Nineveh #45

Nineveh was the principal city of the Assyrian empire, on the eastern bank of the Tigris River in what is now northern Iraq. In Scripture it is remembered as the city to which God sent the reluctant prophet Jonah and, later, as an emblem of imperial cruelty and pride whose fall the prophet Nahum announced.

Biblical Significance

Genesis lists Nineveh among the cities founded in the region of Nimrod’s kingdom, together with Rehoboth-Ir, Calah, and Resen (Genesis 10:11-12). It comes into prominence when Assyria rose to power. After his failed campaign against Jerusalem, Sennacherib withdrew and lived at Nineveh, where he was later assassinated (2 Kings 19:36-37).

The book of Jonah describes it as an exceedingly great city, a three days’ journey across (Jonah 3:3). God told Jonah to go and cry out against its wickedness, but Jonah boarded a ship for Tarshish instead (Jonah 1:1-3). After the episode of the great fish, he went, and his short warning led the king and people to fast and turn from their violence, and God relented from the disaster he had announced (Jonah 3:1-10). The book ends with God’s question to a resentful Jonah, expressing concern for more than 120,000 people and their animals (Jonah 4:10-11). Jesus later cited the men of Nineveh, who repented at Jonah’s preaching, as a rebuke to a generation that would not respond to something greater than Jonah (Matthew 12:41; Luke 11:32).

The later prophets describe a different fate. Nahum pronounces a burden on Nineveh, calling it a city of blood full of lies and plunder (Nahum 1:1; 3:1-7), and Zephaniah foresees it left desolate (Zephaniah 2:13-15). Nineveh fell in 612 BC to a coalition of Babylonians and Medes, an event well documented outside the Bible.

Today

The ruins of Nineveh lie across the Tigris from the modern city of Mosul, in two main mounds: Kuyunjik, the site of the royal palaces, and Nebi Yunus, which means the Prophet Jonah. Excavations from the mid-nineteenth century onward uncovered the palaces of Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal, relief carvings of Assyrian military campaigns, and the library of Ashurbanipal, a vast collection of clay tablets now largely in the British Museum. A mosque on the Nebi Yunus mound was long revered as the tomb of Jonah, but it was destroyed in 2014 during the occupation of Mosul by Islamic State. The city walls and some gates have been partly reconstructed or studied, and the site remains of central importance for understanding Assyrian history and its contact with the Bible.