The Laughlins

I have recently finished a Beginning Biblical Hebrew class, in which we spent the semester going through the book of Jonah section by section. Mark and I were having some fun discussions today about different sections of the book, but I found the overall story to be the most remarkable part. According to various commentators (I will quote C.L. Feinberg as an example), "This [Jonah's call from God] is the only case of a prophet being sent to the heathen." Nineveh was the Assyrian capital, and by many estimates, the largest city in the world during Jonah's time. I just find it very interesting and incredible that God wanted to give this city a chance to repent. When Jonah finally went to the city and announced that it would be "overturned" in 40 days, the ENTIRE city repented immediately - "from the greatest of them to the smallest." They all (including the king) wore "sacks," sat in ashes, and fasted - they even made every animal of the city fast (they weren't allowed to eat/graze). And God spared the city.



One of my "nerdy" interests was in regard to the last verse (Jonah 4:11), where it says that there were more than 12 x 10,000 (120,000) people that did not "know between his right and his left" (that is my literal translation). I have heard two main interpretations for this: 1) The city had 120,000 people, and the right and left refers to their ignorance of what is right (right) and wrong (left) in a moral sense. 2) 120,000 people that don't know their right from their left refers to their ignorance (in general), most likely refering to the children (innocent/ignorant) of the city, which would imply that the entire city's population was much larger (many who hold to this interpretation estimate the total pop. to be appx. 600,000). In this case, Nineveh would have been one ginormous city!



So, I decided to have fun on the archaeological end and to see what I could find in excavation/survey reports of Nineveh. The information that I found definitely supports that Nineveh would have had a population of at least 120,000 (minimum) and quite possibly larger. I have no big conclusion for you (who really does?), but the size of the city in general is quite impressive. Even though the size of the city can be roughly determined, it is hard to know how spread out the population was (within the walls of the city), as they seemed to have room for most of their flocks and cattle as well.

Below, I have included sections from the book "Nineveh and Its Remains: With An Account of a Visit to the Chaldeans..." by Henry Austin Layard (1849), which talk about the dimensions of the city.