Septuagint: Nahum

The Book of Nahum is generally considered one of the older surviving books of the Israelite Scriptures, with most scholars dating it to before the Torah was compiled, or at least heavily redacted in the time of King Josiah. Most scholars accept that Nahum was written by a prophet called Nahum between 663 and 656 BC, who was most likely from the town of Alqosh in northern Iraq, although some debate the location of his home town. His world was very different from the later Kingdom of Judea that emerged in the 2ⁿᵈ century BC, as the Israelites of his time were still polytheistic, worshiping the Canaanite gods, as well as statues of Yahweh, the God the Jews and Samaritans would later worship.

By Nahum’s time, Samaria had been conquered by the Assyrians, as had Egypt to the south, however the smaller Kingdom of Judah, located mostly in the modern Palestinian West Bank, had maintained its nominal independence. As he is reported to be from the town of Alqosh, in modern northern Iraq, his family must have been Samaritan. After the Assyrian Empire conquered the Samaritans in 720 BC, they dispersed the Samaritans throughout the empire in an attempt to assimilate them. The Kushites of modern Sudan, who the Greeks would later call Aethiopians, had ruled Egypt since 744 BC, however, were driven out of most of Egypt in 663 BC when the Assyrians sacked Thebes, called Amon in the Septuagint, and No Amon in the Masoretic Texts, ultimately derived from the Egyptian name Nủt-Ỉmn, meaning, City of Amun. According to multiple ancient sources, Thebes was plundered by the Assyrians and virtually abandoned for years until the new Libyan dynasty took control of the region in 656 BC and began rebuilding.

Nahum’s book is set during this era, after Thebes had been sacked, and presumably before rebuilding had begun. Some scholars debate this, suggesting that Nahum’s life was decades later, as the Assyrian Empire was collapsing around 612 BC. This is mainly due to his prophecy that Nineveh would be devastated like Thebes had been, which did happen in 612 BC, however, that does not mean the prediction was not made decades earlier. Nahum’s sentiment, that all empires eventually fall is a universal truth, and it is far more likely that he would have warned that Nineveh was going to end up like Thebes when that event was still fresh in everyone’s mind than decades later when there was more obvious evidence the Assyrian Empire was collapsing. As such, the scholarly consensus is that he wrote the Book of Nahum between 663 and 656 BC.