When Jacob was returned from Mesopotamia, a city of the Shechemites, an accident happened which caused him a great deal of sorrow. Dinah being gone abroad to see the daughters of the land, their king took her by force, and ravished her; but desired to get her to wife. Jacob was grieved at his daughter’s defilement; and his sons, dissembling their rage, requested the Shechemites to be circumcised, that the mutual intercourse they proposed should take place. They consented; and on the third day, when their pain was most sensible, Simeon and Levi took their swords, and came upon them, and slew all the males, without sparing the king himself or his son, whose unlawful lust caused this bloodshed. The rest of Jacob’s sons pillaged the city, and carried all the spoil along with them, taking all their little ones and their wives captives. Jacob was extremely troubled at this, their revenge. AN ACCOUNT OF JONAH’S MISSION TO THE NINEVITES. Jonah was the son of Amittai, a prophet of Gath-hepher in Galilee. Some Jews would have him to be the son of the widow of Sarepta, raised to life by Elijah, but the distance of time renders it almost impossible; nor is it a whit more certain that he was the son of the Shunamite restored to life by Elisha, or the young prophet who anointed Jehu. It is certain, that he predicted that God would restore to the Hebrews, the cities which the Syrians had taken from them during the reigns of Ahab, Jehoram, Jehu, and Jehoahaz, 2 Kings, xiv. 25. He restored the coast of Israel from the entering of Hamath unto the sea of the plain, according to the word of the Lord God of Israel, which he spake by the hand of his servant Jonah, the son of Amittai the prophet which was of Gath-hepher. We have also the book of Jonah, where God ordered him to go to Nineveh and warn the inhabitants of their approaching destruction. Nineveh was the capital of Assyria, and built by Asshur the son of Shem; Genesis, x. 11, “Out of that land went forth Asshur, and builded Nineveh.” It was one of the largest cities in the world. In Jonah’s time it was a city of three day’s journey, or would require him three days to go through it, proclaiming its overthrow. It then had about one hundred and twenty thousand infants in it, whom we cannot suppose above the eighth or tenth part of its inhabitants: one learned writer says it was sixty miles in circumference; and another writer says it was larger than Babylon. It was surrounded by a wall about two hundred feet high, and so thick, that three chariots abreast might have been driven along the top: on the wall were built one thousand five hundred towers, each two hundred feet higher than the wall; this city was very early noted for wealth, idolatry, and whoredom.