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Nahum 2-3
The event was brought about by the combined revolt of the Medes and Babylonians against the luxurious tyrant who then occupied the Assyrian throne. The king gave them battle, and was for a time successful; but eventually the allied revolters, gaining continual accessions of strength, defeated him, and he was constrained to shut himself in the city, and prepare to sustain a siege, until the forces he had summoned from the remote provinces of his empire should arrive to his relief. Relying much upon an ancient oracle—that the city would never be taken until the river became its enemy—he was by no means dispirited, but prepared for the siege with a degree of courage, skill, and judicious forethought, for which he does not seem to have previously had credit. He sent away his family and treasure to the care of a distant friend on the borders of the Black Sea; he strengthened and repaired the fortifications and he laid in large stores of ammunition and provisions for the use of the soldiers and inhabitants. The siege had lasted two years, and no immediate cause of alarm for the safety of the city existed, when there was an extraordinary overflow of the Tigris, which carried away no less than twenty furlongs of the great wall of the city towards the river. Seeing this, and remembering the old oracle, the king gave up for lost, and withdrew to his palace, which, like another Zimri, he set on fire, and perished in the flames with all his concubines. The army of the confederates entered precipitately, by the breach thus unexpectedly presented, and completed the ruin of the city.
Now the siege was distinctly foretold by the prophet, and the extensive preparations that were made for it. “Draw thee waters for the siege, fortify thy strongholds: Go into clay, and tread the mortar, make strong the brickkiln.” Nah_3:14.
The agency of the river and its waters in the destruction of the city, is still more emphatically indicated. Babylon as well as Nineveh, were destroyed through the agency of the rivers upon which they stood, and at first view this may suggest that the doom of the two cities is so similar that what is said of one may apply to the other. But closer consideration presents essential differences. In the case of Babylon the river was “dried up,” that is, exhausted, so as to admit the enemy; but in the case of Nineveh the very reverse occurs—the river overflows its banks, and becomes an immediate and active agent in the city’s overthrow. “With an over-running flood shall He make an utter end of the place thereof. The gates of the river shall be opened, and the palace shall be dissolved. Nineveh of old is like a pool of water.” Of the appropriateness of every point in this description to an inundation of the Tigris, we are ourselves but too well able to speak, having been present in the greatest city (Baghdad) now upon the same river, when it was in most part destroyed by the most extensive inundation that has been known in modern times. The authorities do not state the time of the year when the Nineveh inundation occurred. The stream of this river is swollen twice in the year—in spring, from the melting of the snow in the mountains of Armenia. This is the greatest swell; the whole of that country, of which this river is one of the principal drains being thickly covered with snow during the winter months. The other inundation is from the fall of the autumnal rains. But any serious inundation is so rare that it has no place among the contingencies which the inhabitants contemplate, and therefore they build their houses of materials little suited to withstand wet. The humbler dwellings are of sun-dried brick, which is speedily dissolved in water and is even damaged by heavy rains. The better dwellings have apparently strong and thick walls of kiln-burnt bricks—but this is merely a casing, the interior being either of sun-dried bricks of loose texture, or of mere earthly rubbish; and when the wetter soaks through the outer casing, the interior mass dissolves, or settles so as to break down the outer casing, and the building suddenly gives way. In our own house, as in most others, there were underground cellars, in which the people live for coolness during the heats of summer. These extensive cellars (called serdaubs) were soon filled deeply with water, which soaked through the basement walls, and caused the part of the house standing over the cellars to give way. This happened so suddenly that, had not attention been drawn, in the merciful providence of God, to a small chink in the wall of the principal apartment, which had not been previously observed, some of us must have perished in the ruins. Indeed, as it was, we had only finally withdrawn a few minutes when the building on that side fell in with a tremendous crash, darkening the air at the same time with immense clouds of dust. In the same way the greater part of the city was destroyed. In one night a large part of the city wall gave way, and then a vast number of houses fell by the irruption of the waters, burying thousands of the inhabitants among the ruins of their own homes. Since the destruction of Nineveh there has not, that we remember, been any parallel ruin of a great city, by the inundation of a river; and this was the same river—and how singularly appropriate to the mode in which the water acts upon the buildings on that river, cannot but strike the most careless attention—“the palace shall be dissolved.”
It is further a singularly parallel circumstance that the people of Baghdad were in expectation of a siege at the very time of the inundation. But in this case the extent of the overflow around the city, and the time it took to subside, allowed time for the repair of the wall before the hostile army could approach, so that it was enabled to sustain a regular siege, and surrendered at last by capitulation.
But fire was also to be an agent in the destruction of Nineveh. “They shall be devoured as stubble fully dry.” Note: Nah_1:10. “The fire shall devour thy bars.” Note: Nah_3:13. “The fire shall devour thee.”
Secular history does, as we have shown, point to this agency but not with so much distinctness and fulness of meaning as the actual ruins. It was formerly thought sufficient to point to the historical fact that the king destroyed himself by fire upon a funeral pile of his costly furniture and treasures. But the words of the prophet imply a more extensive conflagration, and the excavations lately made upon the site have distinctly confirmed this by showing that the city, or at least the public buildings, must have been fired by the conquerors after they had completed their work of slaughter and pillage. M. Botta is unable to account for the appearances which he found in the Khorsabad palace, but by supposing that the roof was of timber, and, being fired, fell into the area of the building, and continued burning a long time. During the excavations a considerable quantity of charcoal, and even pieces of wood, either half burnt or in a perfect state of preservation, were found in many places. The lining of the chambers also bears certain marks of the action of fire. In fact, while the outside walls are untouched, the inside are calcined by intense heat. The appearances are such as could not be produced by the burning of a quantity of furniture. There must have been a violent and prolonged fire to be able to calcine not only a few places, but every part of the slabs of gypsum, which were ten feet high, and several inches thick, reducing them so thoroughly to lime that they rapidly fell to pieces on being exposed to the air.
Nor were these appearances confined to this locality. Layard makes the same observations with reference to the ruins of the palace at Koyunjik. “The palace had been destroyed by fire. The alabaster slabs were almost all reduced to lime, and many of them fell to pieces as soon as uncovered. The places that others had occupied could only be traced by a thin white deposit, left by the burnt alabaster upon the walls of sun-dried bricks, and having the appearance of a coating of plaster.”