ebrew numeration, see footnote above). Bickell has since issued a much improved edition of his restoration (Beitrage zur Semit. Metril, 1894, being an off-print from the Sitzungsberichte of the Vienna Academy of Sciences), which in its turn has sug-
ested to Gunkel a few emendations, incorporated in a note to his Schépfung u. Chaos (p. 120f.).* Finally, Nowack in his commentary (see the Litera- ture at end of article) has adopted, and in some points has still further improved upon, the results of his predecessors. As regards the opening verses at least (vv.?*), the changes which the acrostic scheme demands are not more numerous or more radical than those required in several of the other alphabetic poems of the OT, as we propose to show (see small type below). An alphabetic psalm, however, must by its very nature be complete; hence we do not hesitate to affirm that in Nah 1*-23 we have the remains of an acrostic psalm, of which the first nine verses (® to 8) have suffered little, the next four or five (" to 3) considerably more, and the rest (Ὁ to n) so much that their restoration ‘can never be more than an academic exercise,’ —words which A. B. Davidson has applied rashly, as we think, to the whole of ch. 1. Each of the twenty-two verses consisted originally of two lines each, each line containing, as a rule, three or four accented words.
The following brief note will sufficiently indicate the plan of the psalm: the &-verse consists of v.2 of the MT, i.e. of two lines of four words each, vy. 30. 38 (ΠῚ being probably part of the Ὁ and 3 verses introduced here by an editor to qualify the general statement in v.2» (Nowack). The 3-verse, two lines of three words each, extends from 75)D2 to end of v.8; the 3-verse =v.48 also of six accented words. At y.4>a 7 is needed, and here the VSS certainly had two different verbs, which renders the first $sox suspicious; read perhaps bb5 (Gray, Cheyne) or 3n7 (Now.). The 1- verse τὸ ν ὅδ, }=v.5>; for 1 it is only necessary to transpose Dy? to the head of 65 and read 1255 ; n=6>,»=7". For * we would propose to read $1" (cf. Ps 1388), or, as hitherto proposed, delete ) of 7" in v.7>, Now in all these ten verses, involving only one serious interference with MT, we have surely prea tar than chance coincidences, namely, a conscious design which cannot be explained by the ‘fact that the author allowed himself here and there and per-
haps half accidentally to follow the alphabetic order’ (Driver, Expos. Times, ix. (1897), p. 119—review of Nowack's Kleine
Propheten).
Regarding the author of this lara we can only say that he lived at some period of the post-exilic history,t when the yoke of the heathen pressed heavily on the people of God, whose coming to judge the oppressor and vindicate His own could not be long delayed. The poem, it was felt at a later eriod, fitly expressed the general principle of God’s avenging justice, of which the destruction of Nineveh was the most striking concrete illustra- tion. cpriteern ΥΣ it was prefixed as an appropriate introduction to the genuine ‘vision of Nahum the Elkoshite.’
v. OCCASION AND DATE OF Cus. 2 AND 3.—The
rophecy itself provides us with two fixed points batweet which its date must fall. These are the
* The English-speaking student will find a very lucid account of the proposals of these scholars, with some original sugges- tions, in G. Buchanan Gray's article, ‘The Alphabetical Poem in Nahum,’ Expositor, Sept. 1898.
+ The artificiality of the acrostic form is generally supposed to point to a late rather than an early date for the poems which show this construction, If our psalm is really post-exilic, then 115s (Heb. 218) is taken from Is 527. Other parallels, such as 17 (restored text)=La 835 115> (37) Oe’) = Ps 615, partake too much of the nature of theological commonplaces to permit of an assertion of borrowing on the one side or the other, while almost all the points of contact adduced by older commentators (see esp. Strauss, Nahumi Vaticin., Prolegom. xv f.) are quite illusory.
470 NAHUM
NAHUM
capture of No-amon (Thebes, 385.) and the down- fall of Nineveh itself. Regarding the former event, our terminus a quo, there need be no hesitation in identifying it with the capture and destruction of the capital of Upper Egypt by Assurbanipal in B.C. 664-663 (see Schrader, COT ii. 1491. ; Tiele, Bab.-Assyr. Geschichte, ii. 149 ff.). An event of such far-reaching consequences for the Western world would long remain fresh in the minds of men, so that it is quite unnecessary, because of its mention by Nahum, either to assign the Broncos to a date B.C. 660 (so Schrader, doc. cit., and Orelli), or with Wellhausen (Skizzen, etc. v. 160) to suggest whether the prophet may not refer to some later capture, regarding which history and tradition are alike silent.
With regard, in the next place, to the terminus ad quem, we are now in possession, since 1895, of native cuneiform testimony to the manner and date of the final overthrow of Nineveh. In the course of his excavations in a mound near Hillah (Babylon), Father Scheil came upon a semicircular stele of Nabonidus (B.C. 555-538), now in the Imperial Museum at Constantinople (publ. by V. Scheil in Maspero’s Recueil de Travauzx, ete., 1896, livr. 1, 2; L. Messerschmidt, Die Inschrift der Stele Nabonwids, 1896 ; summary by Johns in Expos. Times, vii. ue 360f.; also, with illustra- tions, by C. J. Ball in Light from the East, 1899, ᾿ 219 ff. ; οἵ. A. B. Davidson, Nahwm, ete. 137f.).