Albert Barnes Commentary Nahum 2:6

"The gates of the rivers are opened, and the palace is dissolved." — Nahum 2:6 (ASV)

The gates of the rivers shall be opened, and the palace shall be dissolved. All gives way in an instant at the will of God. The strife is hushed; no more is said of war and death. There is no more resistance or bloodshed, no sound except the wailing of the captives and the flight of those who can escape, while the conquerors empty it of the spoil, and then she is left a waste.

The swelling of the river and the opening it made may have given rise to the traditional account of Ctesias, although it was obviously exaggerated regarding the destruction of the wall. The exaggerated character of that tradition is not inconsistent with a basis of truth; rather, it implies one. It is inconceivable that walls of the thickness Ctesias described would have been thought to be overthrown by the swelling of any river, unless an event like the one Ctesias relates—where the siege ended because the river burst in and provided an entrance for the enemy—had actually occurred.

Nahum speaks nothing of the wall, but simply of the opening of the gates of the river—obviously the gates by which the inhabitants could access the rivers, which otherwise would be useless to them except as a wall. These rivers correspond to the artificial divisions of the Nile by which No or Thebes was defended, or to the rivers of Babylon (Psalms 137:1), which yet was washed by the one stream, the Euphrates.

But Nineveh was surrounded and guarded by actual rivers: the Tigris and the Khausser, and (assuming those larger dimensions of Nineveh, which are supported by such varied evidence) the greater Zab, which was called “the frantic Zab” on account of the violence of its current. “The Zab contained,” says Ainsworth, “when we saw it, a larger body of water than the Tigris, whose tributaries are not supplied by so many snow-mountains as those of the Zab.” Of these rivers, if the Tigris is now on a level lower than the ruins of Nineveh, it may not have been so formerly.

The Khausser, in its natural direction, ran through Nineveh where, now as of old, it turns a mill, and must necessarily have been fenced by gates; otherwise, any invader might enter at will, just as in modern times, Mosul has its “gate of the bridge.” A break in these gates would obviously let in an enemy and might all the more paralyze the inhabitants if they had any tradition that the river alone could or would be their enemy, as Nahum himself prophesied. Subsequently, inaccuracy or exaggeration might easily represent this as an overthrow of the walls themselves. It made no difference how the breach was made.

The palace shall be dissolved. The prophet unites the beginning and the end. The river-gates were opened; what had been the fence against the enemy became an entrance for them. With the river, the tide of the enemy’s people also poured in.

The palace, then—the imperial abode, the center of the empire, embellished with the history of its triumphs—sank, was dissolved, and ceased to be. This is not a physical loosening of the sun-dried bricks by the stream, which would usually flow harmlessly by, but the dissolution of the empire itself: “The temple, that is, his kingdom was destroyed.” The palaces of both Khorsabad and Kouyunjik lay near the Khausser, and both bear the marks of fire.