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Jonah and Nineveh: the prophet, the city and the sign

Jonah in the days of Jeroboam II, Nineveh's walls and ruins, the destroyed tomb of Jonah and the palace beneath it, the great fish, and the sign Jesus gave.

The Book of Jonah is set in real places at a real moment in history: a prophet from Galilee, the port of Joppa, and Nineveh, the great city of Assyria. Jesus Himself spoke of Jonah as a real man and of Nineveh's repentance as a real event.

Jonah, a real prophet

Jonah is not known only from his own book. 2 Kings records that King Jeroboam II won back Israel's lost territory, just as Jonah had foretold:

He restored the coast of Israel from the entering of Hamath unto the sea of the plain, according to the word of the LORD God of Israel, which he spake by the hand of his servant Jonah, the son of Amittai, the prophet, which was of Gathhepher. (2 Kings 14:25)

GotQuestions.org dates the book between 793 and 758 BC. Gath-hepher was a town of Zebulun in Galilee, only a few miles from Nazareth.

Nineveh, that great city

Nineveh stood on the east bank of the Tigris River, opposite modern Mosul in northern Iraq. A few decades after Jonah, King Sennacherib made it his capital and ringed it with a brick wall about 7.5 miles (12 km) around, with fifteen gates.

Jonah 3:3 calls it "an exceeding great city of three days' journey." GotQuestions.org notes that Austen Henry Layard, who rediscovered Nineveh, believed the city's full circuit matched that description; others take the phrase to include the surrounding district.

The ruins lie in two large mounds. On Kuyunjik, the northern mound, excavations beginning with Layard in the 1840s uncovered Sennacherib's palace and more than 30,000 clay tablets from the library of King Ashurbanipal. The southern mound is called Nebi Yunus, which means "Prophet Jonah", after an old mosque on top of it honoured as Jonah's tomb. Because of the shrine, that mound was hardly excavated. Whether Jonah was really buried there, no one can say.

The tomb destroyed, and a palace found

In July 2014, Islamic State militants blew up the shrine. After eastern Mosul was retaken in early 2017, archaeologists found that the militants had dug looting tunnels under the hill, right into an Assyrian royal palace untouched since ancient times. Iraqi officials identified it as a palace of King Esarhaddon, Sennacherib's son, with winged bulls and inscribed reliefs. It has not yet been properly studied.

Why Jonah ran

Assyria was Israel's most feared enemy. GotQuestions.org describes the Assyrians as a fierce and cruel nation that showed little mercy to those they conquered, and within a few decades of Jonah they carried the northern kingdom of Israel into exile.

So when God said, "Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it" (Jonah 1:2), Jonah "rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the LORD, and went down to Joppa" (Jonah 1:3). Joppa, today's Jaffa, was Jerusalem's main seaport. Tarshish was probably in southern Spain, more than 2,500 miles west, in the opposite direction from Nineveh. Jonah later admits why he ran: "Therefore I fled before unto Tarshish: for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil" (Jonah 4:2).

The great fish

"Now the LORD had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights" (Jonah 1:17). The Hebrew says simply "great fish"; the Greek word in Matthew means a great sea creature, which the King James translates "whale". GotQuestions.org takes the Bible's plain teaching: Jonah was truly swallowed and truly delivered, a real miracle by the God who made the sea. The key word is "prepared": nothing here happened by chance. And Jonah's prayer from the deep ends with the heart of the book: "Salvation is of the LORD" (Jonah 2:9).

Nineveh repents

Jonah's message was short: "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown" (Jonah 3:4). Yet the whole city, from the king down, fasted and put on sackcloth, and "God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way" (Jonah 3:10), and spared them.

Can history confirm this? Not directly: no Assyrian record found so far mentions Jonah. Some scholars, such as Donald Wiseman, have suggested a setting in the troubled reign of Ashur-dan III, when Assyrian records note an uprising in the city of Assur and a total eclipse of the sun on 15 June 763 BC. That is only a suggestion, not a proven link. Our confidence rests on God's Word, and on Jesus, who spoke of Nineveh's repentance as fact.

Nineveh's fall

Nineveh's repentance did not last. Generations later Nahum foretold the day when men would say, "Nineveh is laid waste: who will bemoan her?" (Nahum 3:7). In 612 BC the Babylonians and Medes besieged the city and destroyed it so thoroughly that its location was forgotten until excavators returned in the 1800s.

The sign of the prophet Jonas

When the scribes and Pharisees asked Jesus for a sign, He pointed them to Jonah:

An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas: For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh shall rise in judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: because they repented at the preaching of Jonas; and, behold, a greater than Jonas is here. (Matthew 12:39-41)

Jesus spoke of Jonah, the fish and Nineveh as real history, and He made them a picture of Himself. As GotQuestions.org explains, the sign of Jonah is His death, burial and resurrection. Jonah went down into the deep and came up again to preach; Jesus went down into the grave and rose again the third day. Now One greater than Jonah offers forgiveness to the whole world, and the words Jonah prayed from the belly of the fish are still true: "Salvation is of the LORD."

Sources

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