[246] Usually taken as Sennacherib.
[247] The Hebrew is given by the R.V. though they be in full strength and likewise many. LXX. Thus saith Jehovah ruling over many waters, reading משל מים רבים and omitting the first וכן. Similarly Syr. Thus saith Jehovah of the heads of many waters, על משלי מים רבים. Wellhausen, substituting מים for the first וכן, translates, Let the great waters be ever so full, they will yet all ...? (misprint here) and vanish. For עבר read עברו with LXX., borrowing ו from next word.
[248] Lit. and I will afflict thee, I will not afflict thee again. This rendering implies that Niniveh is the object. The A.V., though I have afflicted thee I will afflict thee no more, refers to Israel.
[249] Omit ver. 13 and run 14 on to 12. For the curious alternation now occurs: Assyria in one verse, Judah in the other. Assyria: i. 12, 14, ii. 2 (Heb.; Eng. ii. 1), 4 ff. Judah: i. 13, ii. 1 (Heb.; Eng. i. 15), 3 (Heb.; Eng. 2). Remove these latter, as Wellhausen does, and the verses on Assyria remain a connected and orderly whole. So in the text above.
[250] Syr. make it thy sepulchre. The Hebrew left untranslated above might be rendered for thou art vile. Bickell amends into dunghills. Lightfoot, Chron. Temp. et Ord. Text V.T. in Collected Works, I. 109, takes this as a prediction of Sennacherib’s murder in the temple, an interpretation which demands a date for Nahum under either Hezekiah or Manasseh. So Pusey also, p. 357.
[251] LXX. destruction כָּלָה, for כֻּלה.
[252] Davidson: restoreth the excellency of Jacob, as the excellency of Israel, but when was the latter restored?
[254] The authorities are very full. First there is M. Botta’s huge work Monument de Ninive, Paris, 5 vols., 1845. Then must be mentioned the work of which we availed ourselves in describing Babylon in Isaiah xl.—lxvi., Expositor’s Bible, pp. [52] ff.: “Memoirs by Commander James Felix Jones, I.N.,” in Selections from the Records of the Bombay Government, No. XLIII., New Series, 1857. It is good to find that the careful and able observations of Commander Jones, too much neglected in his own country, have had justice done them by the German Colonel Billerbeck in the work about to be cited. Then there is the invaluable Niniveh and its Remains, by Layard. There are also the works of Rawlinson and George Smith. And recently Colonel Billerbeck, founding on these and other works, has published an admirable monograph (lavishly illustrated by maps and pictures), not only upon the military state of Assyria proper and of Niniveh at this period, but upon the whole subject of Assyrian fortification and art of besieging, as well as upon the course of the Median invasions. It forms the larger part of an article to which Dr. Alfred Jeremias contributes an introduction, and reconstruction with notes of chaps. ii. and iii. of the Book of Nahum: “Der Untergang Niniveh’s und die Weissagungschrift des Nahum von Elḳosh,” in Vol. III. of Beiträge zur Assyriologie und Semitischen Sprachwissenschaft, edited by Friedrich Delitzsch and Paul Haupt, with the support of Johns Hopkins University at Baltimore, U.S.A.: Leipzig, 1895.