Welcome to the Pauline Family's "Year of the Bible"! I'm reading the Bible clear through this year, and I invite you to read along with me. But first, let us pray:
Everlasting Father,
All time belongs to you, and all the ages. In signs, in songs, in words of promise, you reassured your chosen ones, “I am with you; fear not.” You taught them through the prophets to trust that your saving deeds were not limited to the past.
When Jesus came, he fulfilled “all that was written in the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms.”
The Church has found him everywhere in these same holy books.
Help me to find Jesus in my reading today, to listen to him, and to follow him with all my heart.
Amen.
Today's chapters are Micah 7 and Nahum 1-3.
It's another four-chapter day; Nahum is the second-shortest book in the Old Testament, so we may as well read it all at once!
Micah ends, as we have seen the other prophets do, in hope: "though I have fallen, I will arise." The closing prayer to God the shepherd is included in the Liturgy of the Hours. When you feel depressed by the weight of your own failures and sins, repeat Micah's declaration of faith in the God of compassion: "You will cast into the depths of the sea all our sins..." (7:18).
Nahum was from Judah, but he prophesied the fall of Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire that had conquered Samaria and taken perhaps 25,000 or more captives from the Northern Kingdom. They would never be heard from again.
Drs. Bergsma and Pitre (in A Catholic Introduction to the Bible: the Old Testament) recommend reading Nahum in tandem with Jonah, since both books show us prophecy addressed to the same wicked, world-conquering city of Nineveh. In Jonah, Nineveh repented--but it was not a lasting conversion. Nahum delivers the Lord's final judgment.
Start reading Micah here and Nahum here.
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