_Draw thee water for siege, strengthen thy forts! Get thee down to the mud, and tramp in the clay! Grip fast the brick-mould! There fire consumes thee, the sword cuts thee off.[308] Make thyself many as a locust swarm, Many as grasshoppers, Multiply thy traders more than heaven’s stars, —The locusts break off[309] and fly away. Thy ...[310] are as locusts and thy ... as grasshoppers, That hive in the hedges in the cold of the day:[311] The sun is risen, they are fled, And one knows not the place where they be._
_Asleep are thy shepherds, O king of Assyria, Thy nobles do slumber;[312] Thy people are strewn on the mountains, Without any to gather. There is no healing of thy wreck, Fatal thy wound! All who hear the bruit of thee shall clap the hand at thee, For upon whom hath not thy cruelty passed without ceasing?_
[253] See above, pp. 22 ff.
[254] The authorities are very full. First there is M. Botta’s huge work _Monument de Ninive_, Paris, 5 vols., 1845. Then must be mentioned the work of which we availed ourselves in describing Babylon in _Isaiah xl.—lxvi._, Expositor’s Bible, pp. 52 ff.: “Memoirs by Commander James Felix Jones, I.N.,” in _Selections from the Records of the Bombay Government_, No. XLIII., New Series, 1857. It is good to find that the careful and able observations of Commander Jones, too much neglected in his own country, have had justice done them by the German Colonel Billerbeck in the work about to be cited. Then there is the invaluable _Niniveh and its Remains_, by Layard. There are also the works of Rawlinson and George Smith. And recently Colonel Billerbeck, founding on these and other works, has published an admirable monograph (lavishly illustrated by maps and pictures), not only upon the military state of Assyria proper and of Niniveh at this period, but upon the whole subject of Assyrian fortification and art of besieging, as well as upon the course of the Median invasions. It forms the larger part of an article to which Dr. Alfred Jeremias contributes an introduction, and reconstruction with notes of chaps. ii. and iii. of the Book of Nahum: “Der Untergang Niniveh’s und die Weissagungschrift des Nahum von Elḳosh,” in Vol. III. of _Beiträge zur Assyriologie und Semitischen Sprachwissenschaft_, edited by Friedrich Delitzsch and Paul Haupt, with the support of Johns Hopkins University at Baltimore, U.S.A.: Leipzig, 1895.
[255] Pages 20 f.
[256] Colonel Billerbeck (p. 115) thinks that the south-east frontier at this time lay more to the north, near the Greater Zab.
[257] First excavated by M. Botta, 1842-1845. See also George Smith, _Assyr. Disc._, pp. 98 f.
[258] iii. 12.
[259] iii. 14.
[260] See Jones and Billerbeck.
[261] Delitzsch places the עיר רחבות of Gen. x. 11, the “ribit Nina” of the inscriptions, on the north-east of Niniveh.
[262] ii. 4 Eng., 5 Heb.
[263] ii. 3 Eng., 4 Heb.
[264] _Ibid._ LXX.
[265] iii. 2.
[266] iii. 3.
[267] It is the waters of the Tigris that the tradition avers to have broken the wall; but the Tigris itself runs in a bed too low for this: it can only have been the Choser. See both Jones and Billerbeck.
[268] ii. 6.
[269] If the above conception of chaps. ii. and iii. be correct, then there is no need for such a re-arrangement of these verses as has been proposed by Jeremias and Billerbeck. In order to produce a continuous narrative of the progress of the siege, they bring forward iii. 12-15 (describing the fall of the fortresses and gates of the land and the call to the defence of the city), and place it immediately after ii. 2, 4 (the description of the invader) and ii. 5-11 (the appearance of chariots in the suburbs of the city, the opening of the floodgates, the flight and the spoiling of the city). But if they believe that the original gave an orderly account of the progress of the siege, why do they not bring forward also iii. 2 f., which describe the arrival of the foe under the city walls? The truth appears to be as stated above. We have really two poems against Niniveh, chap. ii. and chap. iii. They do not give an orderly description of the siege, but exult over Niniveh’s imminent downfall, with gleams scattered here and there of how this is to happen. Of these “impressions” of the coming siege there are three, and in the order in which we now have them they occur very naturally: ii. 5 ff., iii. 2 f., and iii. 12 ff.