In Search of the Divine Council: An Alternative Reading of the Book of Nahum

This article addresses the long-recognised problem of the repeated shifts between grammatical persons and numbers in the Book of Nahum. While this phenomenon has been widely noted in scholarship, a variety of explanations have been proposed without reaching a clear consensus. The present study offers an alternative approach by proposing that the Book of Nahum may be read as containing a scene of the divine council. To this end, the article first establishes a set of criteria for identifying divine council scenes, which are then systematically applied to the text of Nahum. The study concludes that such a reading is not only plausible but also provides a coherent explanation for the shifts between grammatical persons and numbers, while at the same time accounting for other literary and theological features of the Book.