Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament: Introducing the Conceptual World of the Hebrew Bible

by John H. Walton

In a book like Jonah, the tug-of-war goes back and forth. Critical scholars point out that the use of the title “king of Nineveh” demonstrates that the author is writing long after the time of the Assyrian Empire. In the putative time of the prophet Jonah, Nineveh was not the capital and it is claimed that the king would have been identified as the “king of Assyria.” But attempts to use cultural studies to undergird the biblical text point to the anarchy in Assyria at the time and the powerful role of regional governors,15 one of them being over the region of Nineveh.16 Added to this is the information from the eponym lists that identify similar offices.17 Thus the title “king of Nineveh” is presented as an authentic detail of the period that may not even have been known a generation later. A writer several centuries later would have naturally used “king of Assyria,” for the knowledge of the existence of the empire was long retained.