Introduction

A Reprieve Runs Out

Nineveh had heard mercy once already. Jonah, as Theophylact reminds his readers in a single compressed paragraph at the head of this commentary—a history they already know from another book he had expounded—had preached destruction to the Ninevites unless they repented; they repented, and the city was spared. But the reprieve did not last. Nineveh grew slack, returned to its old violence, and turned its renewed strength against Israel itself—first through Tiglath-pileser and Shalmaneser, who carried off the ten northern tribes, and then through Sennacherib, whose army fell besieging Jerusalem and who was afterward struck down by his own sons in his own palace. Nahum, Theophylact explains, is the sequel: the same city that once heard mercy through a reluctant prophet now hears, from a very different prophet, that its time has finally run out. Reading Nahum immediately after Jonah, as Theophylact intends, changes what the later book means. This is not a first warning to a city that has never heard one; it is a last word to a city that already had its chance, used it, and threw it away.

Theophylact draws a careful theological lesson from the pairing rather than a simple one. God’s justice, he insists, is not fickle for sparing Nineveh once and destroying it later; the same God who honored Nineveh’s repentance under Jonah honors, in turn, its later refusal to remain repentant. He extends the same logic to Assyria’s earlier role as the instrument of Israel’s own punishment: God permitted the Assyrians to chastise a disobedient Israel, but their cruelty in doing so—savagery undertaken not out of obedience to God but out of naked greed and the wish to dominate—brought its own reckoning in turn. Nations raised up as scourges of others’ sin are not thereby excused from their own; Theophylact even pauses to defend this principle against a possible objection drawn from King Saul’s dealings with the Amalekites, working through the distinction with a lawyer’s patience before returning to Nahum’s own argument. The prophecy, on this reading, teaches a single consistent doctrine of divine providence across two very different books: mercy genuinely offered, justice genuinely deferred, and neither one canceling the other when the time appointed for each arrives.

The Oracle and the Book of Vision

Nahum’s opening words—“the oracle of Nineveh, the book of the vision of Nahum”—draw from Theophylact an extended reflection on how prophecy itself works, distinguishing the several ways the Spirit moved the prophets: showing some the future outright, speaking within others as an inward voice they seemed to overhear, seizing still others suddenly and using them as an instrument for a single utterance. He then turns, in his customary manner, from the letter of the opening verse to a further meaning within it. The prophet’s own name, he notes, means “consolation”, and Nineveh stands here for the whole dominion of sin and death; read this way, the very structure of the opening line becomes a compact statement of the Gospel—an “oracle” pronounced against the ruling power of death is, at the same time, a “book of vision” disclosing the flesh that the Word took up in order to condemn sin within it and bring light to those seated in darkness. Theophylact does not treat this second sense as displacing the first; Nineveh’s literal doom under the historical Nahum and the deeper victory it figures stand side by side throughout the commentary, the plain history never dissolved into allegory but always allowed to carry a further meaning alongside its own.

A City’s Fall, Told at Close Range

Once the opening chapter’s meditation on prophecy and providence is complete, Nahum’s remaining two chapters move with unusual speed and violence, and Theophylact’s commentary moves with them. Where Micah alternates indictment with hope across seven long chapters, Nahum simply watches a great city fall—chariots racing through its streets, gates thrown open, its wealth plundered and its people scattered—and Theophylact reads the vividness of the description as itself part of the prophecy’s argument: this is not vague menace but an eyewitness’s certainty, granted in advance, of exactly how the thing will happen. He is attentive to the specific charges leveled against Nineveh in these closing chapters—a city built on bloodshed, on plunder, and on the deceit of a harlot who ensnares nations for her own profit—and reads the coming devastation as the precise and fitting undoing of the very cruelty by which the city had prospered. Amid this rapid movement Theophylact still finds room for his characteristic close reading of a single striking phrase—a jealous God, watchmen posted on the road, the counsel that Judah keep her feasts and pay her vows now that her oppressor is no more—never letting the pace of the narrative outrun the discipline of reading it verse by verse.

How to Read This Commentary

Nahum is short, and a reader who comes to it without the earlier book in mind will still find a coherent prophecy of judgment on a violent empire. But the commentary rewards a reader who keeps Jonah close at hand, since Theophylact composed his exposition with that earlier reprieve constantly in view and returns to it, directly or by implication, at several points. Read together, the two commentaries tell a single continuous story about the same city—mercy first, judgment after—and about a God whose patience is real without being unlimited. It is worth noting, too, that Theophylact is working from the Septuagint throughout, so that place-names, the numbering of verses, and even the meaning he draws from Nahum’s own name follow the Greek Bible’s wording rather than the Hebrew that underlies most modern English translations; where a phrase looks unfamiliar against a standard English Old Testament, the difference usually traces back to this earlier, equally ancient text tradition rather than to any error.