Others reganl this Iwok as an allegory, such as Ber- tholdt and IJosenmiiUer, Gcscnius and Winer. Espe- cially liave many deemed it a parody upon or even the original of the various heathen fables of Arion and the Dolphin (Hcrodot. i, 21), and the wild adventure of Her- cules wliich is referred to iu Lvcophron {Cassandra, v, 33 ; see Forbigcr, De Li/cophr. Cassandra c. epimetro de ./'w/. Lips. I«27; comp.//iV(f/, XX, 145, xxi,-442; Diod. NIC. IV, 42 i Philostr. Iron. 12 ; Hygin. Fab. 89 ; ApoUod.
11. 1, 9) and Perseus (ApoUod. ii. 4, 3 ; Ovid, Metain. iv, <>';2 s(,.; Hygin. 64; Phot. Cod. 186, p. 231). Joppa bc- iu'j: even famous as the scene of Andromeda's exposure (I'hny, y, 14, 34; ix, 4; Strabo, xvi, 759). Cvrill Al- exrind., ni his Comment, in Jon., notices this similitude between the iitcidcnt of Jonah and the fabled enter- prise of the son of Alcmena (see AUat. Excerpt, var. p. '-<4; Eudocia Viol, in Villoison's Anec. Or. i, 344; An- ton, Comparalio librornm V. T. et scriptor. profan. cet p. 10, Gorlic. 1831 ; compare, too, Theophylact, 0pp. iv,
169). Bleek justly says (Einleit. p. 576) that there is not the smallest probability of the story of Jonah's tem- porary sojourn in the belly of the whale having been either mediately or immediately derived from those Greek fables. F. von Baur's hypotljesis of the story of the book being a compound of some'popular Jewish tra- ditions and the Babylonian myth respecting a sea mon- ster Oannes, and the fast for Adonis, is now universally regarded as exploded. For further discussion of this part of Jonah's history, see Gesenius, in the Hall. Lit.-Zeit. 1813, No. 23 ; Friedrichsen, Krit. Ueberblick der Atisich- ten vom Jonas (Leipz. 1841) ; Delitzsch, in Eudelbach's Zeitschrift, 1840, ii, 112 sq. These legendary parallels may be seen drawn out at length by professor Stowe in the Bibliotheca Sacra for Oct, 1853, p. 744 sq. See Joppa.
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. Such an ojjinion is the evadent result of a mental struggle be- tween receiving it as a real transaction, or regarcUng it as wholly a fiction (Goldhorn, Excurs. z. B. Jon. p. 28 ; Friedrichsen, Krit. Ueberblick der Ansichten B. Jon. p. 219). Grimm, in his Uebersetz. p. 61, regards it as a dream produced in that sleep which fell upon Jonah as he lay in the sides of the ship. The fancifid opinion of the famous Herman von der Ilardt, in his Jonas in luce, etc., a full abstract of which is given by Rosenmiil- ler {Pi-olegom. in Jonam, p. 19), was, that the book is a historical allegory, descriptive of the fate of Manas- seh, and Josiah his grandson, kings of Judali. Tar- shish, according to him, represents the kingdom of Lydia ; the ship, the Jewish republic, whose cajitain was Zadok the high-priest; while the casting of Jonah into tlie sea symbolized the temporary captivity of jManas- seh in Babylon. Less ( Vom historischen Styl der Ur- welt) supposed that all difficulty might be removed by imagining that Jonah, when tlirown 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 hy- pothesis of Anton, who fancied that the projthet took refuge in the interior of a dead whale, floating near the spot where he was cast overboard (Rosenm. Proler/om. in Jon. p. 328). Not unlike the opinion of Less is that of Charles Taylor, in his Fragments affixed to Calmet's Dictionary, No. cxlv., that 5^ signifies a life-preserver, a notion which, as his manner is, he endeavors to sup- ]5ort by mythological metamorphoses founded on the form and names of the famous fish-god of Philistia, There are others who allow, as De AVette and Knobel, that Jonah was a real person, but hold that the book is made up, for didactic puqjoses, of legendarj- stories which had gathered around him. A slender basis of fact has been allowed by some — by Bunsen, for example, who, strangely enough, fixes upon the very portion which to most of his rationalistic countrymen bears the clearest marks of spuriousness, as the one genuine part of the whole — Jonah's thanksgiving Irom the ])erils of ship- wreck (as Bunsen judges); and thinks that some one had mistaken the matter, and fabricated out of it the present story — by others, such as Ivrahmer {Das Bnch Jona?, introd.), who suppose that Jonah was kno-\;n to have uttered a prophecy against Nine\'eh, and to have been impatient at the delay which appeared in the ful- filment, and was hence, for didactic purposes, made the hero of the story.
vBut the more common opinion in the present day with this school of divines is, that the story is purely moral, and without any historical foundation ; nor can any clew be found or imagined in the known history of the times why Jonah in particidar, a prophet of Israel in the latter stages of the kingdom, should have been chjsen as the ground of the instruction meant to be conveyed. So Ewald, Bleek, etc., who, however, differ in some respects as to the specific aim of the book, while they agree as to its non-historical character. In short, that the book is the grotesque coinage of a Hebrew im-