Albert Barnes Commentary Nahum 1:10

"For entangled like thorns, and drunken as with their drink, they are consumed utterly as dry stubble." — Nahum 1:10 (ASV)

For while they lie entangled like thorns – that is, as confused, intertwined, sharp, piercing, hard to touch, rending and tearing whoever would interfere with its tangled ways, and seemingly compact together and strong;

and while they are drunken as their drink (not “drinkers” only but literally, “drunken,” swallowed up, as it were, by their drink which they had swallowed, mastered, overcome, powerless), they shall be derogated as stubble fully dry, rapidly, in an instant, with an empty crackling sound, unresisting, as having nothing in them that can resist.

Historically, the great defeat of the Assyrians, before the capture of Nineveh, took place while its king, flushed with success, was giving himself to listlessness. Having distributed to his soldiers victims, an abundance of wine, and other necessities for banqueting, the whole army was negligent and drunken.

In the same way, Babylon was taken amid the feasting of Belshazzar (Daniel 5:1–30); Benhadad was smitten while drinking himself drunk in the pavilions, he and the kings, the thirty-two kings that helped him (1 Kings 20:16). And so it may well be meant here too, that Sennacherib’s army, secure of their prey, were sunk in revelry, already swallowed up by wine, before they were swallowed up by the pestilence, on the night when the Angel of the Lord went out to smite them. From the sleep of revelry, they slept the sleep from which they will not awake until the Judgment Day.

God chooses the last moment of the triumph of the wicked, when he is flushed by his success, and the last moment of the helplessness of the righteous, when his hope can be in the Lord alone, to exchange their lots. The righteous is delivered out of trouble, and the wicked comes in his stead (Proverbs 11:8).

Spiritually, "the false fullness of the rich of this world is real leanness; the greenness of such grass (for all flesh is grass) is real dryness." Marvelous words, fully dry. "For what is dryness but emptiness?"

They are perfected, but in dryness, and so perfectly prepared to be burned up. "The thorns had, as far as they could, choked the good seed, and hated the Seed-corn, and now are found, like stubble, void of all seed, fitted only to be burned with fire."

For those who feast themselves, without fear is reserved the blackness of darkness forever (Jude 1:12–13).