Zephaniah 2:13

And he will stretch out his hand against the north, and destroy Assyria; and will make Nineveh a desolation, and dry like a wilderness.

EXPOSITORY (ENGLISH BIBLE)

Benson Commentary

Zephaniah 2:13-14. And he will stretch out his hand against the north — Nor will the southern nations only be punished, but judgments will be executed by the divine justice on the nations lying toward the north; and will make Nineveh a desolation — What is here foretold was fulfilled before the predictions recorded in the foregoing verses. Dr. Prideaux observes, that “Chyniladanus being king of the Assyrian and Babylonian empire, Nabopolassar, his general, took the latter from him, in the sixteenth year of Josiah; fourteen years after which Saraccus the king was slain, and Nineveh destroyed, which completed the fall of Assyria.” And dry like a wilderness — A multitude of people are often compared to, and called waters, in Scripture language; and therefore, figuratively speaking, to make Nineveh dry like a wilderness, may signify depopulating her. Or the words may be taken literally; for “Rauwolff observes, in his Travels, that on this side the river Tigris, in Mesopotamia, the ground is so sandy and dry, that you would think you were in the middle of the deserts of Arabia.” — Prid. Con., Ann. 612 and 626. And flocks shall lie down, &c., all the beasts of the nations — The several kinds of wild beasts that are in the country. What is said in this verse, is descriptive of a place lying in ruins and desolation; for in such a case it soon becomes a haunt of wild beasts and birds of every kind. Both the cormorant and the bittern, &c. — Bishop Newcome reads, Both the pelican and the porcupine shall lodge in the carved lintels thereof; observing of the former, “These birds fed in the Tigris, and made their nests in the deserted ruins of the city.” The next clause he renders, A cry shall resound in the window: the raven shall be in the porch. For he shall uncover — Or lay bare, the cedar-work — God will reduce the houses of Nineveh to such a state of desolation, that the floors and ceilings of cedar shall lie open to the injuries of the weather, and to birds to roost and build their nests there. “This reference” (in mentioning cedar-work) “to the former elegance of the city, is finely introduced; and, in the next verse, the grand and affecting description of her desolate state is beautifully contrasted, by her late festivity and pride.”

Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary

2:4-15 Those are really in a woful condition who have the word of the Lord against them, for no word of his shall fall to the ground. God will restore his people to their rights, though long kept from them. It has been the common lot of God's people, in all ages, to be reproached and reviled. God shall be worshipped, not only by all Israel, and the strangers who join them, but by the heathen. Remote nations must be reckoned with for the wrongs done to God's people. The sufferings of the insolent and haughty in prosperity, are unpitied and unlamented. But all the desolations of flourishing nations will make way for the overturning Satan's kingdom. Let us improve our advantages, and expect the performance of every promise, praying that our Father's name may be hallowed every where, over all the earth.

Barnes' Notes on the Bible

Zephaniah began by singling out Judah amid the general destruction, "I will also stretch out My Hand upon Judah" Zephaniah 1:4; he sums up the judgment of the world in the same way; "He will stretch out, or, Stretch He forth, "His Hand against the north and destroy Asshur, and make Nineveh a desolation." Judah had, in Zephaniah's time, nothing to fear from Assyria. Isaiah Isa 39:6 and Micah M1 Corinthians 4:10 had already foretold, that the captivity would be to Babylon. Yet of Assyria alone the prophet, in his own person, expresses his own conformity with the mind of God. Of others he had said, "the word of the Lord is against you, O Canaan, and I will destroy thee; As I live, saith the Lord, Moab shall be as Sodom. Ye also, O Ethiopians, the, slain of My sword are they." Of Assyria alone, by a slight inflection of the word, he expresses that he goes along with this, which he announces.

He does not say as an imprecation, "May He stretch forth His hand;" but gently, as continuing his prophecies, "and," joining on Asshur with the rest; only instead of saying "He will stretch forth," by a form almost insulated in Hebrew, he says, "And stretch He forth His Hand." In a way not unlike, David having declared God's judgments, "The Lord trieth the righteous; and the wicked and the lover of violence doth His soul abhor, subjoineth, On the wicked rain He snares," signifying that he (as all must be in the Day of judgment), is at one with the judgment of God. This is the last sentence upon Nineveh, enforcing that of Jonah and Nahum, yet without place of repentance now. He accumulates words expressive of desolateness. It should not only be a "desolation" Zephaniah 2:4, Zephaniah 2:9, as he had said of Ashkelon, Moab and Amman, but a dry, parched , unfruitful Isaiah 53:2 land. As Isaiah, under the same words, prophesies that the dry and desolate land should, by the Gospel, be glad, so the gladness of the world should become dryness and desolation. Asshur is named, as though one individual , implying the entireness of the destruction; all shall perish as one man; or as gathered into one and dependent upon one, its evil King. "The north" is not only Assyria, in that its armies came upon Judah from the north, but it stands for the whole power of evil (see Isaiah 14:13), as Nineveh for the whole beautiful, evil, world. The world with "the princes of this world" shall perish together.

Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary

13. Here he passes suddenly to the north. Nineveh was destroyed by Cyaxares and Nabopolassar, 625 B.C. The Scythian hordes, by an inroad into Media and thence in the southwest of Asia (thought by many to be the forces described by Zephaniah, as the invaders of Judea, rather than the Chaldeans), for a while interrupted Cyaxares' operations; but he finally succeeded. Arbaces and Belesis previously subverted the Assyrian empire under Sardanapalus (that is, Pul?), 877 B.C.

Matthew Poole's Commentary

And he, the Lord God of Israel, or the Chaldean monarch as God’s servant herein,

will stretch out his hand, engage all his power, and use it to the utmost, against the north, i.e. as follows, Assyria, which lay northward of Judea, but more due north from Babylon, if I mistake not.

Destroy Assyria; overthrow that great and ancient kingdom of Assyria. of which more at large in Nahum. Nineveh; chief city of that kingdom. See Nahum 1:1. A desolation; most desolate, Nahum 3:10-12.

And dry like a wilderness; will turn those well-watered places into dry, thirsty, and barren land, as a wilderness.

Gill's Exposition of the Entire Bible

And he will stretch out his hand against the north,.... Either the Lord, or Nebuchadnezzar his sword; who, as he would subdue the nations that lay southward, he would lead his army northward against the land of Assyria, which lay to the north of Judea, as next explained:

and destroy Assyria; that famous monarchy, which had ruled over the kingdoms of the earth, now should come to an end, and be reduced to subjection to the king of Babylon:

and will make Nineveh a desolation; which was the capital city, the metropolis of the Assyrian monarchy: Nahum prophesies at large of the destruction of this city:

and dry like a wilderness; which before was a very watery place, situated by rivers, particularly the river Tigris; so that it was formerly like a pool of water, Nahum 2:6 but now should be dry like a heath or desert, Dr. Prideaux places the destruction of Nineveh in the twenty ninth year of Josiah's reign; but Bishop Usher earlier, in the sixteenth year of his reign; and, if so, then Zephaniah, who here prophesies of it, must begin to prophesy in the former part of Josiah's reign.

Geneva Study Bible

And he will stretch out his hand against the north, and destroy Assyria; and will make Nineveh a desolation, and dry like a wilderness.

EXEGETICAL (ORIGINAL LANGUAGES)

Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

13. stretch out his hand] See on Zephaniah 1:4.

13–15. Threat against Assyria

The passage naturally implies that the Assyrian empire had not yet fallen.

Pulpit Commentary

Verse 13. - The north, represented by Assyria, as yet unconquered, and still apparently flourishing. Though this country lay to the northeast of Palestine, its armies attacked from the north, and it is generally represented as a northern power. Its destruction was foretold (Isaiah 10:12; Ezekiel 31:11, etc.; Nahum 1:14, etc.). In this verse the Hebrew verbs are not in the simple future, but in the imperative or optative mood, "Let him stretch out his hand," etc., as though the prophet were praying that the enemies of his people might be overthrown. Nineveh. St. Jerome gives speciosam, rendering the proper name according to his notion of its Hebrew etymology. Its proper meaning, in Accadian, would be "Fish house,". i.e. house consecrated to the god of fish. (For a description of Nineveh, see note on Jonah 1:2. For the destruction of Nineveh, see the Introduction to Nahum, § I.) Dry like a wilderness. The country shall become an and desert. Assyria was greatly indebted for its remarkable fertility to a very successful system of artificial irrigation, and when this was not maintained, great tracts soon relapsed into a wilderness (Layard, 'Nineveh,' 2:68). "Cultivation," says Professor Rawlinson, "is now the exception instead of the rule. 'Instead of the luxuriant fields, the groves and gardens of former times, nothing now meets the eye but an arid waste' (Chesny). Large tracts are covered by unwholesome marshes, producing nothing but enormous reeds; others lie waste and bare, parched up by the fierce heat of the sun, and utterly destitute of water; in some places sand drifts accumulate, and threaten to make the whole region a mere portion of the desert" ('Anc. Men.,' 1:41). Zephaniah 2:13

Keil and Delitzsch Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament

After this statement of the aim of the judgments of God, Zephaniah mentions two other powerful heathen nations as examples, to prove that the whole of the heathen world will succumb to the judgment. Zephaniah 2:12. "Ye Cushites also, slain of my sword are they. Zephaniah 2:13. And let him stretch out his hand toward the south, and destroy Asshur; and make Nineveh a barren waste, a dry place, like the desert. Zephaniah 2:14. And herds lie down in the midst of it, all kinds of beasts in crowds: pelicans also and hedgehogs will lodge on their knobs; the voice of the singer in the window; heaps upon the threshold: for their cedar-work hath He made bare. Zephaniah 2:15. This the city, the exulting one, the safely dwelling one, which said in her heart, I, and no more: how has she become a desolation, a lair of beasts! Every one that passeth by it will hiss, swing his hand." As a representative of the heathen dwelling in the south, Zephaniah does not mention Edom, which bordered upon Judah, or the neighbouring land of Egypt, but the remote Ethiopia, the furthest kingdom or people in the south that was known to the Hebrews. The Ethiopians will be slain of the sword of Jehovah. המּה does not take the place of the copula between the subject and predicate, any more than הוּא in Isaiah 37:16 and Ezra 5:11 (to which Hitzig appeals in support of this usage: see Delitzsch, on the other hand, in his Comm. on Isaiah, l.c.), but is a predicate. The prophecy passes suddenly from the form of address (in the second person) adopted in the opening clause, to a statement concerning the Cushites (in the third person). For similar instances of sudden transition, see Zephaniah 3:18; Zechariah 3:8; Ezekiel 28:22.

(Note: Calvin correctly says: "The prophet commences by driving them, in the second person, to the tribunal of God, and then adds in the third person, 'They will be,' etc.")

חללי חרבּי is a reminiscence from Isaiah 66:16 : slain by Jehovah with the sword. Zephaniah says nothing further concerning this distant nation, which had not come into any hostile collision with Judah in his day; and only mentions it to exemplify the thought that all the heathen will come under the judgment. The fulfilment commenced with the judgment upon Egypt through the Chaldaeans, as is evident from Ezekiel 30:4, Ezekiel 30:9, as compared with Josephus, Ant. x. 11, and continues till the conversion of that people to the Lord, the commencement of which is recorded in Acts 8:27-38. The prophet dwells longer upon the heathen power of the north, the Assyrian kingdom with its capital Nineveh, because Assyria was then the imperial power, which was seeking to destroy the kingdom of God in Judah. This explains the fact that the prophet expresses the announcement of the destruction of this power in the form of a wish, as the use of the contracted forms yēt and yâsēm clearly shows. For it is evident that Ewald is wrong in supposing that ויט stands for ויּט, or should be so pointed, inasmuch as the historical tense, "there He stretched out His hand," would be perfectly out of place. נטה יד (to stretch out a hand), as in Zephaniah 1:4. ‛al tsâphōn, over (or against) the north. The reference is to Assyria with the capital Nineveh. It is true that this kingdom was not to the north, but to the north-east, of Judah; but inasmuch as the Assyrian armies invaded Palestine from the north, it is regarded by the prophets as situated in the north. On Nineveh itself, see at Jonah 1:2 (p. 263); and on the destruction of this city and the fall of the Assyrian empire, at Nahum 3:19 (p. 379). Lishmâmâh is strengthened by the apposition tsiyyâh kammidbâr.

Nineveh is not only to become a steppe, in which herds feed (Isaiah 27:10), but a dry, desolate waste, where only desert animals will make their home. Tsiyyâh, the dry, arid land - the barren, sandy desert (cf. Isaiah 35:1). בּתוכהּ, in the midst of the city which has become a desert, there lie flocks, not of sheep and goats (צאן, Zephaniah 2:6; cf. Isaiah 13:20), but כּל־חיתו־גוי , literally of all the animals of the (or a) nation. The meaning can only be, "all kinds of animals in crowds or in a mass." גּוי is used here for the mass of animals, just as it is in Joel 1:6 for the multitude of locusts, and as עם is in Proverbs 30:35-36 for the ant-people; and the genitive is to be taken as in apposition. Every other explanation is exposed to much greater objections and difficulties. For the form חיתו, see at Genesis 1:24. Pelicans and hedgehogs will make their homes in the remains of the ruined buildings (see at Isaiah 34:11, on which passage Zephaniah rests his description). בּכפתּריה, upon the knobs of the pillars left standing when the palaces were destroyed (kaphtōr; see at Amos 9:1). The reference to the pelican, a marsh bird, is not opposed to the tsiyyâh of Zephaniah 2:13, since Nineveh stood by the side of streams, the waters of which formed marshes after the destruction of the city. קול ישׁורר cannot be rendered "a voice sings," for shōrēr, to sing, is not used for tuning or resounding; but yeshōrēr is to be taken relatively, and as subordinate to קול, the voice of him that sings will be heard in the window. Jerome gives it correctly: vox canentis in fenestra. There is no necessity to think of the cry of the owl or hawk in particular, but simply of birds generally, which make their singing heard in the windows of the ruins. The sketching of the picture of the destruction passes from the general appearance of the city to the separate ruins, coming down from the lofty knobs of the pillars to the windows, and from these to the thresholds of the ruins of the houses. Upon the thresholds there is chōrebh, devastation ( equals rubbish), and no longer a living being. This is perfectly appropriate, so that there is no necessity to give the word an arbitrary interpretation, or to alter the text, so as to get the meaning a raven or a crow. The description closes with the explanatory sentence: "for He has laid bare the cedar-work," i.e., has so destroyed the palaces and state buildings, that the costly panelling of the walls is exposed. 'Arzâh is a collective, from 'erez, the cedar-work, and there is no ground for any such alteration of the text as Ewald and Hitzig suggest, in order to obtain the trivial meaning "hews or hacks in pieces," or the cold expression, "He destroys, lays bare." In Zephaniah 2:15 the picture is rounded off. "This is the city," i.e., this is what happens to the exulting city. עלּיזה, exulting, applied to the joyful tumult caused by the men - a favourite word with Isaiah (cf. Isaiah 22:2; Isaiah 23:7; Isaiah 24:8; Isaiah 32:13). The following predicates from היּושׁבת to עוד are borrowed from the description of Babel in Isaiah 47:8, and express the security and self-deification of the mighty imperial city. The Yod in 'aphsı̄ is not paragogical, but a pronoun in the first person; at the same time, 'ephes is not a preposition, "beside me," since in that case the negation "not one" could not be omitted, but "the non-existence," so that אפסי equals איני, I am absolutely no further (see at Isaiah 47:8). But how has this self-deifying pride been put to shame! איך, an expression of amazement at the tragical turn in her fate. The city filled with the joyful exulting of human beings has become the lair of wild beasts, and every one that passes by expresses his malicious delight in its ruin. Shâraq, to hiss, a common manifestation of scorn (cf. Micah 6:16; Jeremiah 19:8). היניע יד, to swing the hand, embodying the thought, "Away with her, she has richly deserved her fate."