Damien Mackey
Summer 2007

Modern biblical criticism can sometimes resemble an all-devouring sea monster, and this is no more apparent than in the case of the historical Jonah whom it has attempted to gobble up and then spit out devoid of any of his real substance. The following words of the prophet Jeremiah, spoken on behalf of Jerusalem, can be applied to this attempted transformation of the historical Jonah into an 'empty shell' of his former self: a 'fiction' (cf. Jeremiah 51:34):

"King Nebuchedrezzar of Babylon has devoured me, He has crushed me; He has made me an empty vessel, He has swallowed me like a [sea] monster; he has filled his belly with my delicacies, he has spewed me out …".

The attempted transformation of the C8th BC prophet Jonah from real to imaginary, though, is only the final stage of what has in fact been a long process of, largely unwitting, 'devouring and crushing' of the original Jonah. Although the complete Jonah has been 'writ large' in the Sacred Scriptures for all to read now for many, many centuries, the ability of scholars to piece it all together seems to have faded away long ago. Jonah is, as I said, actually represented by four Old Testament books, but he is 'known' today from only one. Thus the real Jonah has been 'compressed' beyond recognition; very much like that mass of whale food in one particular case (see p. 60), whose bulk was estimated to have been "equal to the bodies of six stout men compressed into one!"

Admittedly there are significant difficulties in regard to this most intriguing subject of Jonah. I have already referred to the chronological problem that had led to the rabbis actually proposing two real Jonahs. And I shall need to have quite a lot more to say about the chronology of it all. At least, though, the rabbis did not abandon the notion of a real Jonah, to replace it with a fiction. They simply doubled the man.

But, today, even a real Jonah is denied!

Let us now put aside any pre-conceived notions of the prophet Jonah that we might have, and try to determine, from Scripture, answers to the sorts of questions that the mariners had asked of Jonah during the storm at sea: who was Jonah? from whence did he hail? and what was his history? (cf. Jonah 1:8). In other words, let us allow the Sacred Scriptures to help us to piece together again the real Jonah.

1. The Traditions

Though both Jewish and Christian tradition, generally speaking, had long considered the Book of Jonah to be the account of an actual historical event, that view began to change about a century and a half ago. And by now the wheel has turned full circle. For, today, it is very difficult to find any biblical scholars in support of the view that the Book of Jonah is a true account.

Whilst many will still maintain that the story's hero, "Jonah son of Amittai", may have been a real person, based on mention of that prophet also in 2 Kings 14:25, as a contemporary of king Jeroboam II of Israel (early-mid C8th BC), they will deny that the Book of Jonah is an actual account of what might have happened to that particular holy man. The story, they say, is merely a "parable"; or an "historical or didactic fiction", or a "symbolical narrative", resting on a tradition of a real prophet.

Whatever appellation one might wish to give to the book, the bottom line at least is that it is, according to the modern view, a "fiction".

Moreover, such commentators maintain, the Book of Jonah must have been written centuries after the life of Jonah son of Amittai of the C8th BC. It was written, they say, about 400 BC, or even as late as 200 BC. The current situation is summed up by Christian writer Bill Cooper - who personally believes, in accordance with tradition, that Jonah himself wrote the book - when he laments:

... today we are informed that Jonah did not even exist! The book of Jonah, we are asked to believe, is nothing more than a pious fable, a moral tale written some time after the return of the Jews from the Babylonian Exile; a story told around camp-fires that has all the historical validity of a Grimm's fairy-tale.

Unfortunately, and not without incalculable loss, this latest view has prevailed. Most modern Christian (and Jewish) authors will, if they mention Jonah at all, speak of him only in terms of parable and myth, usually in tones that amount to little less than an apology. Very few indeed, and I personally know of none, will attempt to speak of Jonah in a purely historical sense.

What is particularly curious is that Christians, too, have come to accept this non-traditional point of view, despite the fact that Jesus Christ himself had spoken about Jonah in real terms, even with reference to his own Resurrection from the dead. In fact I was prompted to write this article after a clergyman had recently, in a homily on Jonah, argued the contemporary view that the Book of Jonah was written "in C5th BC post-exilic times", when Israel was "having trouble with her enemies", and that it was "a didactic fiction". Cooper goes so far as to call this situation "sinister":

There is, indeed, something very sinister about the out-of-hand way in which Jonah is dismissed from serious discussion by modernist critics and historians. This sinister aspect has, perhaps, to do with the fact that Jesus spoke of Jonah in a historical sense, and He referred to Jonah in direct reference to His own forthcoming resurrection from the dead. Could it be, perhaps, that if modernists can cast doubt upon the historicity of Jonah, then they will have license to cast doubt upon the words and teachings of Jesus Christ and the truth of His resurrection? The two are intimately connected, and any dismissal of the historicity of Jonah should be treated with a great deal of suspicion.

I agree that, for a Christian at least, there are serious ramifications in denying the historicity of the Book of Jonah; though contemporary Christians often seem to be quite oblivious to the implications of their doing so. Jesus Christ appealed to the narrative as genuine history (cf. Matthew 12:39-41), and this really should settle the issue for all who have any regard for the Saviour's deity. His words were blunt and unequivocal. They are specifically recorded by two Evangelists, Matthew and Luke. Let us consider these together side by side:

The Pharisees came and began to argue with him, seeking from him a sign from heaven, to test him. And he sighed deeply in his spirit, and said, 'Why does this generation seek a sign? Truly, I say too you, no sign shall be given to this generation'.

And for John, this entry is given (6:30):

So they said to him. 'Then what sign do you do, that we may see, and believe you? What work do you perform?'

There is indisputably a long enduring Jewish-Christian tradition according to which the story of Jonah was a genuine historical account. According to D. Hart-Davies, writing in 1925: "Jewish tradition, in one unbroken line, testifies to a belief in the historical character of the book …".

And: "… the Christian Church, with remarkable unanimity has confirmed the Jewish tradition …". By contrast, Hart-Davies would give the modern opinion:

Such, however, is not the view which is generally held by modern theologians. The allegorical interpretation is widely accepted. Many treat the narrative as a fiction, with or without a very slight framework of history to rest upon. By many the non-historical character of the book is regarded as indisputable. A writer who ventures to maintain the opposite runs the risk of meeting, in certain quarters, with ridicule or invective. Sir George Adam Smith thus declaims:"How long, O Lord, must Thy poetry suffer from those who can only treat it as prose? On whatever side they stand, skeptical or orthodox, they are equally pedants, quenchers of the spiritual, creators of unbelief" ….

But, responded Hart-Davies, a fervent believer in the book's historicity:

A strong case, surely, does not require to be buttressed by the immoderate terms of such an apostrophe. For it must not be forgotten that the great majority of Hebraists and theologians of the Church Universal, from Jerome and Augustine to Pusey and Perowne, are included in the compass of the distinguished professor's denunciation.

Estimates regarding the duration of the virtually universal acceptance of the historical character of the Book of Jonah range from 1800 years to "at least twenty-one centuries". The matter really depends upon a determination of its date of authorship, its terminus a quo. (See 2. Authorship and Date). We know the approximate terminus ante quem, when what Hart-Davies called the "unbroken" tradition, was broken. I shall return to this on p. 10.

It is, as I said at the start of this section, an extremely long tradition. The antiquity of the tradition, and the force of ancient Christians' enthusiasm for the story of Jonah, is borne out in this statement by Hart-Davies:

The Catacombs in Rome bear striking evidence of the belief of the early Christians. No Biblical subject was more popular for mural and sarcophagi representation, in those underground cemeteries of the disciples of Jesus, than that of Jonah's submergence and deliverance as a symbol of faith and hope in the resurrection.

"The history of Jonas [Jonah] having been put forward so emphatically by our Lord Himself, as a type both of His own and of the general resurrection, it is not to be wondered at that it should have held the first place among all the subjects from the Old Testament represented in the Catacombs. It was continually repeated in every kind of monument connected with the ancient Christian cemeteries; in the frescoes on the walls, on the bas-reliefs of the sarcophagi, on lamps and medals, and glasses, and even on the ordinary gravestones. Christian artists, however, by no means confined themselves to that one scene in the life of the prophet in which he foreshadowed the resurrection, viz., his three days' burial in the belly of the fish, and his deliverance from it, as it were from the jaws of the grave. The other incident of his life was painted quite as commonly, viz., his lying 'under the shadow of the booth covered with ivy on the east side of the city' for refreshment and rest; or again, his misery and discontent, as he lay in the same place, when the sun was beating upon his head and the ivy had withered away".

…. Jerome … wrote a commentary on it; and the sermons and writings of Irenaeus, Augustine, Chrysostom, and other Fathers, abound in references which show conclusively that their belief in the historicity of Jonah was unquestioned. A long and bitter controversy was waged between Jerome and Augustine as to the nature of the plant which overshadowed the prophet; but, as to the historical character of the narrative itself, they were absolutely agreed.

…. Hart-Davies appended an interesting footnote to this section; one which demonstrates how well instructed in Scripture were at least the early African Christians.

When the bishop who read the lesson changed the word cucurbita(a gourd) into hedera (ivy), "the whole congregation", he wrote, "protested, and would not allow the lection to proceed till the word to which they were accustomed was adopted". Now, imagine what might have been the reaction of these ancient Christians had they heard from the pulpit, as I did this very year, that Jonah was a "didactic fiction", written in "C5th BC post-exilic times", and that it is only according to an appreciation of such a genre that one might be able to formulate an answer to a school child's simple question: "Was Jonah really in the belly of the whale?" It is all a matter of genre, we are told.

The Jewish Tradition

E. König, who, as we shall read on p. 10 below, regarded the Book of Jonah as a "symbolical narrative", admitted though in relation to the following Jewish traditions:

The history of Jonah is, however, conceived as non-symbolical when into the mouth of Tobit … are put the words … [pepeismai hosa elalisen Ionas ho prophitis peri Nineui] (To 14:4), and … [pantos estai ha elalisen ho prophitis Ionas] (v. 8). Philo, too, regarded the story of Jonah as non-symbolical, for he took pains to explain the marvel of the fish (Orat. de Jona, § 16, 21). The same interpretation is followed in 3 Mac[cabees] 6:8 (cf. König, Einleitung. p. 483) and in Jos[ephus]. Ant. JX. x. 2 … [who] reproduces the whole contents of the Book of Jonah, with the exception of the displeasure of Jonah at the sparing of Nineveh. So also in the Mishna, Ta'anit ii. 1, † Bab. Ta'anit 15a, Nedarim 38a, where … [vayyittayn s^echarah] … (Jon 1:3) is incorrectly understood as if Jonah had paid the price of the whole ship …. and had thus, in contrast to Amos, been a wealthy man. …. The non-symbolical … interpretation of the story of Jonah is the predominating one also among the Christians of the earlier centuries (cf., inter alios, Justin Martyr, Dialog. c. Tryph. cap. 107).

Before continuing with König's discussion here, I wish to make some comments in relation to the above quote that will immediately enable me to commence my restoration of the prophet Jonah and his history; a picture to be properly developed and brought to completion in 3. Jonah in his Full Dimension.

König had at least conceded that an early Jewish tradition, namely the Book of Tobit (written no later than c. 200 BC even by modern estimates), presented Jonah in terms that suggest historicity. Now, in my New Revised Standard Version (1993) of Tobit 14:4, the name "Jonah" is substituted by the name, "Nahum".

It is universally presumed that Nahum was an Israelite prophet quite distinct from Jonah, though also concerned with Assyria, but living about a century after the prophet Jonah. Since, however, a comparison of different versions of the Book of Tobit might well suggest that Jonah and Nahum are interchangeable, and since Jonah/Nahum had Assyria as his primary subject, then ought there not perhaps to have been some debate as to whether Jonah might in fact have been Nahum?

Seemingly common to Jonah/Nahum, too, is the linguistic element, NAH; though it needs to be noted that in the Hebrew the 'h' (he) in Jonah (Yonah) is a letter different from the 'ch' (het) in Nahum (Nachum). The name "Nahum" does have affinities with "Noah", which may be interesting given a possible equation of Nahum with Jonah: a Noah-type at least in regard to his experiencing an extraordinary maritime adventure.

The New Testament, too, interchanges the name "Jonah", but, in this case, with the name, "John" (Hebrew Yohanan, meaning "Yahweh is gracious"). Thus we read in "Jona[h", in The Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Bible [hereafter TEDB]:

J[onah] the father of Simon Peter, who is addressed by Jesus in Mt 16,17 as Bar-Jona[h], which is Aramaic for "son of J." However, in Jn 1,42; 21,15ff the father of Simon Peter is called John, which in Hebrew and Aramaic would be Yōhānān. Although it was rather common in those days for men in Palestine to have two names, one Hebrew (or Aramaic) and the other Greek, it is unlikely that a man would have two different Hebrew (or Aramaic) names. Perhaps Jona[h] is a contracted form of Johanan, John ….

The name "Nahum" also appears to be interchanged with "Rehum" in Ezra, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia [hereafter CE]:

The Hebrew name, probably in the intensive form, Nahhum, signifies primarily "full of consolation or comfort", hence "consoler" (St. Jerome, consolator), or "comforter". The name Nahum was apparently of not rare occurrence. Indeed, not to speak of a certain Nahum listed in the Vulgate and Douay Version (Nehemiah 7:7) among the companions of Zorobabel, and whose name seems to have been rather Rehum (Ezra 2:2; Heb. has Rehum in both places [500]), St. Luke mentions in his genealogy of Our Lord a Nahum, son of Hesli and father of Amos (iii, 25) ….

I well appreciate that there are some notable difficulties to be associated with any attempt to equate Jonah with Nahum. For instance:

(a) to Jonah and Nahum are ascribed apparently different geographical locations or homes (respectively, Gather-hepher and El-kosh); and there is
(b) the apparent chronological discrepancy (a separation of 1-2 centuries); and also
(c) the consideration that 'they' are regarded canonically as being two separate prophets amongst the so-called "Twelve Minor Prophets".

These points will be considered later. König had also, in his discussion of the Jewish tradition of the Book of Jonah, indicated that the prophet "Amos" had been "[not] a wealthy man". I shall be arguing in 3. that this Amos was in fact the same person as the "Amittai", said to be the father of Jonah (cf. 2 Kings 14:25; Jonah 1:1]. The family, as it happens, was (or at least became) quite wealthy, and was of a high status in Israel.

Now, any link between Amos and Amittai has implications also for the prophet Isaiah, who was a "son of Amos" (Isaiah 1:1); generally presumed to have been the same as the prophet Amos (var. Amoz). Thus my first tentative piecing together again of Jonah and his history are these equations:

Amittai = Amos (Amoz)
Jonah = Nahum

König will go on to make a point reflecting on chronology; one that will be of great significance later on (in 3. & 4.) as we come to discuss the period of floruit of Jonah, and his age. At the same time König will tell of the Jewish tradition that the Assyrian king in the Book of Jonah was "Osnappar" (var. As[e]napper), whom König would tentatively equated with a known neo-Assyrian king, "Assurbanipal" (var. Ashurbanipal):

Jewish tradition, however, contains also the information that the history contained in the Book of Jonah was enacted in the reign of Osnappar (Ezr 4:10) [Assurbanipal?], and, seeing that the date of Jeroboam II, and that of Osnappar were different, the rabbinical tradition spoke of two Jonahs, of whom the first was of the tribe of Zebulun and the second of the tribe of Asher (see, further, Fürst, Der Kanon d. AT nach d. Ueberlief. in Talm. und Midrasch, p. 33 f.).

The essential chronological problem in relation to Jonah is here stated.

We are told by the writer of 2 Kings 14:25 that "Jonah son of Amittai" had preached in the time of king Jeroboam II; whilst the Jewish tradition just referred to has it that "Jonah son of Amittai" of the Book of Jonah had preached to Nineveh in the reign of one As[e]napper.

Now, candidates for As[e]napper are actually limited by scholars to either Ashurbanipal, or his father, Esarhaddon. Thus R. North's comment would be typical, when he writes: "Osnappar may be intended as a rendition of Ashurbanipal (669-633), but might also be referred to Esarhaddon". J. Bright stated directly that: "Osnappar is Asshurbanapal". (We are going to find that there is much confusion amongst the ancients between Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal). Ashurbanipal is indeed the very neo-Assyrian monarch whom I shall be identifying in 4. as "the king of Nineveh" (Jonah 3:6), who would convert as a result of Jonah's preaching. Thus our next possible clue becomes:

"King of Nineveh" = Ashurbanipal

Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal though are well removed in time from king Jeroboam II of Israel. Whilst the latter belonged to the early-mid C8th BC (c. 783-743 BC), the two neo-Assyrian kings belonged to the early-late C7th BC; Esarhaddon (c. 680-669 BC) and Ashurbanipal (c. 668-627 BC). [These however are all conventional dates, the necessary revision of which I shall be proposing in this article, especially in 3. and 4.].

That would make of Jonah a very old prophet indeed!

So, when did what Hart-Davies had called the "unbroken" tradition of the historicity of the Book of Jonah become broken?

Whilst there were probably individual dissenters from the solid tradition down the centuries, what one might call an actual 'movement of dissent' from the tradition appears to have begun in the late C19th, perhaps with the Graf-Wellhausen school (in the 1880's). S. Driver's early view that the Book of Jonah belonged to the C5th BC was criticized by J. McGarvey back in 1896. And König's commentary on "Jonah" dates back to 1899 (see footnote 12). König could even then make the modern claim that the Book of Jonah was "symbolical", and that it was written "in the post-exilic period". Thus:

… The formal character of the Book of Jonah.

- Notwithstanding that the book may rest upon a tradition about Jonah, yet the essential character of the book consists in this, that it belongs to the category of symbolical narratives. ….

… The Date of the Book.

- This symbolical narrative was written, not in the 8th cent., but in the post-exilic period.

Likewise, TEDB (some six decades later than König) would claim that the book was a "parable", but based on a real prophet, viz., "Jonah son of Amittai":

"The author of the Book of Jona[h] used this prophet as the protagonist of the parable which forms the story of this book …".

And, regarding the book's authorship, TEDB tells:

… The old opinion, that this book, even in present state, was written by the prophet Jonah himself, who lived at the time of Jeroboam II, is now abandoned by almost all exegetes, even the most conservative …. The date of its author is put after the Babylonian exile, or more precisely, c. 400 B.C. (Robinson) [TEDB also gives for supporters of this date: van Hoonacker, Tobac, Dennefeld, Goettsberger, Chaine, Lippl] or between 400 and 200 B.C. (Weiser) … according to Cornely-Merk it must be at least after 600 B.C.

Incredibly, Hart-Davies will in fact find a critic in support of each several century for the authorship of the Book of Jonah, from the C8th right through to the C2nd: namely, Pusey: 8th; Kleinert: 7th; Ewald: 6th; Driver: 5th; Orelli: 4th; Vatke: 3rd; Hitzig: 2nd.

It is a hopeless confusion!

Under the heading of "Literary Genre", TEDB will admit that: "Of old both Jewish (cfr. 3Mc 6, 8; Ant. 9,10,2) and Christian exegesis took the historicity of Jon[ah] for granted". And König will testify: "… that [the Book of Jonah's] canonicity was doubted in earlier times there is no evidence".

J. McGowan has echoed instead the more recent, non-traditional views about the Book of Jonah:

…. Commentators who have interpreted the book as an historical narrative identify Jonah with the 8th-cent. prophet mentioned in 2 Kgs 14:25 and consider him to be the author of the book. However, the majority of scholars today deny Jonah's authorship and date the book between 400 and 200 B.C.

And:

…. If the book is studied in relation to its life setting in post-exilic Israel … if it is examined with sources on which it seems to depend, and if it is analyzed in its outer stylistic form, this composition appears to have the characteristics of didactic fiction rather than historical narrative.

Whatever be the case, it is certainly not historical according to McGowan: "Although scholars differ as to the term that should be used in determining the literary form of Jon[ah], they would agree that the book is not to be classified as history".

The key matter that must be settled is this: Is the Book of Jonah fact or fiction?

One might argue, for instance, (a) that it is factual, but that it was written late after having been passed down the generations by oral tradition. Such, however, does not appear to be a common approach amongst those who do attribute late authorship to the book. These rather, as we have read, (b) think that the story is a "fiction" of one kind or another, but based on a real prophet; and they would strenuously deny that the most colourful features in the story (e.g. the 'storm' and 'fish' incidents, and the 'mass conversion of the Ninevites') had ever actually occurred in relation to this prophet - or indeed for anyone. Or one might insist, as has traditionally been the case, (c) that the C8th BC prophet was a real person, and that the events narrated in the story are a true account of what had happened to him. And that either he or a contemporary of his wrote the account of it.

Conclusion to 1. The Traditions

For more than one and a half millennia the Book of Jonah had enjoyed the support of an almost unanimous tradition of historicity, both Jewish and Christian, with very little dissent from this view. That tradition though began to come under serious assault from biblical commentators apparently in the later C19th. These eventually managed to replace the traditional view so effectively that, today, in the early C21st, one will find hardly any commentator at all to support the traditional view that the Book of Jonah relates real historical events.

2. Authorship and Date

As we have seen, the consideration of the authorship of the Book of Jonah is tied up closely with the question of its historicity. I shall now consider more critically the issues of when the book was likely to have been written, and by whom it may have been written.

TEDB's very brief list of reasons as to why "the old opinion" of the Jonah of the time of Jeroboam II (C8th BC), as author of the book, can no longer be sustained, namely: "Because of 3,3 ("Nineve[h] was an enormously large city", hence, it no longer exists), because of its many Aramaisms, and because of its main teaching (the universality of salvation) …" , is well exceeded in detail by König's earlier analysis of "Jonah". Thus:

(a) Literary arguments. The story contains no positive trace that it attributed itself to Jonah. On the contrary, the book speaks of Jonah in the third person everywhere except in the oratio directa of 1:9 2:3ff. etc. Of course the circumstance that in any writing a name is used in the third person, is no sure sign that that writing proceeds from a different author (cf. König, Einleitung, p. 314:4 on Is 7). But, all the same, it is not without significance that Hosea, who opens with the third person, in the further course of his story passes to the use of the first person; cf. 'Then spake J[ehovah]" to me' (Hos 3:1-3) with 'Then came the word of J" to Jonah' (Jon 3:1 etc).

(b) Linguistic indications. The Book of Hosea shows what phase of development the Heb[rew] language had reached in the Northern kingdom [i.e. Israel] in the 8th cent. But the linguistic character of the Book of Jonah is quite different from this. In Hosea the occurrences of anokhī to anī [Hebrew words for "I", "I myself"] are as 11:11, whereas in Jonah the ratio is 2 (1:9;3:2) :5 (1:9, 12; 2:5, 10; 4:11) ….

König would go on to give other, similar linguistic examples, before then writing:

The notion of 'command' (verb) does not occur at all in Hosea, but it is difficult to imagine that he would have expressed it by [minnah] (Jon 2:1; 4:6-8; I Ch 9:29, Dn 1:5. 10f. [Aram.], Ezr 7::25 etc.), for he expresses 'command' (noun) by [tsav] (5:11) and not by [ta'am] (Jon 3:7 [Aram.], Ezr 4:19 etc., Dn 3:10 etc.) …. Taking all this into account, it is an unnatural supposition that the author of the Book of Jonah should have exhibited all the above-mentioned linguistic features to a reader of the 8th cent. B.C. He must have belonged to a period when the written language of the Israelites had already come into close contact with the Aramaic.

König did well I think (according to the knowledge that he had) to consider a comparison between the language of Jonah and that of Hosea, who was, like Jonah, a contemporary of Jeroboam II of Israel (cf. 2 Kings 4:23-25; Hosea 1:1); and also to contrast the language of Hosea with that of the post-exilic Daniel and Ezra. However, if Jonah had had such a long floruit as I am tentatively proposing - from king Jeroboam II to Ashurbanipal - then one would need to establish (as I hope to do in this article) at what point in time during this fairly substantial phase of history the Book of Jonah was actually written - if indeed it were written during this period. Not only was the prophet Jonah a contemporary of Hosea's, I shall in fact be suggesting that he was the very same person as Hosea. That this was just the one prophet. (Note e.g. the parallelism between Hosea 1:2; 3:1 and Jonah 1:1; 3:1). Next restorative step:

Jonah = Hosea.

The prophet Jonah had, as I shall be arguing, an extremely long ministry, as we know Hosea to have had: in the latter case, from Jeroboam II to Hezekiah of Judah (Hosea 1:1). Isaiah too, about whom I have already raised implications for Jonah, due to a possible connection through Amos = Amittai, also had a long ministry, similar to that mentioned for Hosea (cf. Isaiah 1:1). [As I shall be showing on p. 46, the names "Isaiah" and "Hosea" are extremely similar, both being built on the same Hebrew root word for "salvation". On the other hand the name "Jonah" (whose person I would equate with Hosea/Isaiah), bears no resemblance to these names]. Now this period of prophetic ministry, from kings Jeroboam II to Hezekiah, connects, at the one end, Jonah's mission to Jeroboam II, and, at the other end, approximately, Jonah's mission to As[e]napper at Nineveh; given that king Hezekiah of Judah was a contemporary of, at least, Esarhaddon, father of Ashurbanipal (one of these latter two Assyrian kings being As[e]napper).

It would be extraordinary if a country so small as Israel had even two prophets of so exceptionally long a period of prophetic ministry, acting contemporaneously. Yet Israel appears to have had three: namely, Isaiah, Hosea & Jonah. But I believe, and am arguing, that this was just the one prophet, preaching from the time of Jeroboam II of Israel right through to at least Hezekiah of Judah (and hence to well within the neo-Assyrian period).

Admittedly our prophet must have been, by the end of his ministry, a very old man by any calculation. C. Boutflower had discussed Isaiah as an old, reflective prophet, and this already in relation to Isaiah's earlier chapters, namely, 24-27. And this fact of a long life/ministry may not be without significance in relation to the linguistic queries against Jonah's authorship as raised above. It is quite plausible that the language used early in the career of the prophet (i.e., in the time of Jeroboam II) might have undergone significant variation by the latter phase of it (i.e., in the time of Hezekiah). Boutflower had in fact contrasted Isaiah prior to his chapters 24-27, with the Isaiah of 24-27, "an old man":

This is indicated by certain peculiarities of style which have often been noticed; such as "an accumulation of almost synonymous words and phrases to enhance the effect", "a threefold variation of phrase, a characteristic repetition of words, and a fondness for rhymed endings and for accumulated alliterations". All these are looked upon by the critic as "indications of later style". …. I suggest that they are indications that the writer is an old man, and that these very features, which appear more sparsely in the prophet's earlier writings and are here met with in abundance, are characteristic of the copiousness and prolixity of age, and are also well suited to the wide, far reaching visions in which they find a place.

Boutflower was at pains, however, to show that these later chapters (24-27) still pertain to the same author as he who wrote the earlier part of Isaiah (1-23), and so he drew up a fairly detailed list of comparisons (his "points of contact") between these two parts. And so, whilst König might well have been right when saying that "The Book of Hosea shows what phase of development the Heb[rew] language had reached in the Northern kingdom [i.e. Israel] in the 8th cent.", contrasting it with the language in the Book of Jonah, the language may in fact have changed significantly by the time that Hosea, as Jonah (according to my tentative view), actually went to Nineveh (closer to the C7th BC).

A far more radical difference still appears to distinguish Isaiah 1-39 from Isaiah 40-66. So different seemingly is the tone and language of chapters 1-39, from that of chapters 40-66, that scholars now speak of a 'Deutero-Isaiah' (or 'Second Isaiah'); whilst some, following B. Duhm (1892), attribute chapters 56-66 to a 'Trito-Isaiah' (or 'Third Isaiah'). "[Deutero-Isaiah] probably belonged to an Isaian school of religious thought …", wrote C. Stuhlmueller with reference to Isaiah 8:16.

15 Now, whilst there do appear to be evidences (linguistic, historical, chronological, even theological) in favour of this splitting up of the Book of Isaiah into two, or even three, parts, such a concept again goes directly against a long-established tradition. I refer, in this case, to the tradition that the entire Book of Isaiah is a unity, and was written by the prophet Isaiah. It is in fact the situation of Jonah all over again: first the prophet was 'split into two', so to speak, and then he was further 'dissected' (compare 'Trito-Isaiah'). The Book of Isaiah here discussed can illustrate how radically the language can change in the space of a long lifetime. Or even in the space of the one, single book, given Stuhlmueller's following comment on the presumed 'Deutero-Isaiah': "The Prophet's virtuosity is displayed in a rich vocabulary; almost 40 words occur, not found elsewhere in his writings (ch. 40, however, contains 50 to 60 such words, 8 in v. 12 alone)".

I have begun to develop a completely new scenario (at least from any modern view) according to which the prophet Isaiah is to be identified with the prophet Nahum. Towards the very end of this article (see 'The Nahum Factor', beginning on p. 81), I hope to be able to show in some detail that the Book of Nahum is in fact pure Isaiah. What may be most interesting, then, about so-called 'Deutero-Isaiah' (chapters 40-66) - that seems like such a new beginning by comparison with Isaiah 1-39 - in light of the name "Nahum" meaning "Comfort", is that chapter 40 actually begins with an emphasis on God's comforting, and his mercy. "Comfort, O comfort my people" (40:1). According to Stuhlmueller again: "This double imperative is the first of many (51:9, 17; 52:1; 57:14). A tone of mercy joined to a majestic style sets the pace for this entire ensemble of poems". And the "comfort" theme continues right to the end (49:13; 51:3, 19; 52:9; 54:11; 57:18; 61:2; 66:13; cf. Nahum 3:7). If I am correct in my tentative view that Jonah/Nahum is Isaiah, then Isaiah chapter 40 may represent the approximate point (late) in the prophet's writings where Isaiah, so to speak, 'began to become Nahum', "the Comforter" or "the Comforted One", perhaps with a change of name to "Nahum".

In 3. we are going to read in fact that the name assigned to our 'composite' prophet, and even the names of his children, had intended allegorical significance notably for Israel. And that these names did actually undergo a change, at least once, to correspond with changed prophetic circumstances.

["Yahweh comforts" (meaning of 'Nahum') may perhaps not be inharmonious with the name 'John', "Yahweh is gracious", if 'Jonah' were indeed a 'contracted form' of that name ('John'). I shall further be considering this name 'John', in a Jonah context, in 4., p. 64].

To insist that our 'composite' prophet (as Jonah) was already an old man would mean that, according to the conventional chronology that has Nahum living about a hundred to two hundred years after Jonah, to identify the already-old Jonah with Nahum would now make the 'composite' prophet impossibly old. At so advanced an age, it would have taken him a lot more than just three days to walk across 'Nineveh'. In fact, he would probably not even have been able to walk at all! Such chronological anomalies, as I have said, will need to be given serious consideration in the course of this article.

Another factor in regard to the presumed Aramaic elements in the Book of Jonah (supposedly indicating a late authorship), that needs to be taken into account, but seemingly isn't, is that, after the Fall of Samaria to the Assyrians in c. 722/721 BC (conventional date) - admittedly well into the ministry of the prophet (Hosea/Jonah) - there was a large influx of foreign peoples into Samaria, which would undoubtedly have influenced the local language. "The king of Assyria brought people from Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath, and Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria in place of the people of Israel" (2 Kings 17:24). Now Hamath in particular is interesting here because it definitely was a great Syrian city and/or region, whose inhabitants presumably spoke Aramaic; the language that commentators claim to have found sprinkled about in the Book of Jonah. These new peoples brought in by the king of Assyria (i.e., Sargon II) would have been neighbours to Jonah. (See 3 (b)).

Commentators seem generally (and this applies to König, too) to ignore this important factor, when discussing presumed 'Aramaisms' in the Book of Jonah.

König would now move on to propose his third argument against the traditional view of Jonah's being the author of the book:

(c) Material indications. Nineveh, at the time when the Book of Jonah was composed, was no longer in existence. This is clear from the statement (33), 'Now Nineveh was ([hayetah], cf. König, Syntax, § 362m) a great city for God' (i.e. according even to a superhuman standard). Hävernick (Einleitung. ii. 2, p. 359) declined to accept this interpretation, and appealed to Gn 1:2 …. But even this passage confirms the above as the correct explanation of Jonah 3:3. For to the writer of Gn 12 the earth was no longer a chaos. Further, the 'three days' journey' of 3:3, taken in connexion with 'and Jonah began to enter into the city one day's journey' (Syntax, § 330e), must refer to the distance through, not round, the city (Schrader, KAT2 ad loc.). A diameter of such proportions would, however, presuppose a circumference such as even the combination of four cities (Gn 10:11f., Keilinschriften Bibliothek. ii. 117) could not have possessed.

The second Genesis text (10:11f.) to which König here referred pertains to that complex of cities in the land of Assur that the megalomaniacal Nimrod had 'built' or 'renovated'. (The Hebrew verb, banah, can have either of these meanings). That was probably in approximately 2000 BC. Genesis 10:11 belongs to the toledōt (or 'family history') of Shem, son of Noah. Now, 2000 BC was an era extremely distant from the time of Jonah by any estimate!

The size specified for Nineveh in Jonah's day (requiring three days to traverse it, 3:3) is in fact a further clear indication to me that the prophet's ministry to that city must have occurred in neo-Assyrian times (c. C8th-C7th's BC).

More precisely, it must have occurred some time from very late in the reign of Sargon II (close to the C7th BC), after that king had completed his cherished building project of 'Dur-Sargon' (or 'Sargonsville'), at Khorsabad: his brand new city. (See 4. for a consideration of the size of Sargon II's 'Nineveh'). Now this Sargon II was a contemporary of king Hezekiah, the last king of Jerusalem mentioned as ruling within the range of activity of the evergreen Isaiah/Hosea (cf. Isaiah 1:1; Hosea 1:1).

My tentative thesis to this stage is that the great prophet Isaiah, of whom we all have heard, also Hosea, may later have acquired the name Jonah/Nahum, in relation to his developing prophetic ministry. For, according to how my reconstruction is developing, Jonah was simply a great and well-known prophet of Israel and Judah in the latter's guise as God's emissary to Assyria; a mission that would occur at a late stage in that prophet's long ministry/lifetime.

One might even be tempted to propose further that it may be no accident that there is a tomb of the prophet Jonah (Nebi Yunas) in classical Nineveh (and indeed one for Nahum, at al-Qush); and that consequently the prophet might actually have died, and was buried, in Assyria. However, I shall later (p. 44) have cause to question any such supposition.

A consideration of Jonah in relation to Isaiah is interesting in my context, at least, according to which the Book of Isaiah is a unity. We might recall (p. 12) that one of the arguments used for the Book of Jonah's being a late composition is "because of its main teaching (the universality of salvation) …". Yet it is this very facet of the book of Jonah that König had compared with the Book of Isaiah:

The story of Jonah … gives expression to those lofty thoughts which are uttered also in Is[aiah] 40-60. For the 'Servant of J²' (Is 42:1) must be the same who in 41:8 is expressly called [yiserayl 'avedi], and of this Servant of J² it is said, 'I have made him for a light to the goyīm' (42:4, 6f. 49:1-6 etc …). … The Book of Jonah was meant, then, to proclaim the universality of the Divine plan of salvation, and to serve as a protest against the particularist tendencies which now and then led … … Israel[ites] to strive to narrow the boundaries of the Divine kingdom of grace.

Admittedly, this theological view (of 'universality') pertains to what is labelled 'Deutero-Isaiah' (and partly, for some, 'Trito-Isaiah'), which is supposed to date to much later than the so-called 'Jerusalem Isaiah' (1-39), as Stuhlmueller has called him, when contrasting the latter with the so-called 'Deutero-Isaiah': "Isaiah of Jerusalem [sic] looked upon foreign nations as tempters to apostasy (20:5) or scourges of divine anger (10:5); Dt-Is considers them not only as instruments for saving Israel (ch. 45) but also as recipients sharing Israel's salvation".

In my context, though, whatever doctrine is to be found in the Book of Isaiah and the Book of Jonah pertains also to C8th BC thinking (or theology).

Continuing on, König will contrast this theology "of universal salvation", as it is called, with the theological mentality of the era of Ezra and Nehemiah; a (possibly unintended) argument against those (such as e.g. Orelli; Robinson; van Hoonacker; Tobac; Dennefeld; Goettsberger; Chaine; Lippl; etc.) who have maintained that Jonah was written in that later era:

The book [of Jonah] is thus a brilliant example of the diametrical opposite of the spirit which condemned the foreign wives (Mal 2:11, Ezr 9:1ff. 10:1ff., Neh 13:23ff., cf. Est 9:13), and exhibits a lovely dawn preparing the way for the clear day of the gospel (Jn 3:16, Gal 3:28 etc.) ….

Now, an implication of having four books wholly pertaining to - possibly written by - the one prophet, of having presumably four prophets merged into the one, i.e.:

Isaiah = Hosea = Jonah = Nahum.

is that the known father of any of these 'four' must also be the one, same person. We are not told who was the father of Nahum, but we know the others, and so this next equation must follow (presuming my tentative reconstruction is correct):

Amos (Isaiah's father) = Beeri (Hosea's father) = Amittai (Jonah's father)

Later I shall show how these connections, unlikely though they may at first appear to be, are eminently possible.

König next raised an issue that indeed appears problematical, given that the Assyrian annals never used the term, "king of Nineveh" (Jonah 3:6) for any of that nation's rulers, but, for example, "king of Assyria", "king of Sumer and Akkad", "king of the universe". And why anyway, did the author of the Book of Jonah not just name this king?:

Then it would be strange that Jonah himself or a contemporary of his should not have given the name of the 'king of Nineveh' (36) in question. Besides this, Sayce (HCM 487, quoted by Driver LOT2 322) is of the opinion that the title 'king of Nineveh' could never have been applied to him while the Assyrian empire was still in existence.

In 4. I shall venture (most tentatively, though) the tantalizing possibility that Jonah did in fact personally name this "king of Nineveh". He did this however, not in the Book of Jonah, but in the Book of Isaiah. In 4., also, I shall endeavor to show just how accurate was the term, "king of Nineveh", when applied by the author of the Book of Jonah to this particular, repentant king in his proper historical context and geographical location.

König had actually included these above points (a)-(c) - and also a "(d). Arguments drawn from the history of the formation of the OT canon" - within a section in which he claimed to have "sought … to characterize the Book of Jonah positively".

He would then proceed to give "the negative supplement to this". I shall consider this aspect later. But now I return to Hart-Davies' discussion, since he had - with reference to various historical experts - addressed most of the above, historically-related objections:

… it is frequently argued that the use of the past tense in the sentence, "Now Nineveh was" (iii. 3), proves that the book was written after the destruction of the city [c. 612 BC, conventional date], and therefore by someone far removed from Jonah's age. Thus Professor G. A. Smith writes: "One verse implies that when it was written Nineveh had ceased to be a great city". A little reflection, however, will reveal how unstable is the evidence which is relied upon for a statement which many critics repeat with a great show of assurance. It is significant that Dr. Driver, a distinguished authority on the Hebrew tenses, did not resort to that plea for an argument. He knew, of course, that De Wette, a learned Hebraist and critic, had already exploded it. In his Introduction, the latter says: "The statement respecting the size of Nineveh (iii. 3) is of no importance in determining its date". Other Hebraists like Pusey, Keil, and Perowne have confirmed that statement. A modern critical scholar makes the frank though qualified admission:

"The fact that Nineveh's greatness is spoken of in the past tense ('Now Nineveh was', etc.) is not in itself conclusive that the city was no more, although it is most naturally understood so". …. The narrative being in the past tense, the reference to the size of Nineveh follows, in accordance with Hebrew usage, in the past tense also. A corresponding instance occurs in Genesis iii. 1: "Now the serpent was more subtil [subtle] than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made".

Perowne has also shown how unsafe it is to reason from a tense, even in the New Testament, by quoting from St. John's Gospel: "There is at Jerusalem by the sheep market a pool" (v. 2); and, later on in the same narrative: "Bethany was nigh unto Jerusalem" (xi. 8) …. By the use therefore of the same kind of argument as that which the critics employ with reference to the statement about Nineveh, it would be possible to prove that Jerusalem both was, and was not destroyed, when the fourth Gospel was written!

[Comment: Are we making too much of this, anyway? I personally would have no difficulty in regarding the second part of Jonah 3:3, "Now Nineveh was …", as a later addition, even post-exilic (e.g., by someone like Ezra), to the original text, when Nineveh was no more, since, though it "is not in itself conclusive that the city was no more … it is most naturally understood so"].

Hart-Davies next moved on to a consideration of the linguistic issues (I have already made some points of my own about these, pp. 14-16, and shall continue to raise others) that are supposed to indicate a late date for the Book of Jonah:

20 … the presence of certain alleged Aramaisms in the narrative is referred to as evidence of a late date. Not more than eight of these Aramaic or Syriac words are worthy of serious consideration. Cheyne's microscopic analysis detected ten; Driver, however, cites only six; in a recent volume written from the critical standpoint, only four are mentioned …. With respect to all it must be remembered that Jonah lived on the very border of Syria: that there had certainly been before his time a century of close political and commercial contact between Israel and the Aramaeans of Damascus; and therefore the Aramaisms, if such they be, might be regarded as evidence of a North Palestinian origin. But eminent Hebraists deny that those cited are indisputably Aramaic. Even if it were proved that they were, such kind of evidence is, experience testifies, extremely precarious. Not very long ago, for example, the occurrence of the names of a few Greek musical instruments in the narrative was regarded as positive proof of the late date of Daniel. That opinion was based upon the erroneous assumption that the Jew did not come into contact with Greek civilization until after the Macedonian conquests. No self-respecting scholar could reason on that assumption today. Professor Flinders Petrie, the eminent Egyptologist, and others have shown how unwarrantable it is in the light of the discoveries of the existence of a Hebrew community in Upper Egypt, at Elephantine in the fifth century B.C., some of whom had probably migrated to Egypt in the days of the prophet Jeremiah, and the additional find of traces of Greek colonies on the coast of Palestine in the time of Hezekiah, a century before Daniel was born. [Ref. here to A. H. Sayce, "Higher Criticism" and the Verdict of the Monuments, Soc. for Promoting Christian Knowledge, London, 1984, p. 494]. "A mustard seed of archaeological fact removes a mountain of critical theory".

I shall continue in a moment with Hart-Davies' useful discussion of alleged Aramaisms after a few more comments of my own. (Hart-Davies will go on to tell that only one word in the entire Book of Jonah is unequivocally a non-Hebrew word. See p. 30 below). Certainly if it could be established beyond doubt that there were even as many as six Aramaic words in a book so brief as Jonah, then I think that that would be significant enough a matter of language to warrant scholarly discussion and debate. Apparently though, from the testimony of Hart-Davies, some very eminent linguists are at odds as to just how many words in the Book of Jonah they think to be truly Aramaic. So, Hart-Davies' caution of words "indisputably Aramaic" needs always to be kept in mind.

Apart from other possible linguistic intrusions that I have already suggested above (e.g., the influx of foreign peoples into Samaria), there may be the further consideration of local dialects. One need only recall the famous Shibboleth case in the Book of Judges 12, when the Gileadites, who had seized the fords of the river Jordan, were able to identify an enemy fugitive of the northern tribe of Ephraim, who had wanted to cross the river, by the latter's pronunciation of the word shibboleth [Hebrew: 'ear (of corn), point, branch; stream water-course'].

Thus vv. 5-6:

Whenever one of the fugitives of Ephraim said, 'Let me go over', the men of Gilead would say to him, 'Are you an Ephraimite?' When he said, 'No', they said to him, 'Then say Shibboleth', and he said, 'Sibboleth', for he could not pronounce it right.

Now pastor Brenton Minge of Brisbane (Australia) has most kindly given me a book that he has written (relevant also to this study) to show that, against current views, Jesus and his Apostles spoke Hebrew, rather than Aramaic. We might recall that controversial film director Mel Gibson had, in his movie, The Passion of the Christ, gone to the great trouble of having his actors speak in Aramaic, to give authenticity (according to the prevailing view) to his film. But, if pastor Minge is correct, then Hebrew would have sufficed. In his chapter II, "The Galilean Accent", in which pastor Minge also mentions the 'Shibboleth' incident, one of his examples for Jesus' speaking Hebrew with a Galilean accent are certain words that He spoke from the Cross. I shall allow the author to explain this himself:

Eloi, Eloi ("My God, My God", Mark 15:34) is clearly related to the Hebrew word used at times for "my God" in the Psalms (cf. [elohi], "my God", Ps. 18:28; 139:19; [elohi], "My God", Mk 15:34). Astonishingly - given that Eloi, Eloi has always been cited as proof of the Aramaic source of the words - we find that the Targum of Psalm 22:1(2) does not begin with "Eloi, Eloi" but "Eli, Eli" as in the Hebrew ….

In two ways "Eloi, Eloi" is different from the Aramaic - with "oi, oi" instead of "I, I" and the short "E, E" instead of the long "Ay, Ay" (as in "day"). ….

Clearly, we must look elsewhere than to Aramaic for its pronunciation. The obvious explanation lies in the distinctive Galilean accent which we have noted. That is, in Eloi, Eloi we have the Galilean Jesus quoting Psalm 22:1(2) from the Hebrew Bible, carefully recorded with his distinctive pronunciation by Mark.

Pastor Minge's book is a real challenge to the current textbook tendency to favour the Aramaic language. Consider for example this section of his:

"Ghost Words"

That this vice - of seeing "Aramaisms" when they are not really there - is still disturbingly with us, can be seen from Michael Sokoloff's penetrating review of the highly respected Koehler-Baumgartner Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament. He writes:

"Unfortunately, as we shall see in the following notes, the author of the Aramaic section … has included in his discussions a large number of ghost words from 'Jewish Aramaic', non-existent and unreconstructed vocalizations of Aramaic words, and even Hebrew words which were mistakenly quoted as being Aramaic", adding, in his footnotes, that the author "quotes Hebrew words as if they were Aramaic …".

This is a trenchant criticism. Here we have one of the leading Hebrew-Aramaic lexicons of our time, taken to task for perceived "Ghost words from 'Jewish Aramaic'" (i.e., they do not exist), "non-existent and unreconstructed vocalizations of Aramaic words" (i.e., they are artificial creations), and "Hebrew words … mistakenly quoted as being Aramaic" (i.e., it simply confuses the two languages). How cautious this should make us against an uncritical acceptance of so-called "Aramaisms" in the Bible, and the frequently recycled textbook claims concerning them. While some may indeed be in the text, many more exist only in the eye of the beholder!

I shall conclude this selection with pastor Minge's point about the words, ephphatha, and cumi, or cum, used by Jesus; the latter word, cum, being also employed on several occasions in the Book of Jonah (1:2; 3:2). Pastor Minge here wrote:

Jesus' Words

Not surprisingly, the seven words of Jesus recorded in their original tongue, reflect these two aspects, namely

Likewise, cumi, or cum, in Jesus' command to the dead daughter of Jairus to "arise" (Mark 5:41). The word comes directly from the Old Testament Hebrew … "cum", meaning "arise, stand up, stand", while to this day the modern Hebrew for "get up" is cum….

What more appropriate, in the house of a synagogue ruler so familiar with Hebrew, than such a rich Hebrew command: "arise" - not to his Sabbath congregation to rise from their seats, but to his very own daughter to get up from the dead!

Maybe, then, this whole issue of language, and especially the favoritism for Aramaic in both Old and New Testament language studies, will need to be seriously reassessed in light of an appreciation of such a variety of factors (as discussed above) of local dialects and accents, and the influx of foreign peoples. Interestingly, in relation to pastor Minge's study, CE mentions the view of Hitzig and Knobel who had thought that: "A Galilean origin [for Nahum] … would well account for certain slight peculiarities of the Prophet's diction that smack of provincialism". Of course I have yet to establish the precise geographical origins of Jonah, and where he lived, and who therefore were his neighbours, and what form of the language he actually would have spoken; especially in light of my complicating (but I now think necessary) view that he is 'four-prophets-in-one': viz., Isaiah/Hosea/Jonah/Nahum. Whilst I shall be attending to this important matter in far more detail in 3 (b), I should like here to make a few preliminary comments in point form:

(i) Isaiah's father, Amos, was certainly a Judaean. He is presumed to have hailed from the Tekoa region (based on Amos 1:1); though I shall be more specific on his place of origin also in 3 (b).

(ii) Hosea seems to have been associated mainly with the northern kingdom (Israel), though he did refer also to "Judah" and to certain kings of Judah.

(iii) Jonah himself is thought to have been a northerner, from Gath-hepher (tribe of Zebulun) in Galilee. Thus TEDB: "[Jonah was] a native of gath-hepher (In Zabulon: Jos 19,18; modern Khirbet ez-Zurrā¢, four miles northeast of Nazareth) …". But there is a serious problem with this, given that the Pharisees, who certainly knew their Scriptures in detail, dared anyone to identify a prophet arising from Galilee (John 7:52). They would assuredly have been aware of "Jonah son of Amittai" of 2 Kings 14:25.

(iv) Nahum must, according to Murphy, have been a Judaean: "Elkosh is an unidentified locality, but surely to be sought in Judah (such a prophecy could never have been voiced in Assyria, although his "tomb" has been venerated at al-Qush near Nineveh)".

How, then, can I manage to reconcile, in terms of my 'composite' prophet, such a geographical mix, potentially, of Judaean & Israelite & Galilean(perhaps even Ninevite/ Assyrian) elements; geographical regions, all with their quite distinctive characteristics?

What I shall be arguing in 3 (b) is that Amos and Isaiah (a father and his son), Judaeans (meaning here broadly 'of the southern kingdom'), had left the south during the reign of Jeroboam II, to settle in the north, where they mainly stayed. And I shall be disputing that Jonah was from Galilee; though he may have sojourned in that region for a time. This will enable me to accommodate in a natural fashion both the Judaean and Israelite factors, whilst minimizing the troublesome third: Galilee. And I shall be completely dismissing any suggestion that Nahum arose from Assyria's al-Qush, arguing instead that he was (as Isaiah) a Judaean (see pp. 81-82, 'The Nahum Factor').

Yet another aspect for consideration in regard to the linguistic issues discussed above pertains to the perennial issue of chronology affecting the proper understanding of the development of ancient languages. I shall comment further on this following the next quote from Hart-Davies, which in fact relates to this:

Even if it could be proved that the whole of the words cited [in the Book of Jonah] were undoubtedly Aramaic, that could not be accepted as certain evidence of a late date, in the face of the following weighty testimony of Professor R. D. Wilson, of Princeton, one of the most distinguished philologists of our time: "That Aramaic words may have been in Hebrew documents, at any time from Moses to Ezra, is shown by the fact that two or more words and phrases found elsewhere only in Aramaic occur already in the Tel-el-Amarna letters, and one in a letter to the king of Egypt from Abdi-Hiba of Jerusalem". And again: "David conquered Damascus and other cities where Aramaic was spoken, and the Israelites have certainly been in continuous contact with Aramaean tribes from that time to the present. Sporadic cases of the use of Aramaic words would, therefore, prove nothing as to the date of the Hebrew document" [Is the Higher Criticism Scholarly? pp. 23 and 31].

Excursus 1: The El-Amarna Letters

That once "weighty testimony of Professor R. D. Wilson", acceptable though it might have been at the time when he wrote it, now needs to be significantly reassessed, both chronologically and linguistically, in light of the subsequent revision of ancient history, and particularly here in relation to the Tell el-Amarna tablets. One can read about these in detail in my El-Amarna (Net) article. This concerns the worldwide letters that pharaoh Akhnaton and his father, Amenhotep III 'the Magnificent', either sent to, or received from, mainly, Syro-Palestinian and Assyro-Babylonian royalty and dignitaries.

The el-Amarna letters are conventionally dated to the c. C14th BC, but have been revised (and I have accepted this) by Dr. I. Velikovsky to the c. 9th BC, with profound ramifications for biblical history.

Professor Wilson's implication that these letters were contemporaneous with Moses is now known to be quite inaccurate. They belong to more than half a millennium later than Moses! They belong to the era of history known as the "Divided Monarchy", when Israel was no longer a unified kingdom (as in the days of David and Solomon), but split into north (Israel) and south (Judah). That is how late el-Amarna actually is; even later than David and Solomon. And they reigned about half a millennium after the era of Moses!

The language of the el-Amarna letters is Akkadian, a Mesopotamian language, but one letter by a Palestinian king, Lab'ayu (ruling in the Shechem region, modern Nablus), proved to be very difficult to translate (C. Gadd, "The Tell el-Amarna Tablets', p. 123. "No. 252 is a very obscure letter, and K[nudtzon]'s uncertainty is plainly shown by the gaps and italics of his translation"). Professor W. Albright, in 1943, published a more satisfactory translation than had hitherto been possible by discerning that its author had used a good many so-called 'Canaanite' words plus two Hebrew proverbs! Letter No. 252 has a stylised introduction in the typical el-Amarna formula and in the first 15 lines utilises only two 'Canaanite' words. Thereafter, in the main body of the text, Albright noted (and later scholars have concurred) that Lab'ayu used only about 20% pure Akkadian, "with 40% mixed or ambiguous, and no less than 40% pure Canaanite".

Albright further identified the word nam-lu in line 16 as the Hebrew word for 'ant' (nemalah), the Akkadian word being zirbabu. Lab'ayu had written: "If ants are smitten, they do not accept (the smiting) quietly, but they bite the hand of the man who smites them". Albright recognised here a parallel with the two biblical Proverbs mentioning ants (Proverbs 6:6 and 30:25). "It is a pity", wrote revisionist historians, D. Rohl and B. Newgrosh, "that Albright was unable to take his reasoning process just one step further because, in almost every instance where he detected the use of what he called 'Canaanite', one could legitimately substitute the term 'Hebrew'."

Lab'ayu's son too, Mut-Baal, also displayed in one of his letters (No. 256) some so-called 'Canaanite' and mixed origin words. Albright noted of line 13: "As already recognized by the interpreters, this idiom is pure Hebrew". Albright himself even went close to admitting that the local speech was Hebrew:

... phonetically, morphologically, and syntactically the people then living in the district ... spoke a dialect of Hebrew (Canaanite) which was very closely akin to that of Ugarit. The differences which some scholars have listed between Biblical Hebrew and Ugaritic are, in fact, nearly all chronological distinctions.

But of course these "chronological distinctions" cease to be an issue in the Velikovskian context, according to which both the el-Amarna letters and the Ugaritic tablets are re-located to the time of the Divided Monarchy.

In my El-Amarna article I have actually identified the strong Palestinian ruler, Lab'ayu, with king Ahab of Israel himself (early C9th BC), Elijah's foe. Ahab likewise was wont to use a proverbial saying as an aggressive counterpoint to a potentate. When his enemy Ben-Hadad I had sent him messengers threatening: 'May the gods do this to me and more if there are enough handfuls of rubble in Samaria for all the people in my following' (1 Kings 20:10), Ahab answered: 'The proverb says: The man who puts on his armour is not the one who can boast, but the man who takes it off' (v.11).

The "Abdi-Hiba of Jerusalem", to whom Professor Wilson (as quoted by Hart-Davies) had referred, a supposedly C14th BC king, has been well identified by P. James - down to virtually the last historical detail (as I have recalled in my El-Amarna article) - as being none other than the biblical king Jehoram of Judah (c. 840 BC).

The revision of the el-Amarna documents has thus brought to life, in real historical documents that are non-biblical, some of the major biblical characters of the time of the prophets Elijah and Elisha. The revision of history enables for us to find, rather than to have to deny, the great characters of the Bible. And, by its removing certain chronological barriers, this revision has also allowed for a new appreciation of the development of language (as well as of writing, art and architecture).

Thus king Ahab (in his guise of Lab'ayu) has been found, as one might have expected, historically to have spoken Hebrew.

But the revision has also acute significance in the case of Jonah, considering that that other biblical personage whom Jesus had mentioned in connection with the repentant Ninevites, the "Queen of the South" (refer back to p. 4), has now also been properly identified historically. She is Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt/Ethiopia; half a millennium before king Solomon by conventional views, but Solomon's contemporary according to a revised history. This queen (who later ruled as a female pharaoh) did not in fact (as is generally presumed) hail from the 'land of Sheba'; that word, 'Sheba', actually pertaining either to her personal name, Hatshepsut - as Velikovsky had argued (and this is not problematical in relation to the Hebrew) - or to her city of Thebes in southern Egypt, according to Emmet Sweeney's identification, Thebes = Se.wa/She.wa, i.e., 'Sheba'.

Now this historical identification of the celebrated biblical queen may add enormous weight to the words of Jesus about Jonah. For if the "Queen of the South" were truly an historical queen, then the "men of Nineveh" whom Jesus mentioned in the same context, said to have repented at the preaching of Jonah, would presumably also have been real.

Real too, therefore, would have been their king (i.e., "the king of Nineveh").

That means that Jesus was talking about real people, necessarily including Jonah!

Also interesting, in consideration of the critical difficulty as to why the author of the Book of Jonah did not actually name "the king of Nineveh", is the fact that Jesus likewise did not personally name the "Queen of the South", whose name we now know to have been "Hatshepsut". When we turn to the Books of Isaiah, Hosea and Nahum, we find that rulers are sometimes named (e.g. "Cyrus", Isaiah 45:1; "King Jeroboam", Hosea 1:1), and sometimes not, e.g. ("king of Babylon", Isaiah 14:4; "king of Israel", Hosea 10:15; "king of Assyria", Nahum 3:18). Again, sometimes a person is given a descriptive or pejorative 'nickname', (e.g. "Day Star", Isaiah 14:12; "Belial", Nahum 1:11).

Now this Cyrus (mentioned above) is important, because reference to him several times in so-called 'Deutero-Isaiah' (e.g., 44:28; 45:1, 13) is considered to be a compelling historical reason for dating 'Deutero-Isaiah' to post-exilic times. Allow me to elaborate.

Excursus 2: Cyrus and the Fall of Babylon

The Isaian Oracle of the destruction of Babylon and its gods: "Fallen, fallen is Babylon; and all the images of her gods lie shattered on the ground" (Isaiah 21:9), coupled with the later references to Cyrus (mentioned above) and Babylon again (ch's. 46, 47), and to a return of the Jews from their captivity (49:8-26), with Jerusalem to be rebuilt (44:26), are, collectively, points clearly indicating to scholars that these parts of the Book of Isaiah must pertain to a period later than the C8th BC, and presumably to the latter part of the C6th BC, when Cyrus king of Persia, conqueror of Babylon (c. 539 BC, conventional date), issued an edict permitting the exiled Jews to return to Jerusalem and, in the words of A. Wright et al., "to rebuild the Temple at state expense and to restore the sacred vessels plundered by Nebuchednezzar". Consequently, they say, Isaiah could not possibly have written the entire book that bears his name.

One can assuredly understand the reasoning.

Supporters of Isaiah's authorship of all 66 chapters might argue though that Isaiah was empowered to see into the distant future, to events that would occur some 200 years later.

But there are very strong reasons for thinking that Isaiah was not referring at all to the Babylonian captivity in the early C6th BC, and to the subsequent return to Jerusalem, aided by Cyrus the Persian, but to a Babylonian captivity enacted much earlier than Nebuchednezzar II the Chaldean's, in the late C8th, by the Assyrians. Two of these reasons - for the appreciation of which I am indebted to Boutflower's study - are that:

Firstly, the Jews suffered deportations during Isaiah's lifetime, including to Babylon.
Secondly, the entry of king Cyrus the Persian into Babylon, after he had defeated in battle that city's king, was peaceful, and would by no means equate with Isaiah's description of the savage destruction of the city of Babylon.

Let us consider these two points in turn, with the helpful assistance of Boutflower. Boutflower had noted early in his book, when dealing with "The Call of Isaiah" (i.e., Isaiah ch. 6), that the prophet's message to the people of Israel and Judah was going to be, at least in its first phases, quite a depressing one of 'depopulation' and 'devastation'. To the young prophet Isaiah who had asked: 'Lord, how long?' [How long shall I go on doing this?] (v. 11), he was told that he must go on (vv. 11-12): "Until cities be waste without inhabitant, and houses without man, and the land become utterly waste, and the Lord has removed men far away, and the forsaken places be many in the midst of the land." "Here", Boutflower commented, "is foretold the captivity of the Ten Tribes under Tiglathpileser, Shalmaneser, and Sargon; for they too are included along with Judah in the words `this people'" : see chaps. viii. 6, 12, 14, ix. 16, xxviii. 11, 14, xxix. 13, 14".

But that was by no means to be the end of it. For Boutflower next went on to tell, with further reference to Isaiah, of the captivity by Assyria even of the Judaeans:

… the Almighty adds, "and if there be yet a tenth in it, it shall again be eaten up: as a terebinth, and as an oak [Isaiah's father Amos was, as we shall read on p. 42, "a dresser of sycamore trees"], whose stock remaineth when they are felled; so the holy seed is the stock thereof", i.e. a further judgment is to come on those who are left in the land; the Assyrian wild beast will yet again devour, till the Chosen People become like some stately terebinth or oak which has been felled so that the root only remains in the ground. As the second judgment on the nation is to happen in the ministry of Isaiah, it can only be referred to the invasion of Sennacherib, when a yet further depopulation took place. Sennacherib tells us that he took captive from Judah 200,150 persons, and there is good reason to think that his words are no mere exaggeration.

With these persistent terrors in mind, one need hardly go all the way on to the post-exilic period to encounter a time when Israel was 'having trouble with her enemies', as do some (refer back to p. 3) who would argue a late date for the authorship of the Book of Jonah! For the Assyrians (whose nation had ceased to exist by the time of the Babylonian Exile) were already in the C8th BC deporting Israel and Judah into captivity, including to Babylonia (var. Shinar). This is apparent from what Boutflower wrote about it:

Let us next ask, What was the condition of the Chosen People in the writer's reminiscences? In chap. xxiv. 13, 15 they are described as "in the midst of the earth among the peoples", scattered far and wide, both east and west. "Ah!" cries the critic, "that points to the [Babylonian] Exile!" Not necessarily. Look at Isa. xi. 11: "And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall set his hand again the second time to recover the remnant of his people, which shall remain, from Assyria, and from Egypt, and from Pathros, and from Cush, and from Elam and from Shinar, and from Hamath, and from the islands of the sea."

This is no post-exilic list, for Assyria stands first and Egypt next, whilst Shinar, i.e. Babylonia, the land of Judah's captivity, is only mentioned towards the close, Babylon itself being not mentioned at all. As an actual fact captivity was a dire reality in the days of Isaiah, long before the [Babylonian] Exile.

Now, briefly, to the second point, that the brutal destruction of Babylon as referred to in the Book of Isaiah does not accord with the peaceful entry into that city by the victorious Cyrus the Persian. Boutflower had dedicated a full chapter to an Isaianic Oracle (21:1-10) dealing with the fall of Babylon. But here I shall quote just several paragraphs of this. Having stated the standard view, that this Oracle was a reference to the capture of Babylon by Cyrus the Persian, Boutflower then proceeded to note the objections to this:

… it is difficult, as … Dr. Driver observes, to see what "intelligible purposes could be subserved by [Isaiah] announcing to the generation of Hezekiah an occurrence lying in the distant future and having no bearing on contemporary interests"; while [too] … the traditional view altogether fails to account for the alarm and the aversion with which the prophet contemplates the fall of the great oppressing city. … it must be added that there is no evidence that when Cyrus entered Babylon he treated the images of the gods in the way described in verse 9. On the contrary, we are expressly assured that his entrance … was a peaceful one, and that there was no cessation whatever of the temple worship …. The first person to suggest a more satisfactory explanation … was … George Smith …. Comparing Isaiah chapters xx. and xxi. with the Annals of Sargon, Mr. Smith suggested that while chapter xx. refers to Sargon's capture of Ashdod in 711 B.C., chapter xxi. in its opening vision refers to that same king's campaign against Merodachbaladan king of Babylon in the two following years …. But this interesting solution of the problem had scarcely begun to find acceptance when a fresh difficulty began to show itself. The entrance of Sargon into Babylon at the close of the year 710 was shown to have been even more peaceful than that of Cyrus 170 years later. The Babylonians … sent out a deputation to meet the conqueror and to welcome him into their town … whilst, instead of any sacrilegious treatment of the Babylonian gods, Sargon seems to have outdone all his royal predecessors in the costly offerings he made at their shrines …. If verse 9 was not fulfilled by Cyrus, still less was it by Sargon. For the historic fulfillment of this Burden, and of the two short Burdens [Dumah & Arabia] which follow it, we must turn to the records of Sennacherib and to the events which took place in Babylonia and the desert to the west of it during … 691-689 B.C. As we shall presently see, it was Sennacherib, not Cyrus, and not Sargon, who in 689 smashed the idol-gods of Babylon … Sennacherib, too, who in the previous year invaded Arabia and captured Dumah; so that the three Burdens of Isa. xxi. which appear to have been uttered shortly before the events foretold in them took place … were fulfilled about the same time and are rightly put side by side in the Book of Isaiah.

I conclude from all this that the enigmatic "Cyrus" referred to in the later chapters (from 44) of the Book of Isaiah could not likely have been the Cyrus king of Persia who would ultimately release the Jewish nation from the Babylonian Captivity (Ezra 1:1-3). A consideration of who Isaiah's "Cyrus" might in fact have been, in 4., may perhaps serve to solve one of the major objections levelled at the traditional view of Isaiah's authorship of the entire Book of Isaiah. There, too, I shall tell of Hezekiah's son/successor, Manasseh, as having been taken captive by the Assyrians to Babylon (again well before the era of Nebuchednezzar II).

Hart-Davies would tell of one word in the Book of Jonah that was unequivocally non-Hebrew, significantly an Assyrian word:

There is actually only one word in the entire narrative of Jonah that can be regarded, with absolute certainty, as non-Hebraic. That is the word taam [ta'am], the Assyrian for "decree". But that fact may be regarded as evidence in support of the belief that Jonah himself was the author; that he went to Nineveh, and there heard the exact term used for the royal proclamation.

This, I think, is quite telling!

It may immediately account for at least a part of König's linguistic queries (as quoted on p. 13), that an C8th BC prophet such as Hosea would unlikely have expressed 'command' (verb) by minnah, as does Jonah (2:1; 4:6-8), since Hosea expressed 'command' (noun) by tsav; whereas Jonah expressed it differently, by ta'am. But we have just now read that ta'am is quite unique; it being the Assyrian word for "decree" - a loan word that even Jonah presumably would not have used typically - but only in association with the famous Nineveh incident. His use of ta'am is also a clear indication that our 'composite' prophet was not averse to picking up, and using in his writings, untypical words of non-Hebrew origin!

As for minnah, which can also mean "to number", Isaiah did indeed use this word as a verb (e.g., 53:12).

In the same discussion, König had contrasted the Book of Jonah's speaking in the third person "everywhere except in the oratio directa of 19 23ff. etc" with "Hosea, who opens with the third person, in the further course of his story passes to the use of the first person". It is thus interesting to find, in my context - that equates Jonah with Hosea and Isaiah - that, in Isaiah 40:6 (admittedly 'Deutero-Isaiah'), according to Stuhlmueller: "For the first and, perhaps, only time, the Prophet speaks in the first person".

What I have presented so far in this section are what might be considered the more technical points (e.g., historical, linguistic, archaeological) against the presumed historicity of the book and the possibility of the C8th Jonah as its author. But there are also to be considered those accusations by critics that the book is replete with grotesque or exaggerated elements and a super-abundance of miracles. "Jonah is the worst treated book in the Bible", is how Hart-Davies had commenced his own book on the subject:

31 It is the butt of the scoffer; a ready missile which the infidel rarely fails to hurl at the head of the believer; among many professing Christians it serves only to point an inane joke or to provoke an inapt simile. Meanwhile the book remains unread, its contents unknown, the preciousness of its revelation undiscovered and unsuspected.

The fantastic elements of the book, TEDB tells, are largely the reason why exegetes have abandoned the view that the book was ever meant to recount actual historical events:

Against the historical character of the book these exegetes [van Hoonacker et al., see p. 11 above] refer to the accumulation of many miracles in the short space of scarcely fifty verses, and the unwarranted nature of these miracles: the sudden rising of the storm at sea, the falling of the lot on Jona[h], the immediate arrival of the calm as soon as Jona[h] is thrown overboard, the special sea monster sent by God, Jona[h]'s remaining alive in its belly, his being thrown up on the shore again, the plant which grows up in one night and withers in one night. Moreover, it is hardly imaginable, from a historical viewpoint, that all the people of the entire city of Nineve[h], who had their own form of Assyrian polytheism, should be converted and do penance at the word of a foreigner, even though he was an Israelite prophet.

König would similarly remark:

Again, the repentance of the city of Nineveh is depicted with such grotesque features that the intention of the writer to indicate the didactic tendency of the narrative appears sufficiently clear. For, not to speak of the king sitting in ashes (36b), the very beasts are also mentioned as partaking in the fast and the mourning (37f.). This command that 'the cattle, the oxen, and the sheep should eat nothing and drink no water', and that 'man and beast' … should put on sackcloth, is not to be co-ordinated with the custom whereby at the death of Masistios the Persians cut off their own hair and that of the horses and beasts of burden (Herodot. ix. 24; Plutarch, Aristides, cap. 14 ….), or the custom mentioned by Chrysostom of harnessing horses with black trappings to a hearse.

Hart-Davies would in fact use the case of Masistios (or Masistius) as an example in favour of his own argument (see pp. 38-39 below).

König went on to add:

… Moreover, the complaint of Jonah about the gourd (48b) is put into such hyperbolical language ('for me death is better than life'), that one is compelled to assume that the writer did not mean [it] … to be understood as a serious one.

Again, the narrator puts in the mouth of the prophet the statement that he does 'right' … [haytayv] to be angry over the loss of the gourd, 'even unto death'. But is this not to depict him as an ill-natured child who sulks over the loss of a toy?

Such points of criticism will need to be taken into account in the course of this article. Indeed, I personally think that some of these issues will become far more clear once I have established the proper context of 'the Jonah incident' in all its historical fullness. And indeed the prophet Elijah, of broadly the same era as Jonah, as well as Jonah's contemporaries Tobit, Sarah and Job, had likewise asked of God to allow them to depart this life (cf. 1 Kings 19:4; Tobit 3:6, 10; Job 34:1-26). König had likened Jonah to "an ill-natured child", which I think was woefully to have underestimated the whole situation with all of its profound psychological struggles and tension. I have argued that Jonah was, apart from all else, an aged holy man of immense wisdom and experience. He was also a thoroughgoing patriot; and so he dearly wanted to see an end to Assyria, that fierce enemy of his people.

As far as miracles go (which factor many critics think definitely indicates that the Book of Jonah is a fiction), these - like the Resurrection of Christ which the Gospels claim the Book of Jonah to have prefigured - pertain to faith.

Conclusion to 2. Authorship and Date

With great assistance especially from Hart-Davies' book, with reference to certain authoritative scholars (albeit a bit dated today), I have answered some of the key objections to the historicity, date and authorship of the Book of Jonah.

The discussion of language, including Aramaisms (supposedly indicating a late date for the Book of Jonah), I have argued, needs to take into consideration a variety of factors, such as local dialect; influx of foreign peoples; even the ability of an author to vary his use of language significantly; and chronology (e.g. how long the author lived to write, but also a proper perspective on the development of language). On this last important matter, the Velikovskian revision of history has allowed for a perspective and advantage that was unknown - and hence unavailable - to writers like Hart-Davies and those whom he referenced. It thus enables for further matters to be settled and deeper insights to be had.

While I have in this article, "Towards a Full Restoration of the Prophet Jonah", kept open the possibility that the Book of Jonah dates to the C8th BC, and that Jonah may have written it, there is still more to be considered before such matters can be finalised.

I now (3. Jonah in his Full Dimension) want to proceed towards an attempted putting together again of the prophet Jonah, along with his father, "Amittai", by considering the four presumed facets of the former (Isaiah/Hosea/Jonah/Nahum) that I have tentatively proposed. That will be (i) the biblical context. And I want to begin to put all this, too, into (ii) an historical context in relation to Assyria. Following that, I shall endeavour to locate 'the Jonah incident' to its precise era (4. The Mission to Nineveh and its King).

3. Jonah in his Full Dimension

So far I have said relatively little about Assyria, which must become an important element in this discussion. (For I shall need to co-ordinate a revised neo-Assyrian history with a revised history of Jonah). Whilst my attention will turn more fully to Assyria in 4., it shall be necessary nonetheless in this section to begin a basic revision of neo-Assyrian history in connection with the life of our prophet, so that these two histories will properly mesh by the end of this article. I shall therefore devote (a) in this section to a brief discussion of Assyrian history, following on from what I have already said about the Assyrians; whilst, in (b), I shall attempt to outline the career of our 'composite' prophet.

Today, chronologies of the Bible for the period that we are considering seem to be heavily based on the work of Professor E. Thiele. But, whilst his research undoubtedly has its value, it can also play havoc with biblical history - no more so than in the case of king Hezekiah of Judah, son of Ahaz (of the very era to which I shall be locating the activity of Jonah). Instead of Thiele's having accepted the clear biblical information according to which Hezekiah's 6th year coincided with the Fall of Samaria (2 Kings 18:10), in c. 722/721 BC, necessitating that king Hezekiah's reign began in c. 727 BC, Thiele, basing himself as he does on an inaccurate, conventional neo-Assyrian chronology, has tried to make Hezekiah 'fit' (in Procrustean fashion) a chronology that itself is in fact unworkable. Thus we find him dating king Hezekiah's beginning of reign to c. 716/715 BC, meaning that Hezekiah's 6th year (which should coincide with the Fall of Samaria), actually 'falls' more than a decade after that event.

In this article I shall be accepting Hezekiah's beginning at c. 727 BC, not 716/715 BC, and I shall endeavour to show that neo-Assyrian history, when properly understood, does truly harmonize with the biblical record.

I noted that the rabbis had thought there to be a chronological problem regarding the prophet Jonah, in that, whilst the one clear biblical reference to his era (as "Jonah") was that statement in 2 Kings 14:25 that he had prophesied at the time of Jeroboam II of Israel, Jewish tradition had 'the Jonah incident' itself occurring significantly later than Jeroboam II, during the reign of the Assyrian king, As[e]napper (Esarhaddon or Ashurbanipal). Accordingly, the rabbis felt that they had to posit 'two real Jonahs'; one for the era of Jeroboam II of Israel, and one later, for the era of As[e]napper.

I personally accept that particular Jewish tradition according to which the Book of Jonah finds its proper locus at the time of As[e]napper. Let me attempt to evaluate these two, separate eras (i.e., Jeroboam II's era and As[e]napper's era) in connection with Assyria.

(a) The Relevant Assyrian Kings

(i) For the Era of Jeroboam II (approximately)

Firstly we are going to consider the standard succession of Assyrian kings thought to have been contemporaneous with Jeroboam II.

I have used the word "approximately" in the heading above, though, because both the dates for Israel and those for Assyria stand in need of correction. The following king list I have taken from M. van de Mieroop:

All of the kings listed here have, as we are going to read in a moment, been considered as having been in range to represent Jonah's "king of Nineveh". I have commenced my selection with Adad-nirari III, because I know of no commentator who has proposed an Assyrian king earlier than he. Given that the "forty-one years" of reign of Jeroboam II of Israel are conventionally dated to c. 783-743, and given Jonah's known contemporaneity with this same Jeroboam II (cf. 2 Kings 14:23, 25), then commentators' choices for the repentant "king of Nineveh" of Jonah 3:6 tend to fall on either of the two most significant kings within this chronological range: namely, Adad-nirari III or Tiglath-pileser III (the other names belonging to generally ineffective kings; though Assur-dan III is also occasionally nominated).

The commentator for TEDB, who as we saw does not actually concede that Jonah was historical, nevertheless tells of this common view:

The activity of Jona[h] in Nineve[h] is placed in the time of Adadnirari III (809-781 B.C.) or in that of one of his three successors, at any rate, before Tiglat[h]-pileser III (745-726), and attempts have been made to make the success of his preaching to the king and the people look plausible on account of the time, place, and persons (e.g., J. B. Schaumberger, Das Bussedikt des Königs von Nineve bei Jonas 3,7.8 in keilschriftlicher Beleuchtung [Misc. Bibl. II, Roma 1934, 123-134]).

Hart-Davies had likewise presumed that Jonah's mission to Nineveh must have occurred during the reign of Jeroboam II and one or other of his Assyrian contemporaries: "The reign of Jeroboam II coincides nearly with the period from the death of Ramman-Nirari (i.e., Adad-nirari III) to the accession of Tiglath-pileser - a period which was characterized by apparent inactivity and decadence in the Assyrian rule".

Cooper on the other hand, contrary to TEDB's estimation ("before Tiglat[h]-pileser"), and that of Hart-Davies ("period which was characterized by apparent inactivity and decadence in the Assyrian rule"), has made a case for the strong king Tiglath-pileser III's having been the Assyrian king who, at the very beginning of his reign - as Cooper has estimated it - hearkened to, and positively acted upon, the word of Jonah. Here is a part of Cooper's account of the turnaround in Assyria that he thinks was directly caused by the mission of Jonah:

The Tide Turns

The results of Jonah's mission to Nineveh, and the repentance of the Assyrians …. was nothing less than the complete reversal of Assyria's fortunes. … overnight, it seems, the empire underwent a revival. Where defeat had so recently been staring them in the face, the Assyrians were now winning decisive victories. Where there had been economic collapse, there was now available wealth and reasonable stability. Political turmoil and civil unrest now quieted down. In other words the 'disaster-prone empire that Tiglath-pileser III had inherited' …. was almost unrecognizable after the duration of his reign. ….

[I have been referring above to the era post-Tiglath-pileser III as the 'neo-Assyrian' era, though it needs to be noted that Tiglath-pileser III, Shalmaneser V, would also be regarded as being 'neo-Assyrian'].

(ii) For the Era of As[e]napper (approximately)

Now I give the standard succession of Assyrian kings for the 'Sargonid' dynasty (i.e., of Sargon II), including Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal, the proposed candidates for As[e]napper. But I shall have cause to query this conventional sequence. Here is the next part of van de Mieroop's king list:

Apart from other considerations, I should like to suggest that Jonah's mission to Nineveh could not have occurred prior to almost the end of the reign of Sargon II - and significantly later than Jeroboam II. My reason for stating this is because it was only late in the reign of Sargon II that this king managed to complete the construction of his new city of Dur-Sargon, enabling for the 'Nineveh' complex to have become of sufficient size to match the description of it in the Book of Jonah (see discussion beginning on p. 69), taking three days to walk across it.

Thus I, unlike commentators who would imagine the reign of Tiglath-pileser III to have been the terminus ante quem for Jonah's mission, should reject any king prior to Sargon II (after Tiglath-pileser III) as being a possible candidate for Jonah's "king of Nineveh".

According to my argument, those who would consider the 'Sargonid' era to be chronologically right out of range for Jonah's mission - since Jonah had already been actively prophesying in the reign of Jeroboam II - are basing themselves on a one-dimensional Jonah, so to speak, one encompassed entirely within the Book of Jonah (with reference, too, to 2 Kings 14:25); presumably, a very limited period of prophetic activity. My synthesis, on the other hand, would suggest an exceptionally long period of prophetic activity for Jonah, based on a combination of four biblical books. I shall thus not be limiting myself to the sort of opinion about the prophet as expressed in CE, for Nahum:

The little we know touching the Prophet Nahum must be gathered from his book, for nowhere else in the canonical Scriptures does his name occur, and extracanonical Jewish writers are hardy less reticent. The scant positive information vouchsafed by these sources is in no wise supplemented by the worthless stories concerning the Prophet put into circulation by legend-mongers. We will deal only with what may be gathered from the canonical Book of Nahum, the only available first-hand document [sic] at our disposal.

Now, though I think that Hart-Davies was wide of the mark in his choice for the Assyrian era when he presumed that Jonah would have come to Nineveh (i.e., between the reigns of Adad-nirari III and Tiglath-pileser III), his book becomes far more interesting when he described an instance in Assyrian history of a fast, ordained by the king, that is very reminiscent of the fast narrated in Jonah 3:6-9. But this occurred, not at the time of Jeroboam II (when Hart-Davies had estimated that Jonah had received his call to the Ninevites), but significantly later, at the time of Esarhaddon, the father of Ashurbanipal. That is, right in the era that I have nominated as the time of Jonah's mission.

Hart-Davies described this unique situation:

Already we possess proof from the cuneiform tablets that the Bible account of Nineveh's repentance is described in a manner which exactly coincides with Assyrian custom. "It was just such a fast", says Professor Sayce, "as was ordained by Esar-haddon when the northern foe was gathering against the Assyrian empire, and prayers were raised to the Sun-god to 'remove the sin' of the king and his people. 'From this day', runs the inscription, 'from the third day of this month, even the month of Iyyar, to the fifteenth day of Ab of this year, for these hundred days and hundred nights the prophets have proclaimed (a period of supplication)'. The prophets of Nineveh had declared that it was needful to appease the anger of heaven, and the king accordingly issued his proclamation enjoining the solemn service of humiliation for one hundred days".

It is from this most interesting piece of information that Hart-Davies would lead into the issue of Masistios (Masistius), the validity of which argument (in a Jonah context) König had rejected:

The humiliation of the beasts likewise, was a custom not unknown in ancient days and in lands with which the Assyrians were familiar. Herodotus tells us that, when the Persian armies were in Greece, a battle was fought in which a general, universally esteemed, was slain. "On their arrival at the camp", says Herodotus, "the death of Masistius spread a general sorrow through the army, and greatly afflicted Mardonius himself (Xerxes' commander-in-chief). They cut off the hair from themselves, their horses, and their beasts of burden, and all Boeotia resounded with their cries and lamentations. The man they had lost was, next to Mardonius, most esteemed by the Persians and the king. Thus the barbarians in their manner honoured the deceased Masistius". [The Histories, ix. 24].

To comment fully on this passage in the context of a revision of history would lead me too far afield. (I have discussed matters such as this at greater length in other articles). But I still need to make some points as a kind of aside, or excursus, because I believe that to do so has much relevance to this article.

Excursus 3: Greco-Roman Appropriating

The Greeks (and Romans who emulated them) would appropriate much that belonged to the older civilizations of the ancient Near East (e.g., Egypt, Israel, Syro-Hittites, Mesopotamia). Thus, for instance, Professor H. Breasted made the point that Hatshepsut's (biblical "Queen of the South") marvellous temple structure at Deir el-Bahri was a witness to the fact that the Egyptians had developed architectural styles for which the later Greeks would be credited as the originators.

Similarly, I suspect, much of the so-called 'Persian Wars' against Greece are simply mangled accounts of earlier non-Persian wars, especially the C8th-C7th BC neo-Assyrian invasions of the west (against the Syro-Hittites, Palestinians and Egypt); most notably Sennacherib's invasions, with his massive armies, in the C8th BC. Now, E. Sweeney has drawn up a list of most startling parallels between this Sennacherib of Assyria and Xerxes of Persia. Boutflower, too, had called attention to an apparent parallel between Sennacherib "on the shore of the … Persian Gulf" and "Xerxes' treatment of the Hellespont [Sea]".

And I have in turn suggested in articles that the death of Xerxes' famous general, Mardonius (referred to above by Hart-Davies), and the subsequent search for his body on the battlefield by the sorrowful Xerxes, king of Persia, was in fact a Greek appropriation of that most famous incident of the death of Esarhaddon/Holofernes, and Sennacherib's subsequent inquiries in regard to this unprecedented tragedy for Assyria.

[I also believe, and have argued, that there are notable parallels between the supposed Persian assault on the fortress of Lindus, by Datis, for king Darius (as recorded in the Lindian Chronicle), and Holofernes' siege of Judith's town of Bethulia. For one, there is a 5-day time factor].

In Herodotus' account though it was Mardonius who sorrowed over Masistios, the description of whom, "next to Mardonius, most esteemed by the Persians and the king", is very reminiscent of Holofernes, "chief general of [the king of Assyria's] army, second only to [the king] himself" (Judith 2:4; cf. 11:8). Interestingly (perhaps relevant to Jonah), Judith says here to Holofernes, concerning the king of Assyria (who I believe to have been his father, Sennacherib): "Not only do human beings serve him because of you, but also the animals of the field and the cattle …" (11:7; cf. Jonah 3:7).

What may be significant for this present Jonah study is that the lamentations of the Persians in the case of Masistios are described just subsequent to the death of their great commander. In my corresponding revision, that would bring it to very close to Jonah's mission to Nineveh, i.e., not long after the death of Esarhaddon/Holofernes (at the hands of Judith), whose successor was Ashurbanipal. I shall discuss this situation in detail in 4., in which I shall come to the conclusion that Ashurbanipal, several generations later than Tiglath-pileser III, was that actual "king of Nineveh" who repented at the preaching of Jonah. And, whilst Ashurbanipal's reign too, like Tiglath-pileser's, saw the revival of Assyrian power after a period of crisis, or anarchy, Ashurbanipal's was (as we are going to find) - quite unlike that of Tiglath-pileser - most beneficial to Israel and Judah.

'Shortening' the Assyrians

Now, just as I have begun to quadruple Jonah's identity (Isaiah, Hosea, Jonah, Nahum) and have correspondingly multiplied that of his father, Amittai (Amos, Beeri) - thereby 'reducing' the number of biblical prophets - so shall I be merging some of the neo-Assyrian kings, so that their numbers will be diminished and their chronology shortened.

I have argued this revision in far more detail in my various articles on Assyria.

First of all, I believe that Tiglath-pileser III was the same person as Shalmaneser V, the besieger of Samaria, presumed to have been the successor of Tiglath-pileser III. Whilst the latter is supposed to have taken the Galileans into captivity, it was Shalmaneser V who actually captured Samaria, apparently along with his successor, Sargon II. But the Book of Tobit, a most important ancient testimony for this era, attributes instead the capture of Galilee, including Tobit's own tribe of Naphtali, to "Shalmaneser" (1:1-2).

Tobit would in fact become that king's purveyor. Thus he could say: "Because I was mindful of God with all my heart, the Most High gave me favour and good standing with Shalmaneser, and I used to buy everything he needed" (1:12-13).

Since the Book of Tobit attributes to "Shalmaneser" what historians usually attribute to Tiglath-pileser III - and for various other reasons mentioned in my articles - I submit that:

Tiglath-pileser III = Shalmaneser [V]

The only real relevance of this equation for the present article is, apart from the fact that I am arguing that neo-Assyrian history stands in need of radical correction, that it serves to shorten the chronology. And that is much to be desired. For I am already heading towards an inevitable conclusion that the prophet Jonah was old (perhaps this explains, in part, his 'ill-natured' grumpiness that König had found so 'childish'). So any shortening of chronology is greatly to be welcomed. Though consideration of Tiglath-pileser III's (as Shalmaneser) being well disposed towards Tobit might be a further point in favour of Cooper's view that Tiglath-pileser III was the repentant "king of Nineveh" of Jonah 3:6.

Now the Book of Tobit makes no mention whatsoever of a "Sargon" in its account of the neo-Assyrian succession at this point in time. Sargon II is universally thought to have succeeded Shalmaneser V, and to have fathered Sennacherib. But Tobit does not mention Sargon. In fact, the Book of Isaiah was the only record that humankind had of this king, under the name 'Sargon', for 2000-plus years, until Emile Botta, in 1842, excavated Sargon II's palace at Khorsabad. Isaiah had written (20:1):

"In the year that the Turtan [commander] came to Ashdod, when Sargon king of Assyria sent him."

I believe that Sargon II was in fact the same person as Sennacherib, and that the author of Tobit was quite right therefore in saying that Sennacherib succeeded "Shalmaneser", with no mention whatsoever of Sargon. "But when Shalmaneser died, and his son Sennacherib reigned in his place …" (1:15). So I have concluded in various articles:

Sargon II = Sennacherib.

For this historical accuracy, as I believe, the Book of Tobit has been criticized by proponents of the conventional neo-Assyrian chronology, such as J. Marshall:

… It [the Book of Tobit] contains historical errors. (a) It was Tiglath-pileser who took [the tribes of] Naphtali and Zebulun into captivity (B.C. 734), not Shalmaneser, 2 K 15:29. (b) Sennacherib was not [sic] Shalmaneser's son (1:15), but the son of Sargon [sic] a usurper. ….

Basing myself on the testimony of Tobit, but also upon many other considerations as discussed in my articles, I can thus streamline the neo-Assyrian king list a little more:

On p. 29 above, I had quoted Boutflower to the effect that it was neither Cyrus the Persian (in the C6th BC), nor Sargon II (in 710 BC), who had savagely destroyed Babylon as according to Isaiah's Oracle, but Sennacherib in 689 BC (conventional dates). But, with Sargon II and Sennacherib now identified as one, this view will need to be amended somewhat. The Assyrian king actually (like 'Xerxes of Persia' with whom he has been compared) conquered Babylon twice; the second time in brutal fashion. The first time was during his 'Fourth Campaign'; and the second time was during his 'Eighth Campaign'. This last was undertaken at about the time that he had completed the building of 'Dur-Sargon'; only after which, I believe, could 'the Jonah incident' have happened. The destruction of Babylon is described in the Book of Judith as having occurred in the Assyrian king's 17th year (1:13, 14). Babylon is mistakenly called "Ecbatana" there.

[I shall have more to say in 4. about such