Nahum 3:14 Commentary and Bible Study

These words are spoken in irony. ‘Go and take all these measures to protect yourself,’ Nahum says, ‘but all your efforts will be in vain, because the Lord has decreed what will happen to you, and you cannot alter it.’ ‘Draw thee waters for the siege’ – prepare as much as you like, but the reality is that you cannot prepare for what God is sending against you. If he determines your judgment and your downfall, then he who knows all that you will do can easily find ways to thwart your defences. The whole exercise is futile.Identify your weak spots and try to repair them, but you will not succeed. ‘Go into clay, and tread the morter, make strong the brickkiln.’ This too is about preparing defences to face the enemy. Get busy making bricks with which to heighten and strengthen your defensive walls, but it will do you no good. Something is coming against you which you have not bargained for, which you can never anticipate. There will be fire, and there will be the sword of the enemy, wielded without mercy. The sword will devour Nineveh like the cankerworm, which probably refers to the larval stage of the locust with it insatiable appetite, capable of devouring large swathes of edible crops.Another feature of the cankerworm then provides a further illustration. After it emerges into a flying locust, it flies away and can no longer be found. So too the merchants which enriched Nineveh, and its crowned nobles, and its captains will disappear when the invaders come. ‘You, Nineveh, have expanded your trade routes, and multiplied your merchants in your efforts to enrich yourselves, and you have given no time to the consideration of your Creator, and of the God that many of your fathers turned to just a few generations ago.’ They will be like locusts sheltering in a hedge during a cold night, which when the sun comes up and the temperature rises are soon gone, and no trace of them remains. So will her great ones flee away which defeat starts them in the face.