Nahum 1:10 Commentary and Bible Study

‘For while they be folden together as thorns,’ – this is the people of Nineveh, the Assyrians – ‘and while they are drunken as drunkards, they shall be devoured as stubble fully dry.’ The thorns stand for an impenetrable hedge. That's what is being described. Though they feel secure, as though they have got a solid wall around them, or an impenetrable thicket, it doesn't make any difference; they won't be secure. The godless are always insecure. The godless always face the terrors of death at the end of life, and the ultimate judgment. Again, the second figure here is that they are drunk. They are drunk on pride and luxury and power, but they are so insecure. It is a metaphor. They are in a kind of stubborn stupor, not thinking they can ever be brought down. In their drunken state they imagine all sorts of things they can do to protect themselves against the Lord. Every one of them is a miscalculation. It has left out something vital which makes all the difference, or it has overestimated their resourcefulness, or their resilience, or their dependence on God for the very things they try to fight against him with. They may be so drunk on those things, that they are no longer sensitive to anything else, dangers around them, but they will fall like stubble. In other words, they are of such small value to God, they are just like the stubble of the field and they are as easy as that to destroy and to burn up.