Albert Barnes Commentary Zephaniah 2:13

"And he will stretch out his hand against the north, and destroy Assyria, and will make Nineveh a desolation, and dry like the wilderness." — Zephaniah 2:13 (ASV)

Zephaniah began by singling out Judah amid the general destruction, I will also stretch out My hand upon Judah (Zephaniah 1:4); he sums up the judgment of the world in the same way: He will stretch out, or, Stretch He forth, His hand against the north and destroy Asshur, and make Nineveh a desolation. Judah had, in Zephaniah’s time, nothing to fear from Assyria. Isaiah (Isaiah 39:6) and Micah (Micah 4:10) had already foretold that the captivity would be to Babylon. Yet of Assyria alone the prophet, in his own person, expresses his own conformity with the mind of God.

Of others he had said, The word of the Lord is against you, O Canaan, and I will destroy thee; As I live, saith the Lord, Moab shall be as Sodom. Ye also, O Ethiopians, the slain of My sword are they. Of Assyria alone, by a slight inflection of the word, he expresses that he goes along with this, which he announces.

He does not say as an imprecation, “May He stretch forth His hand;” but gently, as continuing his prophecies, and, joining Asshur with the rest. Only instead of saying, “He will stretch forth,” by a form almost isolated in Hebrew, he says, And stretch He forth His hand. In a similar way, David, having declared God’s judgments, The Lord trieth the righteous; and the wicked and the lover of violence His soul doth abhor, adds, On the wicked rain He snares, signifying that he (as all must be in the Day of Judgment) is at one with the judgment of God.

This is the last judgment upon Nineveh, enforcing that of Jonah and Nahum, yet without a place of repentance now. He accumulates words expressive of desolateness. It should not only be a desolation (Zephaniah 2:4, Zephaniah 2:9), as he had said of Ashkelon, Moab, and Ammon, but a dry, parched, unfruitful land (Isaiah 53:2).

As Isaiah, using the same words, prophesies that the dry and desolate land should, by the Gospel, be glad, so the gladness of the world should become dryness and desolation.

Asshur is named as if one individual, implying the entirety of the destruction; all shall perish as one man, or as gathered into one and dependent on one person, its evil king.

The north is not only Assyria, in that its armies came upon Judah from the north, but it stands for the whole power of evil , as Nineveh stands for the whole beautiful, evil world. The world with the princes of this world shall perish together.