The prophet; native of Elkosh in Galilee. He prophesied against Nineveh: ch. 1, the manifestation of the avenging God, executing judgment on the oppressors of his people; ch. 2, a picture of the city's fall; ch. 3, the city denounced as a harlot and enchantress. The prophecy has great literary beauty and much patriotic feeling. Nahum makes no allusion to the sin of his own people. The prophecy was probably written between the fall of Nineveh, 606 B.C., and that of No Amon (Nahum 3: 8) or Thebes, in Upper Egypt, taken by Assurbanipal about 660 B.C. The occasion of the prophecy may have been some recent aggression of Assyria, or more probably some powerful coalition against Nineveh either that before which it actually fell, or an earlier one that prompted the prophet to express his certainty of the city's doom (Nahum 2: 1; Nahum 3: 12).