“I will lift your skirts over your face”
I will lift your skirts over your face. I will show your nakedness to the nations and your shame to the kingdoms. (Nahum 3:5 BSB)
What it sounds like today
A crude, gratuitous image of stripping a woman.
The cultural key
This is jarring until read as the era's formal punishment of a woman convicted of sexual sin. Nahum has just cast Nineveh as a harlot, 'the seductive mistress of sorcery, who betrays nations by her prostitution' (3:4), luring and enslaving peoples by her allure and treachery. Her sentence is described in matching terms: to have her skirts flipped up over her face and her nakedness exposed 'to the nations' was a recognized act of public disgrace inflicted on an adulteress or prostitute, total, humiliating exposure before a watching crowd. The point is poetic justice: the empire that seduced and shamed others will herself be stripped and shamed before all the kingdoms she once dominated, then pelted with filth and made 'a spectacle.' The same shaming imagery falls on Jerusalem (Jeremiah 13:26) and Babylon (Isaiah 47:3). Knowing it is a judicial humiliation, not gratuitous cruelty, reveals the fitting reversal at its heart.
Recovered meaning
Lifting the skirts over the face is the public shaming of a convicted harlot, and Nineveh is that harlot. The empire that seduced and betrayed the nations is stripped and disgraced before those same nations, a fitting reversal of her crimes.