The trauma of war: reflecting on aspects of fear, loss, but also disempowerment of the enemy (hope) in the Book of Nahum

Abstract

There should be no dispute that war causes trauma. In this article, the Nahum text serves as an example of how people suffering the threat of war experience trauma because of oppression, fear, and loss. To facilitate the discussion, a selection of texts was made and analysed to show how the Assyrian threat and invasion resulted in trauma for the people of Judah. A literary, contextual, and historical methodology was applied to analyse the selected text passages. Besides this analysis of the selected texts, affect theory in conjunction with a trauma approach was utilised as a framework to engage with these texts. This combined approach offered a new and exciting lens focussing on emotions. Affect theory is an emerging area of study where aspects such as emotion, culture, and textual bodies become important as impetus in the study of the Hebrew text (cf. Cottrill, 2014: 432). The exercise performed in this article not only enriched the engagement of the Nahum text but showed the relevance of the research for current situations of war and the resulting effects of trauma.