for “overthrown,”nehepekhet,literally means “turned upside down,” and it has
been taken as a word-play alluding to the ultimate repentance of the city’s
residents.
In Jonah’s story, the prophet, a stranger, arrives at Nineveh and proclaims
that it will be overthrown. The inhabitants do not argue. Improbably, they
“take to heart this warning” (Jonah 3 : 5 ). Jonah’s prophecy is one of pending
repentance, implied physical destruction, and looming imperial collapse.
But the story told in Jonah is also about imperial realities. We recall that,
before actually delivering the prophecy as ordered, Jonah first fled. Jonah’s
journey away from, and then inexorably toward, the Assyrian capital reflects
contemporary perceptions of the vastness and diversity of the Assyrian Empire,
the geographical setting of the story.
At first, Jonah escapes the mission by running to the port in Joppa (Jaffa)
and embarking on a “ship bound to Tarshish.” Some scholars locate Tarshish
in southern Spain; others consider it to be a legend. However, all agree that
logically it was located in the opposite direction from Nineveh, somewhere in
the Mediterranean. The scene on the ship reflects the multiculturalism of the
empire; when God sends a storm, “everyone cried out to his own god for help,”
and Jonah is asked to do the same. When this does not work, the sailors ask
Jonah, “What is your business? Where do you come from? Which is your
country? What is your nationality?” To which the answer is “I am a Hebrew”
(Jonah 1 : 7 – 9 ), one recognizable “nationality” among many.
The book of Jonah describes the diversity of Assyrian imperial society and
teaches us about perceptions of distance to and from its capital. It also ex-
presses, metaphorically, the sense of the empire’s inescapable reach. Nineveh
is described as “a vast city of three journey days’ across” inhabited by a
population of 120 , 000. Nineveh in both its proportions and distance is a
known referent; it is, in its context, what “the City” means today. Jonah’s
prophetic travel is unwittingly a strong expression of the extent to which
Israelite perceptions of geography and distance were drawn directly from
Assyrian ones. This Nineveh maps the eastern Mediterranean world as a
fundamentally Assyrian imperial one.
Nineveh also became intimately linked to the exile of the ten tribes. The
apocryphal book of Tobit, produced around the second centurybce, tells the
story of a righteous ten triber named Tobit who lives in Nineveh to which he was
exiled by the Assyrians.^49 During the nineteenth century, when modern archae-
ologists began excavating the city, searching for evidence of the presence of the
ten tribes in the vicinity was on scholars’ minds.^50 In the city, the first modern
Western observers found “the life-likeness of the very men who carried away the
ten tribes.”^51 Modern archaeological discoveries, which shed new light on
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