Nahum 1:9-14
New Catholic Bible
They Will Be Wasted Like Dry Straw[a]
9 Why do you devise plots against the Lord?
He will make an end of you.
None of his adversaries rise up to confront him
for a second time.
10 Like a thicket of thornbushes, they are entangled;
like dry straw they will be utterly consumed.
11 From your number, one has emerged
who plots evil against the Lord
and counsels wickedness.
12 Thus says the Lord:
No matter how numerous they are,
no matter how great their strength,
they will be cut down and pass away.
Even though I have afflicted you,
I will make you suffer no more.
13 Now I will break off their yoke from your neck
and snap the shackles that bind you.
14 In regard to you, Nineveh,
the Lord has decreed
that no more descendants will be born
to perpetuate your name.
I will remove carved images and sculpted idols
from the temple of your gods.
And I will prepare your grave,
for you are worthless.
Footnotes
- Nahum 1:9 Master of the world, the Lord is also Master of history. He acts as the arbitrator of his oppressed people and Assyria, which incarnates the powers of evil: the first shall be liberated and the second shall be destroyed. Belial (“is worth nothing”), a term of scorn often assigned to an infernal power, fits very well upon Sennacherib, of sinister memory (see 2 Ki 18:19). If the God of the Bible appears to us often as one of chastisement, he is first of all the God of liberation.
