JONAH iii
Having learned, through suffering, his moral kinship with the heathen, and having offered his life for some of them, Jonah receives a second command to go to Niniveh. He obeys, but with his prejudice as strong as though it had never been humbled, nor met by Gentile nobleness. The first part of his story appears to have no consequences in the second.[1538] But this is consistent with the writer’s purpose to treat Jonah as if he were Israel. For, upon their return from Exile, and in spite of all their new knowledge of themselves and the world, Israel continued to cherish their old grudge against the Gentiles.
_And the word of Jehovah came to Jonah the second time, saying, Up, go to Niniveh, the great city, and call unto her with the call which I shall tell thee. And Jonah arose and went to Niniveh, as Jehovah said. Now Niniveh was a city great before God, three days’ journey_ through and through.[1539] _And Jonah began by going through the city one day’s journey, and he cried and said, Forty[1540] days more and Niniveh shall be overturned_.
Opposite to Mosul, the well-known emporium of trade on the right bank of the Upper Tigris, two high artificial mounds now lift themselves from the otherwise level plain. The more northerly takes the name of Kujundschik, or “little lamb,” after the Turkish village which couches pleasantly upon its north-eastern slope. The other is called in the popular dialect Nebi Yunus, “Prophet Jonah,” after a mosque dedicated to him, which used to be a Christian church; but the official name is Niniveh. These two mounds are bound to each other on the west by a broad brick wall, which extends beyond them both, and is connected north and south by other walls, with a circumference in all of about nine English miles. The interval, including the mounds, was covered with buildings, whose ruins still enable us to form some idea of what was for centuries the wonder of the world. Upon terraces and substructions of enormous breadth rose storied palaces, arsenals, barracks, libraries and temples. A lavish water system spread in all directions from canals with massive embankments and sluices. Gardens were lifted into mid-air, filled with rich plants and rare and beautiful animals. Alabaster, silver, gold and precious stones relieved the dull masses of brick and flashed sunlight from every frieze and battlement. The surrounding walls were so broad that chariots could roll abreast on them. The gates, and especially the river gates, were very massive.[1541]
All this was Niniveh proper, whose glory the Hebrews envied and over whose fall more than one of their prophets exult. But this was not the Niniveh to which our author saw Jonah come. Beyond the walls were great suburbs,[1542] and beyond the suburbs other towns, league upon league of dwellings, so closely set upon the plain as to form one vast complex of population, which is known to Scripture as _The Great City_.[1543] To judge from the ruins which still cover the ground,[1544] the circumference must have been about sixty miles, or three days’ journey. It is these nameless leagues of common dwellings which roll before us in the story. None of those glories of Niniveh are mentioned, of which other prophets speak, but the only proofs offered to us of the city’s greatness are its extent and its population.[1545] Jonah is sent to three days, not of mighty buildings, but of homes and families, to the Niniveh, not of kings and their glories, but of men, women and children, _besides much cattle_. The palaces and temples he may pass in an hour or two, but from sunrise to sunset he treads the dim drab mazes where the people dwell.
When we open our hearts for heroic witness to the truth there rush upon them glowing memories of Moses before Pharaoh, of Elijah before Ahab, of Stephen before the Sanhedrim, of Paul upon Areopagus, of Galileo before the Inquisition, of Luther at the Diet. But it takes a greater heroism to face the people than a king, to convert a nation than to persuade a senate. Princes and assemblies of the wise stimulate the imagination; they drive to bay all the nobler passions of a solitary man. But there is nothing to help the heart, and therefore its courage is all the greater, which bears witness before those endless masses, in monotone of life and colour, that now paralyse the imagination like long stretches of sand when the sea is out, and again terrify it like the resistless rush of the flood beneath a hopeless evening sky.