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What you get in the Casual English Bible’s Nahum Atlas are
- 9 high definition maps in 3D style, for immediate download as PDFs.
SIN CITY
“Sin city, where crime calls home….the city where sin never sleeps” (3:1).
That’s how Nahum described Nineveh, capital of the vicious Assyrian Empire, before predicting it’s going to get erased.
Jonah came first
A hundred years before Nahum, in the 700s BC, a reluctant prophet named Jonah delivered a similar message:
“In 40 days Nineveh will be destroyed” (Jonah 1:4).
Didn’t happen.
The Assyrian king ordered the people to repent. Everyone fasted and dressed in mourning clothes made of scratchy feed sack fabric. “Humans and animals alike” (Jonah 3:8).
That last line (try dressing a bull in a feed sack) is one of several reasons some scholars say they read Jonah as a parable about God’s concern for everyone, not just for the Jews.
But in Nahum’s message, God is fed up with the Assyrians and concerned for the Jews. So much so that he said he would put a permanent end to the Assyrian Empire:
“Shepherds who led your nation are sleeping.
Great King of Assyria, they’ll never wake up.
What’s left of your people now hide in the hills.
There are no shepherds left to lead them” (3:18).
Babylonians from what is now southern Iraq not only overran the Assyrian Empire and took control of a swath of what is today the Middle East. They recorded the history.
Some of the documents, known as the Babylonian Chronicles, have the stories about it pressed into dried clay, written in wedge-shaped cuneiform characters:
“The king of Babylonia called out his army and…pitched camp by Nineveh…They made a strong attack…They carried off much spoil from the city and temple area and turned the city into a ruin mound and heap of debris.”
The city remains a ruin today, as Nahum said: “Gone for good” (1:15)
In addition to the Nahum Bible Atlas
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