saint
Prophet Nahum the Prophet
Prophet of Elkosh whose three oracular chapters announce the fall of Nineveh and proclaim that the Lord, though slow to anger, will by no means clear the guilty; his prophecy was fulfilled within a generation.
Prophet Nahum — Public domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Life
Nahum was a prophet of Judah in the late seventh century before Christ, a native of Elkosh (the location of which has been variously identified in Galilee, Assyria, and southern Judah), whose three short chapters announce the imminent fall of Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire. The Assyrians, who had taken the Northern Kingdom of Israel into captivity in 722 and had so nearly taken Jerusalem itself in the reign of Hezekiah, were the great oppressor of the prophet's age — and Nahum's prophecy is the divine answer to the cries of every nation Assyria had ground beneath its chariots.
Nineveh fell to the combined forces of the Medes and the Babylonians in 612, exactly as Nahum had foretold; the destruction was so complete that the city was forgotten under the sand for two and a half millennia, only rediscovered by nineteenth-century archaeology. The prophecy of Nahum stands beside that of Jonah, with which it forms a diptych — Jonah preached repentance to Nineveh; Nahum preached the consequence of that repentance abandoned.
His tomb is venerated at Elkosh in Galilee. His feast falls on December 1.
Traditions
Feast day
December 1
Topics
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