Are you better than Thebes: this is another rhetorical question, and again the implied answer is “No.” Good News Translation makes it explicit that the prophet is addressing Nineveh by including the name again here: “Nineveh, are you any better than Thebes, the capital of Egypt?” Or the sentence may be rendered as a statement by saying “Nineveh, you are no better than Thebes, the capital city of Egypt.” The words “the capital of Egypt” do not appear in the Hebrew but are included in Good News Translation to make explicit the location and importance of Thebes, which would otherwise be an unfamiliar name to most readers. In some languages “capital” will be rendered as “the most important city,” “the city where the king (or, chief) lives,” “the most important group of houses,” or even “the largest group of houses.” Thebes is in fact the Greek name for the city, which was situated on the River Nile about 650 kilometers (400 miles) south of Cairo, the present capital. In Hebrew the name is No-amon, as noted in the Revised Standard Version footnote (compare Bible de Jérusalem, Jerusalem Bible, New American Bible, New English Bible, New Jerusalem Bible). This means “the city under the care of the god Amon.” It was indeed a great city, perhaps the greatest of the ancient world. Its massive temple ruins can still be seen at the places today called Karnak and Luxor.
The city was on the east bank of the River Nile, hence the description that sat by the Nile. It will be helpful in some languages to translate “that is situated beside the River Nile.” The words with water around her are somewhat vague. So far as is known Thebes was not surrounded by the river or by canals. It is unlikely that Nahum had visited Thebes, and the description is probably based on hearsay and designed to emphasize a general similarity with Nineveh rather than to give precise details.
The last part of the verse speaks in two parallel phrases of the way in which the River Nile protected Thebes, just as the Tigris protected Nineveh. It says literally “whose rampart was the sea and her wall was of the sea” (Revised Version). The word translated rampart means an outer defense, while the word translated wall refers to the main fortification around a city. In saying that Thebes’ “rampart was the sea” (Revised Version), Nahum is referring to the River Nile, which was about a kilometer (half a mile) wide at that point. The Nile is referred to as “the sea” elsewhere also (see the Hebrew of Isa 18.2; 19.5). Good News Translation drops the distinction between outer and inner defenses and translates by a single, general term, “wall.”
And water her wall: in this line the Hebrew word for “sea” occurs in the traditional Hebrew text (Revised Version “of the sea”), but scholars usually assume different vowels, so that they read it as “waters” instead of “of the sea.” This does not change the meaning of the verse but gives better parallelism between the last two phrases of the verse, as seen in Revised Standard Version her rampart a sea, and water her wall (compare Bible de Jérusalem, Jerusalem Bible, New American Bible, New English Bible, New International Version).
Good News Translation drops the parallelism and restructures the sentence to give, first, a general statement emphasizing the similarity between Thebes and Nineveh, “She too had a river to protect her like a wall,” and second, a more detailed statement about Thebes, “the Nile was her defense.” In cultures which do not have cities protected by rivers, it will be necessary to expand the final part of the verse and say something like “The Nile River was around the city protecting it just like a wall.”
Nahum’s point in all this is that, in spite of her greatness, Thebes had not been able to avoid capture by the Assyrians. In the same way Nineveh, despite its greatness, will not be able to avoid capture by its attackers.
Quoted with permission from Clark, David J. & Hatton, Howard A . A Handbook on the Book of Nahum. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 1989. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .