God’s Word for You

Nahum 3:3-4 lightning and witchcraft

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Tuesday, May 19, 2026

3 Horsemen charging, flashing swords
and spears like flashes of lightning!
Many wounded, masses of dead,
bodies without number,
people stumbling over the corpses—

In verse 3, the imagery continues of the middle of battle. Nahum describes weapons with the language of a storm. The flashing of the swords and the lightning flashes of the spears are set before our eyes.

The second part of verse 3 gives the impression of there being an insurmountable pile (forgive the imagery) of dead bodies. Not only does the prophet use increasingly bigger comparatives (many, masses, numberless, people keep stumbling over them), but also the descriptions of the poor dead people become increasingly grim (wounded, dead, bodies, corpses). Perhaps a dog, a jackal or a rat is trying to climb to the top of one such piles, but Nahum leaves the impression that it just isn’t possible. There are too many!

The verb “stagger” shows just how hard it would be to walk around in such circumstances. How often we read about American Civil War battlefields, “so thickly strewn with their dead that one could walk for rods [that is, a long way] on their dead bodies.” A little over a century after the fall of Nineveh, a Greek writer named Dionysius of Halicarnassus write about the Battle of Cremara (477 BC): “Not long afterwards those also who had seized the hill, being oppressed by both hunger and thirst, resolved to charge the enemy; and engaging, a few against many, they continued fighting from morning till night, and made so great a slaughter of the enemy that the heaps of dead bodies piled up in many places were a hindrance to them in fighting” (Roman Antiquities 9.21.2).

Remember that Nahum is using what might have been a description of Assyria’s victims, but now it is a description of the fallen Assyrians. Isaiah reported: “The angel of the Lord went out and put to death a hundred and eighty-five thousand men in the Assyrian camp. When the people got up the next morning—there were all the dead bodies!” (Isaiah 37:36). That was long ago, in the days of Sennacherib. Now, even worse was on its way for the Assyrians, the people of Nineveh, and their king.

4 all because of the wanton lust of a prostitute,
a beautiful mistress of sorceries,
who enslaved nations by her prostitution
and peoples by her witchcraft.

This was nothing for any woman to be proud of. It is possible that Nahum is thinking of an actual woman, singled out for her sins of alluring men to fornication and idolatry? Many commentators, and many of them far more respected and scholarly than me (including Dr. Luther) think that this is a personification of Nineveh, as a center for false doctrine, sorceries, and witchcraft. What was popular in Nineveh became popular throughout the empire, and people were led astray, away from anything even vaguely approaching knowledge of the true God, into heathen worship. The Assyrians were fearful of demons; we know more about Assyrian demonology than we really care to. The terror of the Assyrians for the unknown produced tales of many demons and varieties of demons that tormented and terrorized human beings they thought, and slowly, remorselessly, and relentlessly, stalked and destroyed whomever they pleased. It is this pseudo-religion than many think is being described by the words “her sorceries” and “her witchcraft.”

The feminine pronoun “her” could refer to the chief love goddess of the Assyrians, Inanna (also called Ishtar). By extension, this “her” or “she” could then refer to all of Nineveh and therefore Assyria.

But it might be possible that Nahum is foretelling an actual human woman. There are many instances in history and right within the Scriptures of influential women who beguiled their kingly husbands and changed the fate and future of their country. Do we need to bring up another example beyond Jezebel to illustrate this?

It is altogether possible that Nahum saw that there would come a woman into the throne room of Assyria. We don’t need to imagine anything exotic, since the verse paints the picture for us: There would appear a woman, the sort who was used to being paid for her favors—sadly, today this isn’t only a description of prostitutes, but evidently a great many of the women who talk about their lives in video clips and raging about how there are so few men who can afford them.

This woman’s beauty is acknowledged, although every woman has her own beauty. But probably this would be the sort of woman who would turn many heads and perhaps make other women jealous. She is called a “baalah” (“lady Baal”) or “mistress” of sorceries. “Sorceries” is a word that only occurs in the plural in the Bible (Micah 5:11); various kinds of magic or illusions can be meant by this. Even an exotic dance that involved making things appear and disappear could be the meaning. The first thing that comes to mind is the way that dancers of various European countries were also pickpockets, getting close to men in a provocative way while stealing their valuables.

Such a woman perhaps danced her way into the court of the Assyrian king, not unlike the Dutch dancer and spy Mata Hari. If she “enslaved” the king, she succeeded in enslaving “many nations” with her wiles. A healthy Assyrian king would be far more susceptible to her alluring ways than a sickly one. St. Augustine rightly says, “The healthier a man is, the more the disease [of lust] rages.” A king must at least try to be discreet, and since he perhaps has the pick of the unmarried women of his kingdom, he does not need to give in to every pretty eye he sees. But this prostitute, bold and outrageous, might just catch his attention and seduce him.

Yes, this is all speculation, but it fits with the text of the word of God, and such a woman would also help to explain why the King of Assyria and his armies were unprepared for the attacks that overthrew them, especially if the king’s attention was elsewhere. It is our duty to pursue the text of the Bible at face value at all times. Where the Scripture presents itself as figurative, such as in apocalyptic accounts of the end of the world, we take the text as figurative. But where the text does not do this, we should try to take it as literally as we can. So while this vision of our prophet could merely be about the city and its idolatry (for God often equates idolatry to him being like adultery to us, and just as detestable), the verse could be about a human woman.

These verses proclaim the law in any case, for Nahum foretells the downfall of the nation that turned itself into the enemy of God’s people. But it also reminds us with its language what a filthy and disgusting thing it is to despise marriage, which God has given to mankind as the second estate after the church itself. He wants us to live chastely in thought, word, and deed in whatever our place in life (but especially in the state of marriage), and he wants all, married and unmarried, to respect and honor marriage. This is God’s holy will, and a deed we should strive for under God’s forgiveness and love, day by day.

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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