Nahum 3:18

Thy shepherds - that is, they who should counsel for the people' s good and feed it, and "keep watch over their flocks by night," but are now like their master, the "King of Assyria," are his shepherds not the shepherds of the people whom they care not for; these slumber, at once through listlessness and excess, and now have fallen asleep in death, as the Psalmist says, "They have slept their sleep" Psalms 76:6. The prophet speaks of the future, as already past in effect, as it was in the will of God. All "the shepherds of the people" , all who could shepherd them, or hold them to together, themselves sleep "the sleep of death;" their mighty men dwelt in that abiding-place, where they shall not move or rise, the grave; and so as Micaiah, in the vision predictive of Ahab' s death, "saw all Israel scattered on the hills, as sheep that have not a shepherd" I Kings 22:17, so the people of the Assyrian monarch shall be "scattered on the mountains," shepherdless, and that irretrievably; no man gathers them.