Searching for Jonah - The Disruptive History Version

Searching for Jonah: Clues in Hebrew and Assyrian History by Don E. Jones

My father, Donald Everett Jones, wrote this disruptive book, although the implications of its conclusions may still be apparent mainly to students of theology. It's a brilliant analysis of the Bible story, with some startlingly original insights about what might have really happened, including the strange story of Jonah's being protected in Nineveh by a gourd that grew overnight. Through linguistic analysis and some clever inference, Dad realized that the “gourd” was a coded message about Jonah’s alliance with the pro-Israel Assyrian rebel faction led by Apliya. The gourd reference is a pun on the insurgent leader’s name, Apu-lilu, or "son of the night."

Although not published until after Dad had suffered a debilitating stroke, he recognized his name on the cover, and he may have known his caregivers were speaking about him when they bragged about “our author in residence.”

Here’s the story behind the story…

Dad was trained as a chemical engineer. Having experienced the privations of the Great Depression as a child and then the stresses of WWII as a naval officer, when the war was over, he chose a career with an oil company that promised a stable income so he could support a family.

But all through his adult life, he was something of a closeted history professor, and he developed a fascination for Biblical archaeology. Over the years while I was growing up, he’d occasionally mention he was working on a book, usually providing no explanation about its subject. I eventually learned he’d formed an unusual interpretation of the Book of Jonah, including the notion that the prophet was a Hebrew diplomat on a secret mission to Assyria, where his story about surviving a shipwreck caused local storytellers to assume he was the incarnation of an ancient seafaring god.

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