Apples, Oranges, and Nahum 1:2-3a

In an earlier post I stated that comparing a text of the Hebrew Bible to resignifications of it by subsequent tradition is like comparing apples to oranges. An example may illustrate.

 MT Nahum 1:2-3a

 

אֵל קַנּוֹא  וְנֹקֵם יהוה

נֹקֵם יהוה  וּבַעַל חֵמָה

נֹקֵם יהוה לְצָרָיו  וְנוֹטֵר הוּא לְאֹיְבָיו

יהוה אֶרֶךְ אַפַּיִם וּגְדָל־כֹּחַ וְנַקֵּה לֹא יְנַקֶּה  

 
יהוה  is an avenger,

a passionate God;

יהוה  is an avenger,

expert in wrath.

יהוה  is an avenger against his foes,

he seethes in anger against his enemies.

יהוה  is slow to anger,

but massive in strength:

he will not remit punishment.

 
Targum Yonatan Nahum 1:2-3a

 

אֲלָה דַיָין וְפֹורעָן יוי

מִתפְרַע יוי וְסַגִי חֵילָא קֳדָמֹוהִי

עֲתִיד יוי לְאִתפְרָעָא מִסָנְאֵי עַמֵיה

 וּבִרגַז חַסִין מִבַעֲלֵי דְבָבֹוהִי׃

יוי מַרחֵיק רְגַז וְסַגִי חֵילָא קֳדָמֹוהִי

וְסָלַח לִדתָיְבִין לְאֹורָיתֵיה

 וְלִדלָא תָיְבִין לָא מְזַכֵי

 A divine judge,

and one who exacts payment, is the Lord.

The Lord is one who requires payment,

     extreme coercion is his.

The Lord will require payment of his despisers,

     in a state of eminent wrath, of those hostile to him.

The Lord postpones wrath,

     but extreme coercion is his,

and he forgives those who return to his Torah,

     but those who do not return, he does not acquit.

 The text contained in MT Nahum 1:2-3a is part of a longer composition I introduce and translate here. The affirmations of 1:2-3a prepare the way for the oracle in 1:13: “Thus said יהוה: Though vigorous and though many, even so they are cut off and gone away. I humiliated you:  I will humiliate you no more. And now: I will break his yoke from you, and burst your bonds asunder.”

The gospel according to Nahum (cf. 2:1) is that God has routed Assyria out of steadfast love for his people. Said love, like that of a she-bear, manifests itself as punishing fury toward those who threaten. “Therefore a fierce people must honor you, an outpost of tyrannical nations fear you” (Isa 25:3). Soon the Assyrian yoke would be removed altogether (so also Isa 14:24-27).

The text is resignified in Targum Jonatan. The emphasis is no longer on God’s righteous wrath, though the motif is retained. God is now described as a judge who faithfully enforces the law. He forgives those who return to his law, but withholds credit to those who do not. The passage has been recontextualized. It now addresses non-Torah-abiding Jews, reminds them of God’s forbearance, but also threatens them with God’s wrath.

The image of God as heavenly judge and accountant is a recurrent one in Judaism. It is no less typical of the teaching of Jesus, who depicts God as jailor as well (Matthew 5:26)[1]  I imagine this last image is attested elsewhere in Jewish sources, but off hand, I don’t know where.

[1] Matthew 5:21-26 shows awareness of the destructive nature of anger. Implicitly or explicitly, nevertheless, biblical authors make a distinction between righteous and unrighteous anger. The former is permitted, the latter rejected.

Preliminaries

Nah 1:2-8 in the Hebrew original bears the signs of its nucleus having once been the first half of an acrostic poem in which each line began with a letter of the alphabet, starting with א (thus אֵל קַנּוֹא in this verse). Not even a trace of the second half of the original poem is extant. Presumably it did not serve our poet’s purposes. The same poet freely reworked and expanded on the first half. He added, it would seem, extra lines at the beginning, and preposed the divine name before the onset of the original ב line (now part of 1:3).

It is not difficult to restore features of the original acrostic underlying 1:2-8 here and there, but it cannot be assumed that said restoration takes us back to the shape of the original prophetic composition. Textual proposals aimed at repristinating the text as it might have read in its first historical context - the 7^th cent. bce based on internal and contextual indicia – must be motivated on grounds other than assimilation to the putative shape of the acrostic that served as raw material, but was not necessarily left intact, in the process of its rielaboration for the purpose of vehiculating a prophetic message.

Commentary

In an attempt to preserve the syntax of the first line of the Hebrew in translation, the order of its halves is reversed.

The first word of the poem functions as an appellative, ‘God,’ but is elsewhere used to refer to a deity in particular, El, in Ugaritic literature the head of the pantheon; and with the same function in a number of biblical texts (Deut 32:8, 43 [LXX υἱοὶ θεοῦ; 4QDeut^g bny ʾl[ym]]; Isa 14:4b-20; Ps 29:1; 74:8; Ps 82:1; 89:7). The first component of the expression בַּעַל חֵמָה ‘a man of wrath,’ is identical with the name of another deity, Baʿal. A play on the names of these deities is likely here (so Cathcart, Nahum, 40; followed by Roberts, Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah, 43). On the other hand,  Il (=El) is associated with kindliness and generosity in Ugaritic literature (the expression laṭipānu ’Ilu dupi’di ‘the Benevolent, Il of the warm heart’ recurs); the goddess ʿAnatu is associated with wrath and jealousy. In spite, as it were, of our preconceptions, Yahweh assumes the traits of a feminine deity in this text. Nahum 1:2-13 dwells on Yahweh’s fierce and jealous love for his own, a characteristic of goddesses in the ancient world. A paraphrase of 1:2a - valuable only from a traditionsgeschichtliche point of view, might go like this:

Yahweh is an avenger,

            an Anatu-like El,

Yahweh is an avenger,

   a Baal of wrath.

The poetic structure of Nah 1:2 in Hebrew is twice 2:2 + 3:3 in terms of strong-stress prosody. The dynamics of its parallelism: a¹:b¹ followed, chiastically, by b¹:a², then b¹:c¹ (chiastic once again, in relation to the first line) followed by b²c². A finer-grained analysis yields: a¹b¹:c¹d¹, _xc¹d¹:a²b², _xc¹d¹e¹:c²d²e². The syntax of the first and second lines is similar. Both lines are occupied by nominal clauses with the head (‘Yahweh’) postposed to final position in the first line and to medial position in the second line. In both lines, the complement has two parts, with the parts distributed across contiguous versets.

אֵל קַנּוֹא and the related אֵל קַנָּא occur in a number of other texts (Exod 20:5; 34:14; Deut 4:24; 5:9; Josh 24:19; etc.), and Nah 1:2 is often interpreted in the light of them, with קַנָּא/ קַנּוֹאbeing understood to refer in particular to the resentful rage of one whose prerogatives have been given to another (per Greenberg[2]). That is what it means in its other occurrences, but that does not mean it should or must have the same meaning here. There is an unfortunate tendency to overgeneralize in textual study, a tendency which must be carefully resisted. Here the term refers to the indignant rage of one whose cannot tolerate injustice forever.

An avenger (נֹקֵם) is someone who wreaks symmetrical retribution on a guilty party. Attempts to soften the term’s meaning, while understandable, are nonetheless misguided. It is important to remember, with Heschel, that “God is greater than His decisions. The anger of the Lord is instrumental, hypothetical, conditional, and subject to His will.”[3] He may and does mitigate precedent decisions at will.

בַּעַל חֵמָה is charged with more meaning than the etymology of בַּעַל (‘possessor’) implies. Compare בַּעַל הַלָּשׁוֹן (‘charmer’; lit., ‘possessor of the tongue’ [Qoh 10:11]); בַּעַל־מְזִמּוֹת (‘mischievous person’; lit., ‘possessor of deceits’ [Prov 24:8]); and בַּעֲלֵי חִצִּים (‘archers’; lit., ‘possessors of arrows’ [Gen 49:23]). It is nevertheless possible to translate the phrase ‘as man of wrath,’ but ‘expert in wrath’ brings out a nuance of the phrase more clearly.

נוֹטֵר, based on context and its Akkadian cognate, refers to anger. In and of itself (an abstract concept to be sure, since meaning is always determined by context), נטר means to ‘keep,’ e.g. a vineyard (Cant 1:6); by extension, ‘keep, maintain’ wrath, with ‘wrath’ going unexpressed (also in Lev 19:18; Jer 3:12; etc.).

אֶרֶךְ אַפַּיִם is a colorful phrase which ought to mean, as it were, ‘long of nostrils.” The phrase is apparently elliptical, in the sense of ‘long [before arriving] at wrath' ('wrath' is based on what is most often only a dead metaphor, (red) nostrils).  ‘Slow of ’ or ‘delaying of anger’ is undoubtedly the sense. The phrase is used elsewhere to characterize Yahweh (Exod 34:6; Numb 14:18; etc.).

גְּדָל־כֹּחַ (Qere) or גְּדוֹל־כֹּחַ (Ketiv), in syntactic and semantic parallelism with precedingאֶרֶךְ אַפַּיִם , is analogous to גְּדֹל עֵצָה ‘great in counsel’ Jer 32:19; גְּ׳ כְּנָפַיִם ‘with huge wings’ Ezek 17:3, 7; and גְּדָל־חֵמָה ‘a hot-tempered man’ Pr 19:19 (Qere).

נַקֵּה לֹא יְנַקֶּה, an infinitive absolute construction, is well-attested with Yahweh as subject (Exod 34:7; Numb 14:18; cf. Jer 30:11; etc.).

The diction of Nah 1:2-3a is traditional insofar as it echoes traditional theology in the Pentateuch at several points (אֵל קַנּוֹא; אֶרֶךְ אַפַּיִם; and נַקֵּה לֹא יְנַקֶּה). But it uses all these turns of phrase in reference, not to Yahweh’s interaction with his own people, but over against his (and the people’s) enemies.

Bibliography

Cathcart, Kevin J. Nahum in the Light of Northwest Semitic. Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1973.

Roberts, J. J. M. Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah. A Commentary. OTL. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1991.

 

---

[2] Moshe Greenberg, Ezekiel 1-20 (Garden City: Doubleday, 1983) 115.

[3] Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets. Part II (New York: Harper & Row, 1975 [1962]) 66.