the fifth in order of the minor prophets. No era is assigned to him in the book of his prophecy, yet there is little doubt of his being the same person who is spoken of in 2 Kings xiv. 25, where he is described as the son of Amitai, and a native of Gath-hepher, in the tribe of Zebulon. He flourished in or before the reign of Jeroboam II., and predicted the successful conquests, enlarged territory, and brief prosperity of the Israelitish kingdom under that monarch's sway.

The Book of Jonah contains an account of the prophet's mission to denounce Nineveh, and of his refusal to undertake the embassy—of the method he employed to evade the unwelcome task, and the miraculous means which God used to curb his self-willed spirit, and subdue his petulant and querulous disposition. After narrating his fulfillment of the Divine command we are again presented with another exemplification of his refractory temper. His attempt to flee from the presence of the Lord must have sprung from a partial insanity, produced by the excitement of distracting motives in an irascible and melancholy heart. The mind of Jonah was dark and moody, not unlike a lake which mirrors in the waters the gloomy thunderclouds overshadowing it, and flashing over its sullen waves a momentary gleam.

The history of Jonah is certainly striking and extraordinary. Its characteristic prodigy does not resemble the other miraculous phenomena recorded in Scripture; yet we must believe in its literal occurrence, as the Bible affords no indication of being a mythus, allegory, or parable. Our Saviour's pointed and peculiar allusion to it is a presumption of its reality (Matt. xii. 40). The opinion of the earlier Jews (Tobit xiv. 4; Joseph. Antiq. ix. 10, 2) is also in favour of the literality of the adventure. It requires less faith to credit this simple excerpt from Jonah's biography, than to believe the numerous hypotheses that have been invented to deprive it of its supernatural character. 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 mythical. Grimm regards it as a dream produced in that sleep which fell upon Jonah as he lay on the sides of the ship. The opinion of the famous Herman von der Hardt, as given by Rosenmüller was, that the book is a historical allegory, descriptive of the fate of Manasseh, and Josiah his grandson, kings of Judah. Tarshish, according to him, represents the kingdom of Lydia; the ship, the Jewish republic, whose captain was Zadok the high-priest; while the casting of Jonah into the sea symbolized the temporary captivity of Manasseh in Babylon. Others regard this book as an allegory, such as Bertholdt and Rosenmüller, Gesenius, and Winer—an allegory based upon the Phoenician mythus of Hercules and the Sea-monster. Less 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 rancid 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 over board. De Wette regards the story as not a true history, yet not a mere fiction; its material being derived from popular legends, and wrought up with the design of making a didactic work. But many regard it as a mere fiction with a moral design—the grotesque coinage of a Hebrew imagination. This opinion, variously modified, seems to be that of Semler, Michaelis, Herder, Stäudlin, Eichhorn, Augusti, Meyer, Pareau, and Maurer.

These hypotheses are all vague and baseless, and do not merit a special refutation. Endeavouring to free us from one difficulty they plunge us into others yet more intricate and perplexing. Much profane wit has been expended on the miraculous means of Jonah's deliverance, very unnecessarily and very absurdly. The species of marine animal is not defined, and the word is often used to specify, not the genus whale, but any large fish or sea-monster. There is little ground for the supposition of Bishop Jebb, that the asylum of Jonah was not in the stomach of a whale, but in a cavity of its throat, which, according to naturalists, is a very capacious receptacle, sufficiently large, as Captain Scoresby asserts, to contain a merchant ship's jolly-boat full of men. Since the days of Bochart it has been a common opinion that the fish was of the shark species, *Lamia canis carcarias*, or "sea-dog" (Bochart, Op. iii. 72; Calmet's Dissertation sur Jon.) Entire human bodies have been found in some fishes of this kind. The stomach, too, has no influence on any living substance admitted into it.

The Book of Jonah is a simple narrative, with the exception of the prayer or thanksgiving in chap. ii. Its style and mode of narration are uniform. There are no traces of compilation, as Naftigall supposed; neither is the prayer, as De Wette imagines, improperly borrowed from some other sources. That prayer contains, indeed, not only imagery peculiar to itself, but also such imagery as at once was suggested to the mind of a pious Hebrew preserved in circumstances of extreme jeopardy. There was little reason either for dating the composition of this book later than the age of Jonah, or for supposing it the production of another than the prophet himself. The Chaldeisms, which Jahn and others find, may be accounted for by the nearness of the canton of Zebulon, to which Jonah belonged, to the northern territory, whence by national intercourse Aramaic peculiarities might be insensibly borrowed. Gesenius and Berthold place it before the exile; Jahn and Koester after it. Rosenmüller supposes the author may have been a contemporary of Jeremiah; Hitzig postpones it to the period of the Maccabees. Apocryphal prophecies ascribed to Jonah may be found in the pseudo-Ennius (De Vitis Proph. c. 16), and the Chronic. Paschale, p. 149. Various spots have been pointed out as the place of his sepulchre, such as Mosul in the East, and Gath-hepher in Palestine; while the so-called Epiphanian speaks of his retreating to Tyre and being buried there in the tomb of Cenezes, judge of Israel.

Among the numerous commentators on Jonah may be noticed J. Gerhard, Annot. in Prop. Am. et Jon., &c., Frag. 1692; Lessing, Observat. in Vatic. Jon. 1782; Grimm, Der Prophet Jonas af. Neue Ubersetz. 1798; Forbiger, Proph. Jon., 1827; Krahmer, Das B. Jon. Hist. Krit. untersucht, Cassel, 1839.