God’s Word for You

Nahum 3:14-17 The stars of the sky

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Sunday, May 24, 2026

14 Draw water for the siege, strengthen your defenses!
Work the clay, tread the mortar, use the brick mold!

One ancient king of Assyria, Sennacherib (704-681) dug an impressive number of canals, eighteen in all, to bring water to the city in case of a siege (the Tigris is notorious for being undrinkable). He brought much of this water down from the north, from Mount Tas in Urartu (present-day Armenia). Attackers, however, learned to use this water against the city, as we have already seen.

The extra bricks were to fortify and strengthen the walls. The brick mold is one of the most ancient and useful tools known to man. Still useful today, it supplied the regular, standard-sized bricks that made quick and sturdy building possible in antiquity, even to the walls of many of our present-day churches.

15 There the fire will devour you;
the sword will cut you down and consume you
like a swarm of grasshoppers
even if you multiply like grasshoppers and like locusts!
16 You have increased the number of your merchants
till they are more than the stars of the sky.
But like locusts they strip the land and then fly away.
17 Your guards are like locusts,
your officials like swarms of locusts.
On a cold day they settle in the walls,
but when the sun appears they are chased away,
and no one knows to where.

The coming assault is described as being like a swarm of grasshoppers or locusts. Locusts are actually just a seasonal variation of grasshoppers that become more social (leading to swarms) on account of certain weather conditions when they are young. Nahum embraces the imagery, noting that even if the people inside Nineveh could suddenly multiply themselves like locusts, it would be too late.

Yet, the prophet says, they are like locusts or grasshoppers in another way. They have been acting like predators against their own people. Assyrian merchants strip the land just like the marauding insects. But when they strip everything of value from their own countrymen, they just move on to the next city, and the next, and the next one after that, just like greedy grasshoppers.

But there is more. Another quality of these insects comes to the prophet’s poetic mind. The Assyrian soldiers are like locusts, too. How can this be? Like the insects, they settle “in the walls” on a cold day. Now, insects will actually burrow or find their way into the relative warmth or safety of an actual wall, whether timber, brick, or stone. But the guards and their captains? They settle “in the walls,” meaning that they take refuge behind the city walls where they can bivouac with fires and extra blankets, leaving the guarding duties to the posted watchmen on the walls.

But what does the prophet mean by comparing them with insects when the sun comes out? The verb is actually passive, so that we should understand that these locusts are “chased away” by the coming of the sun. The insects get chased away, “who knows where,” but how can this be a prophecy about the Assyrians? Here, the Assyrian records themselves help us to understand just how literal and factual was Nahum’s foresight. The King sent his family (sons and daughters) away to Paphlagonia on the shores of the Black Sea between Pontus and Bithynia (compare Peter’s greeting to the people of this region, 1 Peter 1:1). When the king (Sin-šar-iškun) was killed in the fighting, his brother Ashshur-Uballit II became king, and he escaped westward, ruling the final days of the Assyrian kingdom from the city of Harran (the city where Abraham’s father Terah had died, thirteen hundred years before, Genesis 11:32).

Another detail from Nahum is that he says that the Assyrians might multiply “more than the stars of the sky.” I think this is much more than a taunt in the middle of all of the locust-verses. This is the real proclamation of judgment, the hard hammer of the law. God had spoken to Abraham this way, that his family would multiply and grow to numbers like “the stars of the sky” (Genesis 15:5). To Abraham, this was a part of the gospel, but a minor part—just a physical blessing to accompany his faith and forgiveness. But to the Ninevites?

We don’t know the content of Jonah’s preaching during all of the days that he was there, only his warning (Jonah 3:4). Did he also preach from Genesis to the people of Nineveh? Surely they would not have applied the other four books of Moses to their lives very easily, but Genesis would have many applications for Jews and Gentiles alike, just as it does today. And again, God promised Abraham an inheritance, a physical one, that would extend from the river of Egypt to the great river Euphrates (Genesis 15:18). Did this resonate with the people living on the banks of the very next river, just a few miles to the east, the Tigris?

What was gospel to Abraham and to the people of God is law to all of those who reject God. “Why don’t you just multiply like the stars of the sky, O Nineveh? That’s what God promised would happen to Abraham and his descendants. You’ve had a lot of time, Nineveh. A generation, really two, have come and gone since Jonah was here. And what blessing will God give on account of your faith?” But you have no faith, Nineveh.

Solomon said, “Better a dry crust with peace and quiet than a house full of feasting, with strife” (Proverbs 17:1). That’s another way of saying, “better to have just what we need to live on in faith, than to have all of the wealth anyone can imagine, and pantries full of food with unbelief.” Which will matter when Christ comes to judge the living and the dead? In the First Article of the Creed, we are taught that God the Father preserves us by giving us everything we need for our physical lives. But we are also taught that “God also preserves me by defending me against all danger, guarding and protecting me from all evil. All this God does only because he is my good and merciful Father in heaven, and not because I have earned or deserved it. For all this I ought to thank and praise, to serve and obey him. This is most certainly true.”

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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