But it seems simpler to refer “affliction” here, as in Nah 1:12, to Judah; indeed destruction, rather than affliction, applies to the Assyrian.