Nahum Week 9
Introduction 3/18/21
The city of Thebes spoken of here was the one in Egypt and not the one in Greece. It was a fabulous place and the ancient remains that can be visited today speak of a long and rich past. It is still possible to walk its sun-scorched streets and along the sphinx-lined processional ways to the temples. When the nation was united and strong in the New Kingdom era, the Pharaoh would receive the crown in the temple of Karnak, the largest known place of worship in the ancient world. It was to this place that death, defeat and humiliation came when the armies of Assyria laid siege to it with great ferocity.
New king, old ways
At the head of that army was Ashurbanipal, the last great king of Assyria who succeeded to the throne when his father, Esarhaddon, died on his way to a campaign in Egypt in 669 BC. His death caused the Pharaoh, Taharqa, whom Sennacherib’s spokesman had called thirty-two years earlier ‘that splintered reed of a staff, which pierces a man’s hand and wounds him if he leans on it!’ (Isaiah 36:6), to launch an offensive against the Assyrian garrison stationed at Memphis in 667 BC. Ashurbanipal sent his rapid response units against him and reclaimed the lost territory by the use of force. As their long history often reveals, the ancient Egyptians were patient and persistent. Four years later in 663 BC, when Taharqa’s nephew, Tantamnni, had become Pharaoh, the Egyptians tried again to regain control of Memphis and the Delta region, which was being governed by Assyrian vassal rulers.
In response to this, Ashurbanipal reacted with another invasion. This time he did not stop in the north of Egypt but pushed down the Nile to the great capital of Upper Egypt, Thebes.