Hating Our Enemies—2 Kings, Nahum, and Jonah

The Prophets do not view the territory of Israel and Judah in isolation from its neighbors, the surrounding small states, and especially the vast empires that threatened or dominated the region throughout most of the monarchic period. For more than a century, the dominant force was Assyria; its fate is the exclusive focus of two of the Minor Prophets, Nahum and Jonah. Total domination of the Mediterranean region began during the expansionist reign of the Assyrian ruler Tiglath-Pileser III (745–727 BCE) and continued until the last decades of the seventh century, when the empire gradually weakened in the face of multiple enemies. The capital city of Nineveh fell in 612 BCE, as the Chaldean dynasty in Babylon began its own spectacular rise to dominance of western and central Asia....