Raise your hand if, in Sunday School, Hebrew school, or Bible studies in general, you were taught the Twelve Prophets with the same focus you were given the Book of Exodus. Almost none of us were. And almost none of us were taught this: one of those twelve prophets is a direct sequel to one of the most famous stories in the entire Bible, and the ending is nothing like the one you remember. This is mind blowing once you see it, and it is exactly what our brand new course with Rabbi Elie Mischel on the Book of Nahum here on Bible Plus digs into.
Everybody knows Jonah. The reluctant prophet, the great fish, the city of Nineveh that repents at the last possible moment and is spared. It is a story about mercy, and it is beautiful. But about a hundred and fifty years later, God sends another prophet to that same city, and this time there is no fish, no repentance, and no forgiveness. That prophet is Nahum, and his three short chapters are the other half of the story nobody finishes.
Nineveh was the capital of Assyria, and Assyria was not an ordinary empire. It ruled through terror on a scale the ancient world had rarely seen. Its kings had themselves carved into palace walls hunting lions, image after image, generation after generation, until domination itself became the family inheritance. A son grew up watching his father, and his father’s father, treat cruelty as the highest form of greatness, and he absorbed it the way children absorb everything they are shown on repeat. Assyria did not stumble into becoming the most brutal empire on earth. Its own culture manufactured that outcome on purpose.
The real question is this: If an entire empire can deliberately shape its children into predators, generation after generation, what does the Torah demand we shape our own children into instead?
The answer is not vague, and Nahum hands us one thread of it in a single, sharp verse that is easy to read past.
Take a look at the word ma’oz, stronghold. Not a promise that trouble disappears. A promise of where to run when it comes. That single word reframes everything Nahum says next about vengeance, justice, and a city of blood, and it is the hinge the whole book turns on. I will not unpack the rest of it here. That is exactly what the course will teach you, verse by verse, and it changes how you read every prophecy of judgment in the Bible that follows.
Here is the piece I can tell you without giving away the class. Nahum never asks Israel to hate Assyria back. He asks Israel to trust that God Himself settles the score, so His people are never required to carry hatred in their own hearts to survive. That is the real difference between a nation raised on vengeance and a nation raised on trust, and it is exactly what Torah demands of us with our own children, in our own homes, today.
We are living through a moment when knowing that difference matters enormously. Watching evil finally answer for itself is not cruelty. It is relief. But raising children who can tell the difference between celebrating justice and nursing hatred takes real, deliberate and intentional teaching.
This is exactly what our new course on the Book of Nahum inside Bible Plus was built to show you, word by word, verse by verse. And if you join with an annual subscription right now, you will receive a free Travel size Hebrew English Bible, so the words you are teaching diligently to your own children are always within reach in your hands.
