Daily Verse | Nahum 3:1
Woe to the city of blood,
full of lies,
full of plunder,
never without victims!
Monday’s Reading: Habakkuk 1-3
Monday and it’s the last week of September.
Today’s “Daily Verse” is from the book of Nahum, one of the twelve “minor” prophets. The “city of blood” referred to in 3:1 is ancient Nineveh, which is located just outside of modern-day Mosul, Iraq.
You may remember Mosul was captured by the Islamic State in 2014, taking control of Iraq’s second-largest city. The Islamists then gave Christians an ultimatum: leave the city, pay the jizya (a fee of protection) or die by the sword. They all fled, leaving no Christians in Mosul for the first time in the history of Iraq.
But Mosul was known for its murderous streets even before then. In April, 2010, while U.S. troops were still stationed in Iraq, I traveled to Erbil in Kurdistan-controlled northeastern Iraq as a member of a small Christian humanitarian relief organization. Erbil is about 50 miles east of Mosul.
Ancient Nineveh is mostly known because of the biblical prophet, Jonah, who was told by God to go and call the Assyrian capital city to repentance during the reign of king Ashurdan III (772–754 BC). He refused, and scripture tells us he spent three days in the belly of a great fish to help correct his attitude.
Turns out that the prophet Nahum also prophesied against Nineveh.
The fascinating thing that you may not know is that Nahum’s tomb is in the city of Alqosh, Iraq, about 30 miles north of Mosul. And that’s the small city we visited one day while I was in Iraq.
Nahum’s tomb was on the northern side of the city and was in severe disrepair. This is what it looked like when we stepped out of our car.
In the background are the domes of a local Catholic church where the bones of the prophet were reportedly moved out of fear that the Jews who left the country in the 1950s would take his remains with them. Whether the bones were moved or not is still the subject of debate because no one dares violate the burial site.
But inside the crumbling edifice in the northern reaches of a Muslim majority country was something magnificent and, to me as an outsider from the West, shocking—ancient Hebrew text inscribed on the walls of the tomb.
And here is the actual burial site within the tomb, fenced off and covered by a green tarp. We never saw what the tarp covered.
While I was there a gaggle of very young Arab boys were playing in the courtyard. One of them came up to me wearing headphones plugged into some kind of device. He smiled large and motioned for me to listen to what he was listening to, so I took his headset and placed it in my ears.
I’ll never forget how shocked I was—again—when I heard explicit American gangsta’ rap music. I was immediately embarrassed, thinking, “This is what we’re exporting?” The boy thought I’d be pleased to hear what he was listening to, but I just shook my head, disappointing the kid’s expectations that I’d find it awesome. How could I affirm that garbage?
We left not knowing what would happen to the tomb, grateful to have visited but assuming we’d never see it again and that it would be completely lost before long.
Remarkably, as I was researching this post, I came across an article from September 2021 in The Times of Israel called, “Saving Iraq’s Tomb of Nahum, a secret mission resurrects Kurdistan’s Jewish past.”
For decades, the people of Alqosh, members of the Chaldean Catholic Church, guarded a shrine once revered by local Jews as the final resting place of Nahum of Elkosh. But on that day, the structure that lay before them was crumbling around a caved-in roof.
“The walls and pillars were cracked and crumbling. It looked like the rest of the building would collapse at any minute,” recalled Adam Tiffen, an American entrepreneur and project manager who had visited the site a year earlier and was there that day with the Israelis.
[…]
But according to Tiffen, the tomb was special. It had for generations resisted being turned into a church or mosque, and more recently had also been spared by Islamic State, which had not been so kind to the nearby Nabi Younus Tomb, believed to be where the prophet Jonah is buried, or a shrine in Mosul that some revere as the final resting place of the biblical Daniel.
“The synagogue was a beautiful and tangible reminder of the connection of the Jewish people to the land and their coexistence in the region with the Christian, Yazidi and Muslim communities for over a millennium,” Tiffen said.
“Given the recent sectarian violence and attacks by ISIS on religious minorities like the Christians and Yezidis, we also saw the restoration as a symbol of hope and a reminder of the common history and belief that we all share,” he went on. “Jews, Christians and Muslims coexisted in the region for hundreds or thousands of years. Perhaps not perfectly, but with a level of tolerance and acceptance that should not be forgotten.”
The whole article is worth the read if for no other reason than to appreciate the preservation efforts of a site connected to a biblical figure. And the photos included are spectacular, including close ups of the work.
Here’s a comparison between my first photo above and one taken from almost the same spot following the restoration 11 years after I was there:
In a region beset by so much violence, destruction and bloodshed—true to the ancient reputation of Ninevah as recorded by Nahum—it’s refreshing to see what has become of this historic Jewish and Christian site.