Nahum 1:14

And the Lord hath given a commandment concerning thee, O Assyrian - In the word “I have afflicted thee,” the land of Israel is addressed, as usual in Hebrew, in the feminine; here, a change of gender in Hebrew shows the person addressed to be different. : “By His command alone, and the word of His power, He cut off the race of the Assyrian, as he says in Wisdom, of Egypt, “Thine Almighty word leaped down from heaven, out of Thy royal throne; as a fierce man of war into the midst of a land of destruction, and brought Thine unfeigned commandment as a sharp sword, and standing up filled all things with death,” (Wisd. 18:15, 16), or else it may be, He gave command to the Angels His Ministers. God commands beforehand, that, when it comes to pass, it may be known “that not by chance,” nor by the will of man, “nor without His judgment but by the sentence of God” the blow came.

No move of thy name be sown - As Isaiah saith, “the seed of evildoers shall never be renowned” Isaiah 14:20. He prophesies, not the immediate but the absolute cessation of the Assyrian line. If the prophecy was uttered at the time of Sennacherib’s invasion, seventeen years before his death, not Esarhaddon only, but his son Asshurbanipal also, whose career of personal conquest, the last glory of the house of the Sargonides and of the empire, began immediately upon his father’s reign of thirteen years, was probably already born. Asshurbanipal in this case would only have been thirty-one, at the beginning of his energetic reign, and would have died in his fifty-second year. After him followed only an inglorious twenty-two years. The prophet says, “the Lord hath commanded.” The decree as to Ahab’s house was fulfilled in the person of his second son, as to Jeroboam and Baasha in their sons. It waited its appointed time, but was fulfilled in the complete excision of the doomed race.

Out of the house of thy gods will I cut off graven image and molten image - As thou hast done to others Isaiah 37:19, it shall be done to thee. : “And when even the common objects of worship of the Assyrian and Chaldean were not spared, what would be the ruin of the whole city!” So little shall thy gods help thee, that “there shalt thou be punished, where thou hopest for aid. ‘Graven and molten image’ shall be thy grave; amid altar and oblations, as thou worshipest idols,” thanking them for thy deliverance, “shall thy unholy blood be shed,” as it was by his sons Adrammelech and Sharezer. Isaiah 37:38. “I will make it thy grave” ; , what God makes remains immovable, cannot be changed. But He “maketh thy grave” in hell, where not only that rich man in the Gospel hath his grave; but all who are or have been like him, and especially thou, O Asshur, of whom it is written, “Asshur is there and all her company; his graves are about him: all of them slain, fallen by the sword. Whose graves are set in the sides of the pit and her company is round about her grave: all of them slain, fallen by the sword, which caused terror in the land of the living” Ezekiel 32:22. “Graven and molten image,” the idols which men adore, the images of their vanity, the created things which they worship instead of the true God (as they whose god is their belly), in which they busy themselves in this life, shall be their destruction in the Day of Judgment.

For thou art vile - Thou honoredst thyself and dishonoredst God, so shalt thou be dishonored , as He saith, “Them that honor Me I will honor, and they that despise Me shall be lightly esteemed” 1 Samuel 2:30. So when he had said to Edom, “thou art greatly despised” Obadiah 1:2, he adds the ground of it, “The pride of thine heart hath deceived thee. For thou art vile” Obadiah 1:3. Great, honored, glorious as Assyria or its ruler were in the eyes of men, the prophet tells him, what he was in himself, being such in the eyes of God, light, empty, as Daniel said to Belshazzar, “Thou art weighed in the balances, and found wanting” Daniel 5:27, of no account, vile .