Albert Barnes Commentary Nahum 1:14

"And Jehovah hath given commandment concerning thee, that no more of thy name be sown: out of the house of thy gods will I cut off the graven image and the molten image; I will make thy grave; for thou art vile." — Nahum 1:14 (ASV)

And the Lord has given a commandment concerning you, O Assyrian. In the words “I have afflicted thee,” the land of Israel is addressed, as usual in Hebrew, in the feminine.

Here, a change of gender in Hebrew shows the person addressed to be different: “By His command alone, and the word of His power, He cut off the race of the Assyrian, as he says in Wisdom, of Egypt, ‘Thine Almighty word leaped down from heaven, out of Thy royal throne; as a fierce man of war into the midst of a land of destruction, and brought Thine unfeigned commandment as a sharp sword, and standing up filled all things with death,’ or else it may be, He gave command to the Angels His Ministers.”

God commands beforehand so that, when it comes to pass, it may be known “that not by chance,” nor by the will of man, “nor without His judgment but by the sentence of God” the blow came.

No more of your name be sown. As Isaiah says, “the seed of evildoers shall never be renowned” (Isaiah 14:20). He prophesies not the immediate but the absolute cessation of the Assyrian line.

If the prophecy was uttered at the time of Sennacherib’s invasion, seventeen years before his death, then not only Esarhaddon but also his son Asshurbanipal was probably already born. Asshurbanipal’s career of personal conquest—the last glory of the Sargonide house and of the empire—began immediately after his father’s thirteen-year reign. In this case, Asshurbanipal would have been only thirty-one at the beginning of his energetic reign and would have died in his fifty-second year. After him, only an inglorious twenty-two years followed for the empire.

The prophet says, “the Lord has commanded.” The decree concerning Ahab’s house was fulfilled in the person of his second son, and the decrees concerning Jeroboam and Baasha were fulfilled in their sons. It waited for its appointed time but was ultimately fulfilled in the complete excision of the doomed race.

Out of the house of your gods I will cut off graven image and molten image. As you have done to others (Isaiah 37:19), so it shall be done to you:

“And when even the common objects of worship of the Assyrian and Chaldean were not spared, what would be the ruin of the whole city!” So little shall your gods help you, that “there you shall be punished, where you hope for aid. ‘Graven and molten image’ shall be your grave; amid altar and oblations, as you worship idols,” thanking them for your deliverance, “your unholy blood shall be shed,” as it was by his sons Adrammelech and Sharezer (Isaiah 37:38).

“I will make it thy grave.” What God makes remains immovable and cannot be changed. But He “makes your grave” in hell, where not only that rich man in the Gospel has his grave, but all who are or have been like him, and especially you, O Asshur, of whom it is written: “Asshur is there and all her company; his graves are about him: all of them slain, fallen by the sword. Whose graves are set in the sides of the pit and her company is round about her grave: all of them slain, fallen by the sword, which caused terror in the land of the living” (Ezekiel 32:22–23).

“Graven and molten image”—the idols which people adore, the images of their vanity, the created things which they worship instead of the true God (like those whose god is their belly)—in which they busy themselves in this life, shall be their destruction in the Day of Judgment.

For you are vile. You honored yourself and dishonored God, so you shall be dishonored, as He says, “Them that honor Me I will honor, and they that despise Me shall be lightly esteemed” (1 Samuel 2:30).

So when he had said to Edom, “thou art greatly despised” (Obadiah 1:2), he adds the ground of it: “The pride of thine heart hath deceived thee. For thou art vile” (Obadiah 1:3).

Great, honored, and glorious as Assyria or its ruler were in the eyes of men, the prophet tells him what he was in himself, being such in the eyes of God: light, empty (as Daniel said to Belshazzar, “Thou art weighed in the balances, and found wanting” (Daniel 5:27)), of no account, vile.