Albert Barnes Commentary Nahum 3:4

"because of the multitude of the whoredoms of the well-favored harlot, the mistress of witchcrafts, that selleth nations through her whoredoms, and families through her witchcrafts." — Nahum 3:4 (ASV)

Because of the multitude of the whoredoms of the well-favored harlot - There are “multitudes of slain” because of the “multitude of whoredoms” and love of the creature instead of the Creator. So to Babylon Isaiah says, “they (loss of children and widowhood) shall come upon you in their perfection for the multitude of your sorceries, for the great abundance of your enchantments” (Isaiah 47:9). The actual use of “enchantments,” for which Babylon was so infamous, is not elsewhere attributed to the Assyrians. But neither is the word elsewhere used figuratively; nor is Assyria, in its intimate relation to Babylon, likely to have been free from the longing, universal in paganism, to obtain knowledge about the outcome of events that would affect her.

She is, by a rare idiom, entitled “mistress of enchantments,” having them at her command as instruments of power. Mostly, idolatries and estrangement from God are spoken of as “whoredoms,” only in respect of those who, having been taken by God as His own, forsook Him for false gods.

But Jezebel too, of whose offenses Jehu speaks under the same two titles (2 Kings 9:22), was a pagan. And such sins were only part of that larger, all-comprehending sin: that man, being made by God for Himself, when he loves the creature instead of the Creator, divorces himself from God. Of this sin, world empires such as Nineveh were the concentration.

Their existence was one vast idolatry of self and of “the god of this world.” All means—art, fraud, deceit, protection of the weak against the strong (2 Kings 16:7–9; 2 Chronicles 28:20–21), promises of good (Isaiah 36:16–17)—were employed, together with open violence, to absorb all nations into it.

The sole end of all this was to form one great idol-temple, of which the center and end was man—a rival worship to God, that would enslave all to itself and the things of this world. Nineveh and all conquering nations used fraud as well as force, enticed and entangled others, and so sold and deprived them of freedom .

Nor are people less sold and enslaved because they have no visible master. False freedom is the deepest and most abject slavery. All sinful nations or persons extend to others the infection of their own sins.

But, chiefly, the “wicked world,” arrayed in manifold ways with fair forms and “beautiful in the eyes of those who will not think or weigh how much more beautiful the Lord and Creator of all,” spreads her enticements on all sides: “the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eye, and the pride of life,” “her pomps and vanities,” worldly happiness and glory and majesty, and ease and abundance. In this way, she deceives and sells mankind into the power of Satan.

It is called “well-favored” (literally, good of grace) because the world possesses a real beauty; indeed, “unless there were a grace and beauty in the things we love, they could not draw us to them.” They have their beauty because they are from God; they become deformed, then, when “things hold us back from God, which, unless they were in God, would not exist at all.”

We deform them if we love them for our own sakes, not in Him, or for the intimations they give of Him:

“Praise given to foul things has an intensity of blame. It is as if one were to speak of a skilled thief, or a courageous robber, or a clever cheat. So although he calls Nineveh a well-favored harlot, this will not be for her praise (far from it!), but conveys the heavier condemnation. Just as such people, when they wish to attract, use flattering words, so Nineveh was a skilled craftsman of evil deeds, well equipped with means to capture cities and lands and to persuade them to do what pleased her.”

She sells not only nations but families, drawing mankind after her, both as a mass and one by one, so that scarcely any escape.

The adultery of the soul from God is the more grievous, the nearer God has brought anyone to Himself; it is worse in priests than in the people, in Christians than in Jews, in Jews than in pagans. Yet God espoused mankind to Himself when He made them. His dowry was the gifts of nature. If this is adultery, how much more grievous it is when one is betrothed by the Blood of Christ and endowed with the gift of the Spirit!