15/01/2025
The biblical Book of Nahum explains how the Lord (the Name) deals with evil. An internal biblical hermeneutic technique is used to arrive at this meaning, a technique that is inconsistent with the rest of the Hebrew Bible. As a prophetic song, the Book of Nahum rightly predicts the imminent fall of the Assyrian Empire. In light of the story of the Jews of Kurdistan, along with a careful reading of the Book of Nahum, there is sufficient evidence to confirm that the book has gone through various oral translations and oral recitations. Thus, as an oral literature, the “Book” of Nahum is, in fact, a long poem in three parts, which was transmitted not only in the original Hebrew but also through Kurdish Kurmanji and Neo-Aramaic translations before the final Hebrew editing process took place. Accordingly, the biblical text sheds light not only on an episode of ancient history, but also on the antiquity of the Kurdish language and its vernaculars.
Translation Summary Nahum was a Kurdish Jewish prophet who lived in northern Syria during the Assyrian occupation of the Mitanni kingdom and civil wars over 2,500 years ago. A portion of Nahum's long poem, which belongs to the Kurdish literary genre "Shahnameh", has since been included in the Hebrew Bible. The first chapter of the Book of Nahum, henceforth the first section, is a praise song (praise) introducing the main hero - in this case Hashem. The second and third sections of the Book of Nahum continue the narrative in the Kurdish literary genre "Shahnameh". However, instead of the following long story, the third section ends with a few lines of "conclusion", written by someone else. Keywords
