Our last reading was in the book of Obadiah.  I mentioned in the comments on Obadiah that that book was one of a few where the prophets message was specifically for a non-Israelite people.  Jonah is another such book.  Jonah was a prophet of Israel but he was sent to Ninevah.

Ninevah was an important city and sometime capital of the on-again off –again Assyrian empire.  As we just saw in the book of Obadiah, whether a nation is “on” or “off” often depends on it’s relationship with God.  Historically the Assyrians didn’t have a great track record; at least if their treatment of the people they conquered is any indication.  They were famous for their brutality, killing leading citizens in a conquered city and piling their heads outside of cities to discourage rebellion, ripping people’s body parts off (including lips), not nice people in war.  When we read Hosea we learned that the Assyrian’s had a policy of scattering conquered people throughout their empire to break up loyalties, both personal and spiritual.  It was to such a people that Jonah was sent. No wonder he ran the other way.

The date of Jonah is debated among scholars as is the truthfulness of the story.  Many scholars think it is a fiction, a myth, or an allegory designed to teach a point, like an “Aesop’s Fable”.  However, 2 Kings 14:25 specifically names Jonah as a prophet in the reign of Jeroboam king of Israel (793-753 BC).  Also Jesus uses Jonah as a real life example in Matthew 12:39-41.  Other problems scholars have with Jonah include the miraculous event in the book (but is anything too hard for God to do) and the reference to the size of Ninevah (a great city with 120,000 souls in it and described as a city of three days journey).  The references to the size of Ninevah probably refer to “Greater Ninevah”, that is Ninevah and the villages around it.  I live in Garden Grove, Ca.  about 30 miles from Los Angeles, and I live in a different county that the one Los Angeles is in, Orange County.  About a half mile from my house is a Costco store.  Attached to the Costco is a regional headquarters for Costco, the “Los Angeles Regional Headquarters.”  And about three miles from my house is Anaheim Stadium (in Orange County) where the “Los Angeles Angles” play baseball.  So it’s not unreasonable to consider the descriptions of Ninevah to be similar.  Finally the response to Jonah seems unlikely to some modern scholars and they also like to point out that we do not have any record of a spiritual revival in Ninevah at the time of Jonah.  Ancient people were very concerned with natural events.  They often saw them as signs from the gods. History records plagues in both 765 and 759 BC and there was a solar eclipse in 765 BC all of these could have prepared the way for the message from Jonah.  The fact that there is no record of a revival is an argument from silence, there are lots of events in history that go unrecorded and the argument ignores the record of Jonah himself.

So we see Jonah as a real guy taking God’s message to the people of Ninevah around 760 BC.