All defence is vain. The prophet describes the last scene. The gates of the rivers shall be (are) opened. The simplest explanation of this much disputed clause is, according to Strauss and others, the following: The gates intended are those adjacent to the streams which encircled the city, and which were therefore the best defended and the hardest to capture.
When these were carried, there was no way of escape for the besieged. But, as Rosenmuller remarks, it would have been an act of folly in the enemy to attack just that part of the city which was most strongly defended by nature and art.
We are, therefore, induced to take "the gates of the rivers," not literally, but as a metaphorical expression (like "the windows of heaven," Genesis 7:1 l; Isaiah 24:18) for an overwhelming flood, and to see in this a reference to the fact mentioned by Diod.
Sic. (2.27), that the capture of Nineveh was owing to a great and unprecedented inundation, which destroyed a large portion of the fortifications, and laid the city open to the enemy. "At the northwest angle of Nineveh," says Professor Rawlinson, "there was a sluice or flood gate, intended mainly to keep the water of the Khosr-su, which ordinarily filled the city moat, from flowing off too rapidly into the Tigris, but probably intended also to keep back the water of the Tigris, when that stream rose above its common level.
A sudden and great rise in the Tigris would necessarily endanger this gate, and if it gave way beneath the pressure, a vast torrent of water would rush up the moat along and against the northern wall, which may have been undermined by its force, and have fallen in".
The suggestion that the course of its rivers was diverted, and that the enemy entered the town through the dried channels, has no historical basis. Dr. Pusey explains the term to mean the gates by which the inhabitants had access to the rivers.
But these would be well guarded, and the open. ing of them would not involve the capture of the city, which the expression in the text seems to imply. The LXX. gives, πόλεων διηνοίχθησαν, "The gates of the cities were opened."
The palace shall be (is) dissolved; or, melteth away. Some take this to signify that the hearts of the in. habitants melt with fear, or the royal power vanishes in terror. That the clause is to be taken literally, to denote the destruction of the royal palace by the action of the waters, seems to be negatived by the fact that the Assyrian palaces were built on artificial mounds of some thirty or forty feet in elevation, composed of sun-dried bricks united into a solid mass, and were thus secured from the effects of an inundation.
There is evidence, too, that fire played a great part in the destruction of the temples and palaces (see note on Nahum 3:13).