The Book of Jonah by Peter Spier
Author:Peter Spier [Spier, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-375-98238-5
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2015-01-26T16:00:00+00:00
Map of Nineveh’s Ruins Today
Muslims regard Yunus, “the man of the fish,” as one of Allah’s prophets. And the Koran, the sacred book of Islam, mentions him in three of the 114 chapters, one of which bears his name.
In Jonah’s time, Israel was in the shadow of its mighty neighbor, the Assyrian Empire, which spread across the territory of present-day Iraq and Syria. We know that Nineveh, which became the capital of Assyria in the eighth century BC, covered eighteen hundred acres within a wall eight miles around. Diodorus, a historian of the first century BC, wrote that “its walls were one hundred feet high, with room for three chariots to drive abreast on them, and there were fifteen hundred towers, each two hundred feet in height.”
So it seems small wonder that Jonah, aside from having to journey the 565 miles from Joppa to Nineveh, was fearful and reluctant when ordered to go to that sophisticated and most magnificent of cities, the very symbol of world power, to tell the people of their impending doom.
Today Joppa is known as Jaffa, a suburb of Tel Aviv in Israel, which lies thirty-five miles northwest of Jerusalem.
Although not all scholars agree, Tarshish was most likely the city of Tartessos on the southern coast of Spain, 2,400 miles from Joppa. Jonah must have chosen to escape to the most distant place he could think of—and Tarshish was just that. To Jonah, it would have seemed like the very western edge of the world.
During the seventh century BC, Assyrian power gradually eroded—and that of Babylonia steadily grew. In 612 BC, the Babylonians and their allies launched their final assault on Nineveh, and the city fell, as foretold by the prophets Nahum and Zephaniah.
“And it shall come to pass,” prophesied Nahum, “that all they that look upon thee shall flee from thee, and say, Nineveh is laid waste: who will bemoan her?” (Nahum 3:7).
And in Zephaniah we read: “And he will stretch out his hand against the north, and destroy Assyria; and will make Nineveh a desolation, and dry like a wilderness. And flocks shall lie down in the midst of her …” (Zephaniah 2:13–14).
Nineveh was sacked and burned, and for twenty-four centuries, the curtain of time descended on the dust and rubble of what had been the mightiest city on earth.
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