destruction of the Temple, not only human felicity was in many respects forfeited, but all nature declined and was vitiated. However, such a notion does not seem to have been entertained by the author of this Book; for in a later portion the guiltlessness of the brutes is urged as a reason why Nineveh should be spared. Yet the deeper significance of the edict is not fathomed by assuming that the fasting and consequent groaning and crying of the animals were intended to rouse the compassion of the people and thus to enhance the fervour of their devotion;d nor is it sufficiently explained by the usage of the early Greeks and Persians, Thessalians and Macedonians, who testified their grief in heavy bereavement not only by shaving the hair from their own heads, but by cutting off the manes from their war-horses and sumpterbeasts; which custom, like the covering of funeral horses with black trappings, was merely prompted by the desire of letting the living property of the mourners share the external signs of affliction;f much less is the conduct of the Ninevites meant to illustrate their ignorance of what is really required to secure the grace of God, as it included the very same acts which the Hebrew author himself regarded as most pious and most acceptable.

c. 34; Alexand. c. 72.

f The lament on the death of Daphnis (in Virg. Ecl. v. 24-28) is only a poetical fancy: 'Non ulli pastos illis egere diebus Frigida, Daphni, boves ad flumina; nulla neque amnem Libavit quadrupes' etc.; although such imaginative conceptions prove how easily a corresponding custom might actually arise among less cultured nations.

Dinter and others. Luther remarks: they do several 'foolish things' which God did not desire, but which He overlooked on account of the earnestness they evinced.

b

Do we find in history any trace of the Ninevites ever having done homage to the God of Israel and of having, even temporarily, renounced their ancestral worship? We can nowhere discover the slightest allusion to such a fact; neither in the Hebrew nor in the heathen annals; neither in that part of the Scriptures which relates the work of Jonah, and where surely so singular a success of his zeal would have been mentioned with pride if it had been achieved, nor incidentally in any of the prophetic or hagiographic writings. On the contrary, the prophet Nahum declares distincitly, among other menaces pronounced against Nineveh, 'Out of the house of thy gods will I cut off the graven image and the molten image;' the Books of Kings state by name the eastern idols Nibhaz and Tartak, Nergal and Ashima, Adrammelech and Anammelech; in the remarkable account of Sennacherib's war against Hezekiah, the former, through the mouth of one of his chief officers, bitterly taunts the Hebrew king with his futile reliance on his national god, whose nature the Assyrian understands so little that, in his opinion, Hezekiah must have incurred Jahveh's wrath for having deprived Him of all the heights, and of all the altars except that solitary one in Jerusalem; and he places, in fact, Jahveh on the same level of power with the gods of Hamath and Arpad or any Syrian idol. And on the other hand, all Assyrian monuments and records, whether of a date earlier or later than Jeroboam II.

a There is truth and force in the remark: 'Such a conversion is unexampled in the whole revelation of God to man... Before this stupendous power of God's grace over the unruly will of savage, yet educated, men, the physical miracles, great as they are, shrink into nothing. As many souls as there were, so many miracles were there, greater even than the crea

tion of man' (Pusey 1. c. p. 257). If so wonderful a conversion had been accomplished, the ancient historians would certainly have left it on record; while the prophets would not have failed to use it against the impenitent Israelites.

b

Nah. i. 14; comp. iii. 4.

c 2 Ki. xvii. 30, 31; see Comm.

on Lev. i. 367, 369, 370.

d 2 Ki. xviii. 22, 30, 33, 34.

disclose the same vast pantheon which was the boast of king and people alike-Asshur, 'the great lord ruling supreme over the gods,' with his twelve greater and four thousand inferior deities presiding over all manifestations of nature and all complications of human life; for the Assyrians at all times saw their strength and their bulwark in the multitude of their gods and considered that nation feeble and defenceless indeed which enjoyed only the protection of a single divinity.a If, then, in spite of all these opposing and evidently authentic facts, and in spite of incessant invectives of honoured patriots recognised as divinely inspired, a Hebrew writer, about a century after Nineveh's downfall, yet depicted the Ninevites as turning their hearts readily to Jahveh and His messenger, he must have clung, with an irrepressible longing, to that time when 'the Lord shall be One and His name One.' This aspiration is the indisputable title of the simple Book of Jonah to rank among the noblest productions of Hebrew prophets; though not containing a single Messianic prediction in explicit words, it is thoroughly Messianic in its essence and totality, and it might well be used, as it is used in the New Testament, as a most powerful weapon of reproof and admonition: 'The men of Nineveh shall rise in judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it, because they repented at the preaching of Jonas.'b

PHILOLOGICAL REMARKS.-Hence the view that Jonah's mission was not really meant to effect the conversion of the Ninevites, but typically to show the possibility of the future reception of the heathen in the kingdom of God (Keil 1. c. pp. 272, 275, 291), is but partially correct: to the Hebrew writer, the conversion of the Ninevites was a reality, 'a sort of first-fruit of the re-creation of the Gentile world' (Pusey 1. c. p. 257), and not merely a type or symbol; he did

a

Comp. Comm. on Gen. p. 301. b Matt. xii. 41; Luke xi. 32.

not relegate the redemption of the heathen to an indefinite future, but held it to be possible at once; and we must admit the justice of the remark that 'the whole Book could obtain its full importance only if the readers regarded the penitence and reformation of the Ninevites not as fictions but as facts' (Friedrichsen 1. c. p. 275); comp. also Bailey 1. c. p. 1120, 'Jonah was sent to testify by deed, as other prophets would afterwards testify by word, the capacity of the Gentiles for salvation, and the design of God to make them partakers of it;' Huxtable 1. c. p. 579, 'The example of the Ninevites could only serve to abash impenitent Jews on the supposition that they were real persons, who really acted in the way described;' Kaulen, Lib. Jonae Prophetae, pp. 1-5; etc.-The first part of the fourth verse (on which see supra pp. 234, 235), taken separately, might indeed be understood to mean, as Theodoret and others interpret it, that Jonah 'did not pass straight through the city, but went about the public places and streets;' this is, however, rendered impossible by the unmistakable sense of the words. o`pnwbw bap in ver. 3. From one extreme point to the other Nineveh extended a three days' journey; now Jonah began () to make his progress through the city (N for n, supra p. 146), delivering his charge and exhorting the people, as he went on, from time to time and in suitable places; when he had thus proceeded for one day, the Ninevites believed and did penance; and then the prophet considered his mission as accomplished. Such seems to be the context of these verses, to which no objection can be raised on account of the simple parataxis of p"

although in other passages a clearer ויחל לבוא after ויאמר

and more specific mode of expression is chosen to convey the contemporaneousness of two actions (see supra p. 170;

for the author surely ;(בלכתו בעיר היה קורא ואומר וכ' Kimchi

did not intend to say that Jonah began his preaching only at the end of the first day's journey-in the evening or the next morning. But such minute details as 'Jonah, who doubtless arrived by the still common caravan road past

Amida and entered the complex Assyrian town at Nineveh, came after the first day into the vicinity of the palace, which was then probably in Nimroud, where the king heard of his addresses, the distance between Nineveh and Nimroud being eighteen to twenty English miles or a small day's journey' (Keil 1. c. p. 288),-such precise details, supposing even that the theory respecting the 'complex town' were well-founded, are at variance with the character of the narrative, since the author, merely bent upon enjoining his great lessons and truths, interwove no other particulars but such as were demanded by perspicuity and the interest of the story.-'Jonah's preaching,' observes Pusey, no doubt correctly (1. c. p. 253), 'seems to have lasted only one day; for on that one day only was there still a respite of forty days.'—The Septuagint is singular among the ancient versions in rendering Dy by three days, eri rрEÏS upa, whether from inadvertency or design, and hence the same number is likewise given by Philo (De Jona c. 27), Sulpicius, and the Greek Fathers; but it is also found in the Arabic translation; Justin the Martyr, combining the two figures, has forty-three; while Josephus writes vaguely ‘after a very little time' (μετ' ὀλίγον πάνυ χρόνον). Augustin (De Civit. Dei, xviii. 44) curiously defends both numbers as prefiguring analogous events: 'in quadraginta diebus ipsum Christum quaere, in quo et triduum potueris invenire; illud in ascensione, hoc in ejus resurrectione reperies.'— The verb is used to denote the utter destruction of towns and districts, like that of Sodom and Gomorrah (comp. Gen. xix. 21, 25, 29; Deut. xxix. 22; Isa. i. 7; xiii. 19; Jer. xx. 16; xlix. 18; Am. iv. 11; Lam. iv. 11; also Job ix. 5; xxviii. 9; Tobit xiv. 4, NivεvỲ öтi kataσтpapera), and the participle n expresses the event as unfailingly impending. Josephus states, that Jonah threatened the Assyrians merely that they would soon lose the dominion. of Asia, and he abruptly concludes the narrative at this point (καὶ ταῦτα δημώσας ὑπέστρεψε), utterly ignoring the deeper spirit and tendency of the Book.-The people of