08/12/2026
Since we’ve been studying the book of Jonah the past Sundays…
They said a city that large could not have existed. Then someone dug it up.
The Book of Jonah describes Nineveh as an exceedingly great city, a city so vast that it took three days to walk through it and whose population was large enough to contain more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who did not know their right hand from their left. Critics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries found these numbers incredible. No ancient city of that scale was known from any source. Nineveh did not appear in any excavated archaeological record. The conclusion drawn was that Jonah had either invented or grossly exaggerated the city — that it was literary device rather than historical geography.
Then Austen Henry Layard began excavating a large mound opposite the city of Mosul in northern Iraq in 1845 and 1847.
What he found beneath the mound was one of the most significant archaeological discoveries of the nineteenth century. An enormous ancient city — palaces, temples, defensive walls, gates flanked by massive carved stone bulls and lions of extraordinary artistic sophistication. Inscriptions on the walls identified the city beyond any doubt. It was Nineveh — the ancient capital of the Assyrian Empire.
The scale was extraordinary. The walls of ancient Nineveh enclosed an area of approximately 1,730 acres, with a perimeter of roughly seven and a half miles. The royal library of King Ashurbanipal discovered within the ruins contained over thirty thousand cuneiform clay tablets — one of the largest and most significant archives of ancient literature ever found, including the Assyrian version of the flood narrative that predated the biblical account.
Population estimates for Nineveh at its height range from 120,000 to several hundred thousand — consistent with the biblical description.
The city critics said was too large to be real was the capital of an empire.
Share this with someone who has been told Jonah is mythology.
"Nineveh was a very large city — it took three days to go through it." — Jonah 3:3
