How big was Nineveh?

Walls, gates and water

Nineveh was old long before it was great. It became the capital of Assyria under Sennacherib, who reigned from 705 to 681 BC and rebuilt it on a grand scale. His wall, about 12 kilometers long, enclosed roughly 750 hectares (some 1,800 acres) on the east bank of the Tigris, opposite today’s Mosul. Fifteen gates opened in it, each with a name of its own, among them the Nergal Gate, guarded by winged bulls, and the Shamash and Adad gates. Inside rose two great mounds, today called Kuyunjik and Nebi Yunus, with palaces and temples on top.

A city that size needed water. Sennacherib dug canals from the hills to the north and carried one across a valley at Jerwan on a stone aqueduct, whose remains still stand. He planted parks and orchards with it. The Assyriologist Stephanie Dalley has argued that the famous Hanging Gardens, always placed at Babylon, were really here (The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon, 2013).

“Three days’ journey”

Jonah describes the city in a single line.

So Jonah arose, and went to Nineveh, according to Yahweh’s word. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, three days’ journey across.

The Hebrew says ir gedolah le-Elohim, literally a city great to God, a Hebrew way of saying immense. But three days on foot is far more than Sennacherib’s walls, which a walker crosses in an hour or two. Readers explain the phrase in four ways.

• Greater Nineveh. Genesis already groups Nineveh with neighboring towns, among them Calah, today’s Nimrud, about 30 kilometers to the south: “Nineveh, Rehoboth Ir, Calah, and Resen between Nineveh and the great city Calah” (Genesis 10:11–12). Seen as one district, the “great city” was much larger than its walls.
• The length of a visit. The scholar D. J. Wiseman suggested that ancient diplomacy took three days: one to arrive, one for business, one to leave. Jonah “began to enter into the city a day’s journey” (3:4).
• The distance around. Greek writers gave Nineveh a circuit of 480 stades, about 90 kilometers, roughly three days’ walk (Diodorus of Sicily, Library 2.3). That figure is legend, but it shows how the city loomed in memory.
• A storyteller’s scale. Many scholars read the phrase as the book’s way of saying “enormous,” the size the city had in Israel’s imagination.

How many people?

The book gives one more number, in its last verse: God’s concern for “more than one hundred twenty thousand persons who can’t discern between their right hand and their left hand, and also many animals” (Jonah 4:11). If those are small children, as many older commentators thought, the whole city would have been several times larger. If the phrase means everyone, morally lost, then 120,000 is the full population.

Assyria’s own records show that its capitals were counted in tens of thousands. A stone stele found at Nimrud, the earlier capital, says King Ashurnasirpal II fed 69,574 guests at a ten-day feast to open his new palace, about 879 BC. Nineveh under Sennacherib was bigger still. Either way, Jonah’s figure is not absurd for one of the largest cities of the ancient world.

What is left

Less than a century after Sennacherib, Babylonians and Medes stormed the walls (when Nineveh fell). The line of the old wall still runs through eastern Mosul, and some of its gates were partly rebuilt in the twentieth century. The mounds, the shrine of Nebi Yunus and what war has done to them are in where Nineveh is today.