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[208]
Now I cannot but think it necessary for me, who have promised to
give an accurate account of our affairs, to describe the actions of this
prophet, so far as I have found them written down in the Hebrew books.
Jonah had been commanded by God to go to the kingdom of Nineveh; and when
he was there, to publish it in that city, how it should lose the dominion
it had over the nations. But he went not, out of fear; nay, he ran away
from God to the city of Joppa, and finding a ship there, he went into it,
and sailed to Tarsus, in Cilicia 1
and upon the rise of a most terrible storm, which was so great that the
ship was in danger of sinking, the mariners, the master, and the pilot
himself, made prayers and vows, in case they escaped the sea: but Jonah
lay still and covered [in the ship,] without imitating any thing that the
others did; but as the waves grew greater, and the sea became more violent
by the winds, they suspected, as is usual in such cases, that some one
of the persons that sailed with them was the occasion of this storm, and
agreed to discover by lot which of them it was. When they had cast lots,
2 the
lot fell upon the prophet; and when they asked him whence he came, and
what he had done? he replied, that he was a Hebrew by nation, and a prophet
of Almighty God; and he persuaded them to cast him into the sea, if they
would escape the danger they were in, for that he was the occasion of the
storm which was upon them. Now at the first they durst not do so, as esteeming
it a wicked thing to cast a man who was a stranger, and who had committed
his life to them, into such manifest perdition; but at last, when their
misfortune overbore them, and the ship was just going to be drowned, and
when they were animated to do it by the prophet himself, and by the fear
concerning their own safety, they cast him into the sea; upon which the
sea became calm. It is also reported that Jonah was swallowed down by a
whale, and that when he had been there three days, and as many nights,
he was vomited out upon the Euxine Sea, and this alive, and without any
hurt upon his body; and there, on his prayer to God, he obtained pardon
for his sins, and went to the city Nineveh, where he stood so as to be
heard, and preached, that in a very little time they should lose the dominion
of Asia. And when he had published this, he returned. Now I have given
this account about him as I found it written [in our books.]
1 When Jonah is said in our Bibles to have gone to Tarshish, Jonah 1:3, Josephus understood it that he went to Tarsus in Cilicia, or to the Mediterranean Sea, upon which Tarsus lay; so that he does not appear to have read the text, 1 Kings 22:48, as our copies do, that ships of Tarshish could lie at Ezion-geber, upon the Red Sea. But as to Josephus's assertion, that Jonah's fish was carried by the strength of the current, upon a storm, as far as the Euxine Sea: it is no way impossible. And since the storm might have driven the ship, while Jonah was in it, near to that Euxine Sea; and since in three more days, while he was in the fish's belly, that current might bring him to the Assyrian coast; and since withal that coast could bring him nearer to Nineveh than could any coast of the Mediterranean, it is by no means an improbable determination in Josephus.
2 This ancient piece of religion, of supposing there was great sin where there was great misery, and of casting lots to discover great sinners, not only among the Israelites, but among these heathen mariners, seems a remarkable remains of the ancient tradition which prevailed of old over all mankind, that Providence used to interpose visibly in all human affairs, and never to bring, or at least not long to continue, notorious judgments, but for notorious sins; which the most ancient Book of Job shows to have been the state of mankind for about the former three thousand years of the world, till the days of Job and Moses.
Flavius Josephus. The Works of Flavius Josephus. Translated by. William Whiston, A.M. Auburn and Buffalo. John E. Beardsley. 1895.
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