206 
spend at that spot the summer months with any feeling of 
pleasure, especially as there are very pleasant and delightful 
nooks within thirty or forty miles of Nineveh, where the 
kings of Assyria might have had an enjoyable retreat in the 
verdant valleys of the Assyrian mountains. 
51. It may not be out of place here to mention what Mos- 
lem authors and their prophet Mahommed say regarding tho 
mission of Jonah to Nineveh. In tho 37th chapter of tho 
Koran it is written: “Jonas was also one of those who were 
sent by Us.* When he fled into the loaded ship, and those 
who were on board cast lots among themselves and he was 
condemned ; and the fish swallowed him, for he was worthy 
of reprehension, and if he had not been one of those who praise 
God, verily he had remained in the belly thereof until the day 
of resurrection ; and we cast him on tho naked shore, and he 
was sick ; and we caused a plant of gourd to grow over him ; 
and we sent him to an hundred thousand persons, or they 
were a greater number ; and they believed, wherefore wo 
granted them to enjoy this life for a season.” It is not sur- 
prising that such a mistake is made here as to the number of 
persons Nineveh contained, and the growing of the gourd 
before the divine proclamation, when we find even Josephus, 
who ought to have known his Hebrew Bible better, made such 
a blunder in his history of tho Jews when he mentions that 
the whale which swallowed Jonah vomited him out on the 
shore of the Euxine or Black Sea ; and also that when he went 
to Nineveh “he preached that in a very little time they should 
lose the dominion of Asia.” 
52. Al-Baidhawee, an Arab historian, narrates the following 
story concerning the preaching of Jonah. With regard to the 
Ninevites, he says : “This people having corrupted themselves 
with idolatry, Jonas, the son of Mattai (or Amittai, which the 
Mahommedans suppose to be the name of his mother), an 
Israelite of the tribe of Benjamin, was sent by God to preach 
to and reclaim them. When he first began to exhort them to 
repentance, instead of hearkening to him they used him very 
ill, so that he was obliged to leave the city, threatening them 
at his departure that they should be destroyed within three 
days, or, as others say, forty. But when the time drew near, 
and they saw the heavens overcast with a black colour which 
shot forth fire and filled the air with smoke, and hung directly 
over their city, they were in a terrible consternation, and 
* The word “ Us ” is used here in the same sense as in Genesis, chap. i. 
ver. 28, “ Let Us make man in Our image,” as the Moslems acknowledge 
the Koran to he revealed. 
