The New John Gill Exposition of the Entire Bible Nahum 1:9
What do ye imagine against the Lord? &c.] O ye Ninevites or
Assyrians; do you think you can frustrate the designs of the Lord,
resist his power, and hinder him from executing what he has threatened
and has determined to do? or what mischief is it you devise against his
people, which is the same as against himself? can you believe that you
shall prosper and succeed, and your schemes be carried into execution,
when he, the all wise and all powerful Being, opposes you?
he will make an utter end; of you, as before declared, and will save
his people; which may be depended on will certainly be the case:
affliction shall not rise up the second time; either this should be the
last effort the Assyrians would make upon the Jews, which they made
under Sennacherib, and this the last time they would afflict them; or
rather their own destruction should be so complete that there would be
no need to repeat the stroke, or give another blow; the business would
be done at once. This seems to contradict a notion of some historians
and chronologers, who suppose that Nineveh was destroyed at two
different times, and by different persons of the same nations; and so
the whole Assyrian empire was twice ruined, which is not likely in
itself, and seems contrary to this passage; for though some ascribe it
to Arbaces the Mede, and Belesis the Babylonian as Diodorus Siculus
{e}; and others to Cyaxares the Mede as Herodotus F6, and to
Nebuchadnezzar the first, or Nabopolassar the Babylonian in a later
period; so Tobit F7 says it was taken by Nebuchadnezzar and Ahasuerus,
the same with the Cyaxares of Herodotus; yet all seem to agree that it
was taken by the conjunct forces of the Medes and Babylonians; and
there are some things similar F8 in all these accounts, which show
that there was but one destruction of Nineveh, and of the Assyrian
empire.
FOOTNOTES:
F5 Bibliothec. l. 2. p. 110, 111.
F6 L. 1. sive Clio, c. 106.
F7 Tobit 14:15.
F8 See the Universal History, vol. 4. c. 8. sect. 5. & vol. 5. p. 22.
Margin, & Nicolai Abrami Pharus Vet. Test. l. 6. c. 19. p. 165.
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