Today is Yom Hashoah, commonly known as Holocaust Remembrance Day. Increasingly, as this day approaches each year, my thoughts have turned to the biblical prophet Nahum.
Why Nahum? That's a long story. As I wrote in an earlier essay in Mosaic, I believe his brief book, which predicts and celebrates the downfall of the Assyrian empire in the late-7th century BCE, has been wrongly neglected by Jewish tradition. Indeed, Nahum is obscure to the point of invisibility. No part of his book, itself a mere three chapters long, is ever read in the synagogue, or in Christian churches, and even theologians who recognize his high literary merit evince an acute discomfort with the content of his message.
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