The daily devotions for Reps and Sets take the reader through each book of the Bible each year. There are a proportional number of days allotted for each book roughly equivalent to the number of chapters in each book. Today’s devotion comes again from the book of Nahum and the text verse has been chosen simply because it is generally obscure to most readers, but it is an interesting verse to discover. The emotions these verses from Nahum create the first time the text is understood are a combination of shock and unbelief followed by a desire to understand why there is a need for the vulgarity of the message.

The verses leading up to God's condemnation of Nineveh in chapter 3 verses 1-4 accuse Nineveh as being:

• A city of blood
• Full of lies
• Full of plunder
• Never without victims
• Full of chariots and cavalry with swords and spears
• A place of casualties, piles of dead, innumerable bodies, stumbling over corpses

The reason for the violent behaior identified above is the “lust of the harlot (3:4) “who enslaved nations by her prostitution.” Nineveh of 660 BC is the harlot who has caused such social injustice and violence.

Nineveh will receive the punishment of a harlot described in Nahum 3:5-7. The Lord is going to do the following to punish Nineveh and publicly humiliate the city that produced violence and oppression in her society and in other nations.

• Lift your skirt over your face – which is to say remove her skirts to leave her naked.
• Expose your nakedness to the nations – public nakedness was the punishment assigned for an unfaithful wife in Babylonian records and prostitutes were stripped naked
• Show your shame to the kingdoms -  to be publicly naked was a shame
• Pelt you with filth – “filth” refers to human excrement often found in the streets and gutters in ancient cites which did not have the sanitation systems of the modern western world. Their sewer was not always separate from the rain runoff or the water system. The beauty of the harlot Nineveh would be covered with filth hurled at her from those who saw her publicly stripped naked and walking down the street
• Treat you with contempt – public humiliation and social rejection
• Make you a spectacle – all this would be done as the world watched the Babylonians smash Nineveh and crush her glory

The decline of Assyria and its capital, Nineveh, happened between the invincible days of Sennacherib in 702 BC and 612 BC (a mere 90 years) when Nebuchadnezzar and his Babylonian forces left Nineveh a ruined pile of debris (and the Babylonian records of the event describe the remains as “a heap of rubble.”) Nineveh was so totally ruined that within 200 years historians had virtually forgotten about Nineveh and until archaeology uncovered the palaces, libraries and temples some even doubted Nineveh and Assyria existed in such a powerful state as described in Scripture. This total destruction is summed up in Nahum’s words in 3:7, “Nineveh is in ruins who will mourn for her.” Indeed, history quickly forgot about Nineveh and how Assyria had shaken the earth.

"The devil is a better theologian than any of us
and is a devil still."
– A.W. Tozer