Nahum 1:8

"But with an over-running flood he will make a full end of her place, and will pursue his enemies into darkness."

"With an over-running flood ..." It is not necessary at all to designate this as "a metaphor" for military conquest. The background for Nineveh's destruction by some providential interference over and beyond the ordinary course of nature had already been abundantly provided by the paragraph immediately preceding, where, as already indicated, Graham accurately discerned the prophet's expectation, not of a mere military defeat, but of a providential overthrow. Therefore, the scholars who move quickly to dismiss this as a mere metaphor are wrong. It was literally by an overrunning flood that Nineveh fell.

THE FALL OF NINEVEH

"The Assyrian and Babylonian records are silent with regard to the fall of the city,"[8] a very instructive fact in its own right. Why should their records have stressed the God-ordered ruin of the great pagan city that, at the time, had been standing nearly as many centuries as have now elapsed since the birth of Christ? In a similar way, those records also omitted any reference to the repentance of Nineveh under the preaching of Jonah.

Despite the reluctance of those chiefly concerned in it to give any account whatever of it, others have supplied many of the most impressive details of the final end of Nineveh. "Alexander Polyhistor, Abydenus, and Syncellus all speak of it."[9] Diodorus Sicullus is credited with the best account. The siege had been in progress for over two years, the third assault against the city having been repulsed with great jubilation by the king of Assyria who supposed that victory belonged to him. He ordered a great feast which became a drunken orgy. That night, the Kohsr (a Tigris tributary), swollen by phenomenal rains and melting snows "carried away a huge section of the great rampart surrounding the city,"[11] The best that evil men can do is to dismiss such historical references as "mere tradition"; but such are the only records of it that pagan history affords! Furthermore, if those very same "traditions," as they are called, contradicted in any manner the prophetic announcement of Nineveh's doom as given through Nahum, they would be trumpeted as gospel truth! Nahum's prophecy proves that the "traditions" in this case are indeed true.

"A full end of her place ..." It is unusual that God's enemy here should be addressed as "her." Watts thought that the feminine was used to indicate not only Nineveh; "But it may also point to her patron goddess, Ishtar."[12] There will be other uses of the feminine in this manner, as in Nahum 2:5-7.

"Pursue his enemies into darkness ..." Watts thought the "darkness" here to be, "the darkness of the underworld, the world of death and demons where they belong."[13] We believe it stands for the removal of Nineveh from any historical continuity upon the earth, the darkness of the grave, and of oblivion.