II. Style, Date, etc. — The book of Jonah is a simple narrative, with the exception of the prayer or thanksgiving in chap. 2. Its style and mode of narration are uniform. There are no traces of compilation, as Nachtigall supposed; neither is the prayer, as De Wette (Einleit. § 237) imagines, improperly borrowed from some other sources. That prayer contains, indeed, not only imagery peculiar to itself, but also such imagery as at once was suggested to the mind of a pious Hebrew preserved in circumstances of extreme jeopardy. On this principle we account for the similarity of some portions of its phraseology to Psalm 59:42, etc. The language in both places had been hallowed by frequent usage, and had become the consecrated idiom of a distressed and succored Israelite.. Perhaps the prayer of Jonah might be uttered by him, not during his mysterious imprisonment, but after it ( îַîְּòֵé äִãָּâָä , out, i.e. when out of the fish's belly; comp. Job_19:26; Job_11:15). The hymn seems to have been composed after his deliverance. and the reason why his deliverance is noted after the hymn is recorded may be to show the occasion of its composition. 'The Lord had spoken unto the fish, and it had vomited Jonah on the dry land!" (See further Hauber, in his Bibl. Betrachtungen, Lemgo, 1753; also an article on the subject in the Brit. Theol. Mag. 1, 3., p. 18.) There was little reason either for dating the composition of this book later than the age of Jonah, or for supposing it the production of another than the prophet himself. The Chaldaisms which Jahn and others find may be accounted for by the nearness of the canton of Zebulon, to which Jonah belonged, to the northern territory, whence by national intercourse Aramaic peculiarities might be insensibly borrowed. (Thus we have ñְôַéðָä — a ship with a deck — not the more common Hebrew term; øִá — a foreign title applied to the captain; îַðָּä , to appoint — found, however, in Psalms 61, a psalm which Hupfeld without any valid grounds places after the Babylonian captivity; àָîִø , to command, as in the later books; èִòִí command, referring to the royal decree, and probably taken from the native Assyrian tongue; çָòִí , to row, a nautical term; and the abbreviated form of the relative, which, however, occurs in other books, etc.) Gesenius and Bertholdt place it before the exile; Jahn and Koster after it. Rosenmüller supposes the author may have been a contemporary of Jeremiah; Hitzig postpones it to the period of the Maccabees. The general opinion is that Jonah was the first of the prophets (Rosenmüller, Bp. Lloyd, Davison, Browne, Drake): Hengstenberg would place him after Amos and Hosea, and, indeed, adheres to the order of the books in the canon for. the chronology. He, as well as Hitzig, would identify the author with that of Obadiah, chiefly on account of the initial "and." The king of Nineveh at this time is supposed (Usher and others) to have been Pul, who is placed by Layard (Nim. and Bab. p. 624) at B.C. 750; but an earlier king, Adrammelech II, B.C. 840, is regarded as more probable by Drake. The date above assigned to Jonah would seem to indicate the husband of the famous Semiramis. SEE ASSYRIA.