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 the wilderness."

"The north ..." Thus Zephaniah touches all the cardinal points of the compass. That anyone prior to the time when Assyria fell, about 612 B.C., would have dared to prophesy the destruction of so proud and powerful a city is simply incredible, from the human standpoint; and even Zephaniah did so only because he knew that he was declaring the true Word of God. Furthermore, all efforts to make it appear that such a thing as the fall of Assyria could have been calculated to take place merely upon the basis of astute political understanding are frustrated by the facts of the actual fall itself. On the night it fell, the king of Assyria declared a big banquet to celebrate the victory of the city over her besiegers. Neither the world of that day nor the Assyrians supposed that their fall was even possible. All allegations that the empire had been tottering for a decade or so, and that Zephaniah was aware of this are unhistorical speculations and manifestly untrue.

Zephaniah's reference to Assyria's being in the north, despite the fact of its actual situation northeast of Jerusalem should not be pressed. As Deane said, "Though this country lay to the northeast of Palestine, its armies attacked from the north; and it is usually spoken of as a northern power."[29]

The destruction of Assyria and the fulfillment of God's prophecies against that proud and wicked nation were fully discussed in our commentary on Nahum, above; and it is not necessary to add very much here.

"Dry like a wilderness ..." From the human standpoint, Zephaniah must have thought this prophecy was impossible of fulfillment, for Nineveh was situated upon the world-renowned Tigris river. But that did not prevent the sands of the desert rolling over the city within two brief decades of the date of Zephaniah's prophecy. Watts wrote: "Nineveh was destroyed in 612 B.C., about two decades after this was spoken."[30] Within only two hundred years, the very knowledge of Nineveh had faded from the earth:

"Her destruction was complete. Xenophon, passing the site in B.C. 401 was able to learn only that a great city had once occupied the spot and had been destroyed because Zeus had deprived its inhabitants of their wits!"[31]

Afterward, Nineveh disappeared even farther from the memory of mankind:

"The utter destruction of the Assyrian capital is a fact of history. It was so completely destroyed that its very location was lost to the memory of man until the nineteenth century when its was discovered by archeologists."[32]