Your princes are like grasshoppers, your scribes like clouds of locusts settling on the fences in a day of cold — when the sun rises, they fly away; no one knows where they are.
Nahum's last chapter piles up pictures of Nineveh's collapse. Here the prophet turns to the men at the top: the princes and officials who held the empire together. He compares them to insects that shelter on a wall in the cold and vanish the moment the sun warms them. Can rank and sheer numbers hold out against a sentence from God?
Who the Princes and Officials Are
The verse describes a government, not insects. Where the ESV says "princes" and "scribes," older translations read "crowned ones" and "captains." One writer names each group and traces where each one ends up:
Arno Clemens GaebeleinTheir crowned ones, the chiefs in authority, would all be scattered, just as sunrise scatters locusts and swarms of grasshoppers to a place no one knows. Their shepherds, the leaders and rulers under the King of Assyria, would sleep in death. Meanwhile the people wandered homeless over the mountains, with no one to gather them.
Why Locusts
The picture fits. Locusts are known for two things at once: vast numbers, and total disappearance:
Morrish Bible DictionaryThe wind brings the locusts in, and the same wind carries them away… They stand out for the huge numbers that swarm over a district all at once, and for the vast damage they do to plant life in a very short time.
Assyria fits that picture: vast numbers one day, and gone the next.
Numbers Are No Defence
Just before this, Nahum told Nineveh to draw water for the siege, strengthen her walls and multiply herself like locusts. None of it helped:
William KellyNo care would help… For a city of such grandeur, the ruin is so complete that history has no other example of it.
The Reason Behind the Sentence
God used Assyria to discipline Israel. But Assyria carried out that work in a way that insulted God Himself:
William KellySo we see the side subject here: the judgment of Israel by their enemies. But the Assyrians carried out that judgment in a way that insulted God Himself, and did not only discipline His guilty people. So they must get ready for their own doom.
Bigger Than One City
One writer reads the Assyrian as more than a single ruler. He stands for something that outlives him:
J. G. BellettThe Assyrian is surely a symbolic or representative figure, as well as a real man… for the Assyrian began the captivities of God's people. In his day he stood for the hostility of the earth, the hostility of the Gentile world, to God and His people. So the Spirit, in the prophets, sees the Gentile in him. He looks along the view that then opened, right to the very end of the earth's history under the Gentile — the man of the world — when the full and ripened wickedness of man will call out the closing, clearing judgments of God.
Read that way, the officials settling on the fences are a sample of every human government that looks permanent.
Judgment Is Not the Last Word
Judgment is not the whole story for Assyria. One writer looks past it, to the millennium — the coming age of God's kingdom on earth:
William KellyStill, there is this difference to see: Assyria will have a place in the millennium, and an honoured place — not Nineveh, but Assyria… In the middle of His judgment, Jehovah will remember mercy.
Nineveh's own history shows the same pattern. God had once sent the prophet Jonah to warn this city, and it turned:
J. G. BellettGod's earlier dealing with Nineveh through Jonah can show us, in this day of judgment that Nahum announces, that He is "slow to anger." He sent a preacher then to warn them and turn them to repentance, and that repentance He accepted, and He spared them. But the One who is slow to anger does not "acquit the wicked."
Summary
- Crime. God used Assyria to discipline Israel. But she struck in a way that insulted God Himself, so she had to face her own doom.
- Sentence. No preparation could hold it off. For a city of such grandeur, the ruin was complete, with no match in history.
- Picture. Locusts arrive on the wind in huge numbers, and the same wind carries them away. So with Nineveh's princes and officials.
- Reach. The Assyrian stands for the whole Gentile world's hostility to God — right down to the closing judgments at the end of earth's history.
- Hope. God is slow to anger. He once sent Jonah to warn this very city. Even in judgment He remembers mercy, and Assyria will have a place in the coming kingdom.