What is said about the size of Nineveh also is in accordance with fact. It was an exceeding great city of three days' jouniey.' Built in the form of a parallelogram, it made, according to Diodorus (ii. 7), a circuit of 4So furlongs, or about 60 miles. It has been usual, since the publication of Layarcl's Nineveh, to say that the great ruins of Koyunjik, Keremles, and Khorsabacl, form such a parallelogram, the distances from north to south being about IS miles, and from east to west about 12 ; the longer sides thus measuring 36 miles, and the shorter ones 24. But against this view fessor Rawlinson has recently urged, with siderable force, that the four great ruins bore distinct local titles ; that Nimrud, identified with Calah, is mentioned in Scripture as a place so far separated from Nineveh, that a great city'— Resen—lay between them (Gen. x. 12); that there are no signs of a continuous town ; and that the four sites are fortified on what would be the side of the city.' Still Nineveh, as represented by the ruins of Koyunjik and Nebbi-Yunus, or Tomb of Jonah, was of an oblong shape, with a circuit of about eight miles, and was therefore a place of unusual size—` an exceeding great city.' The phrase, 'three days' journey,' may mean that it would take that time to traverse the city and pro claim through all its localities the divine message ; and the emphatic point then is, that at the end of his first day's journey the preaching of Jonah took effect. The clause, that cannot discern their right hand from their left hand,' probably denotes children, and 120,000 of these might represent a population of more than half a million [NINEvEn]. Rawlinson's Five Great Monarchies, vol. i. p. 3 to ; Sir Henry Rawlinson's Comment. on Cuszeif. script., p. 17 ; Captain Jones' Topography of Nine veh ; 7ournal of Asiatic Society, vol. xv. p. 20S. Jonah entered the city a day's journey,' that is, probably went from west to east uttering his in cisive and terrible message. The sublime audacity of the stranger—the ringing monotony of his sharp short cry—had an immediate effect. The people believed God, and proclaimed a fast, and man and beast fasted alike. The exaggeration ascribed to this picture adds to its credibility, so prone is Ori ental nature to extremes. If the burden of Jonah was to have any effect at all, one might say that it must be profound and immediate. It was a panic —we dare not call it a revival, or with Dr. Pusey, dignify it into conversion. There was plainly no permanent result. After the sensation had passed away, idolatry and rapacity resumed their former sway, .as is testified by the prophets Isaiah, Nahum, and Zephaniah. Yet the appalled conscience of Nineveh did confess its evil and its violence,' as it grovelled in the dust. Various causes may have contributed to deepen this consternation— the superstition of the people, and the sudden and un explained appearance of the foreigner with his voice of doom. The king,' as Layard says, blight believe him to be a special minister from the supreme deity of the nation,' and it was only when the gods themselves seemed to interpose that any check was placed on the royal pride and lust.' Layard adds, It was not necessary to the effect of his preaching that Jonah should be of the religion of the people of Nineveh. I have known a Christian priest frighten a whole Mussulman town to tents and repentance by publicly pro claiming that he had received a divine mission to announce a coming earthquake or plague' (Nine veh a7zd Balylon, p. 632). The compulsory mourn ing of the brute creation has at least one analogy in the lamentation made over the Persian General Masistius : • The horses and beasts of burden were shaved' (Herodotus, ix. 24). According to Plu tarch also, Alexander commanded the observance of a similar custom on the death of Hephmstion. Therefore, in the accessories of the narrative there is no violation of probability—all is in accordance • with known customs and facts.
The characteristic prodiry of the book does not resemble the other miraculous phenomena recorded in Scripture. Vet we must believe in its literal occurrence, as the Bible affords no indication of its being a myth, allegory, or parable. On the other hand, our Saviour's pointed and peculiar allusion to it is evidence of its reality (Matt. xii. 40). The Pharisees asked a sign—crnp-aop—or supernatural token—some signal and brilliant proof of his mis sion. He refuses such a sign in their sense of it, but adds that the sign of Jonah shall be given them : For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly, so also shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.' To say that such words at c only put Into the mouth' of Jesus, as Paulus. De Wette, Strauss, and Krabbe affirm, at once gainsays all critical evidence, and puts an end to all reasoning on the point. Hold ing, however, that Jesus spoke them, and there is the same proof that he spoke them as that he spoke any other sentence ascribed to him in the gospels, we maintain, that the crThiceiov is not Jonah's call to repentance, but his miraculous preservation. The
context plainly implies it, and warrants us to give to am.kelop the meaning of a miracle or supernatural token. Not that Jonah, in the strict theological sense, was a type of Christ—but this wonder ol his life had in itself, and in its lessons, a striking resemblance to that great event in Christ's career which proved the divinity of his mission, and the perfection of his mediatorial work. The preaching of Jonah referred to in verse 41 is indeed connected with the sign, but is distinct from it, and brings out another aggravation of Pharisaic unbelief. The denial of the possibility or probability of this miracle, or of other miracles, limits omnipotence, while it deifies the uniformity of nature, and indges of the sovereign ruler from our own self-imposea conceptions of his ways and works. The opinion of the earlier Jews (Tobit xiv. 4 ; Joseph. Antiq. ix. lo. 2) is also in favour of the literality of the ad venture. It requires less faith to credit this simple excerpt front Jonah's biography, than to believe the numerous hypotheses that have been invented to deprive it of its supernatural character. In vindication of its reality, it may be argued too, that the allusions of Christ to Old Testament events on similar occasions are to actual occur rences (John iii. 14 ; vi. 43); that the purpose which God had in view justified his miraculous interposition ; and that this miracle must have had a salutary effect both on the minds of the Ninevites and on the people of Israel. _Neither is the character of Jonah improbable. Many reasons might induce him to avoid the discharge of his pro phetic duty—fear of being thought a false prophet, scorn of a foreign and hostile race, desire for their utter destruction, and a false dignity which might reckon it beneath him to officiate among uncir cumcised idolaters (Laberenz, De Vera lib. Yana Inte;p., Fulda 1836).
Some, who cannot altogether reject the reality of the narrative, suppose it to have had a historical basis, though its present form be fanciful or mythi cal. Such an opinion is the evident result of a mental struggle between receiving it as a real transaction and regarding it as wholly a fiction. (Blasche, Grimm, Uebersetz. p. 61, and Abarbanel, regard it as a dream produced in that sleep which fell upon Jonah as he lay in the sides of the ship). The opinion of the famous Herman von der Hardt, in his 7onas in luce, and other similar productions, a full abstract of which is given by Rosenmiiller (Prolegont. yonam., p. 19), was, that the book is a historical allegory, descriptive of the fate of Manasseh, and Josiah his grandson, kings of Judah. The fancy of this eccentric author has found ample gratification. Tarshish, according to him, repre sents the kingdom of Lydia ; the ship, the Jewish republic, whose captain was Zadok the high-priest ; while the casting of Jonah into the sea symbol ized the temporary captivity of Manasseh in Baby lon. We cannot say, with Rosenmi.iller, that this theory deserves even the praise of ingenious fiction. That the book is an allegory, is the opinon of Bertholdt, Rosenmliller, Gesenius, and Wtner an allegory based upon the Phcenician Myth of Hercules and the Sea-monster. Less, in his tract, Von Historischen Sly/ der Unveil, supposed that all difficulty might be removed by imagining that Jonah, when thrown into the sea, was taken up by a ship having a large fish for a figure-head—a theory somewhat more pleasing than the hypothesis of Anton, who fancied that the prophet took refuge in .the interior of a dead whale floating near the spot where he was cast overboard (Rosenm. Pro Kevin. in p. 328). Not unlike the opinion of Less is that of Charles Taylor, in his Fragments affixed to Calmet's Dictionary, No. cxlv., that rt signifies a life-preserver, a notion which, as his manner is, he endeavours to support by myth ological metamorphoses founded on the form and names of the famous fish-god of Philistia. But many regard the book as a mere fiction with a moral design—the grotesque coinage of a Hebrew im agination. This opinion, variously modified, seems to be that of Semler, Michaelis, IIerder, Staudlin, Eichhorn, Augusti, Meyer, Pareau, Hitzig, and Mauler. On the other hand, the historical charac ter of the narrative is held by Hess, Lilienthal, Sack, Reindl, Havemick, Hengstenberg, Laberenz, Baumgarten, Delitzsch, Welte, Stuart, and Keil, Ebileitzing, sec. 89. (See Friedrichsen Krit. iiber. sicht der verschied. Ansichten von el. Buck yona, 2d ed. 18.41.) There are others who allow, as De Wette and Knobel, that Jonah was a real person, but hold that the book is made up, for didactic purposes, of legendary stories which had gathered around him. Bnnsen maintains that the hymn in the second chapter is a genuine poem composed by Jonah on an occasion of shipwreck and deliverance, and that it suggested the narrative which now itn beds it.