Jonah and King Uzziah

In the fifteenth year of Amaziah’s reign, Jeroboam the son of Joash reigned over Israel in Samaria for forty years. This king was insolent toward God, and became very wicked in worshiping idols and in many absurd and foreign undertakings. Yet to the people of Israel he was the cause of countless good things. Now a certain prophet named Jonah foretold to him that he would make war with the Syrians and defeat their army, and enlarge the borders of his kingdom on the north as far as the city of Hamath and on the south as far as the Dead Sea; for these had originally been the borders of Canaan, as Joshua their general had fixed them. So Jeroboam marched against the Syrians and overran all their country, as Jonah had foretold. [a]

I think it necessary, since I have promised to give an accurate account of our affairs, to describe the actions of this prophet, so far as I have found them written down in the Hebrew books. Jonah had been commanded by God to go to the kingdom of Nineveh, and when he was there to proclaim in that city that it would lose the dominion it had over the nations. But he did not go, out of fear. Instead he ran away from God to the city of Joppa, and finding a ship there, he went on board and sailed for Tarsus in Cilicia. A most terrible storm arose, so great that the ship was in danger of sinking, and the sailors, the helmsmen and the shipowner himself vowed thank offerings in case they escaped the sea. But Jonah lay still, wrapped up, without doing anything the others did. As the waves grew higher and the winds made the sea more violent, they suspected, as people usually do in such cases, that one of those sailing with them was the cause of the storm, and they agreed to find out by lot which of them it was. When they had cast lots, the lot fell on the prophet. When they asked him where he came from and what he had done, he replied that he was a Hebrew by nation and a prophet of the supreme God; and he persuaded them to throw him into the sea if they wanted to escape the danger they were in, for he was the cause of the storm that was on them. At first they did not dare to do it, thinking it a wicked thing to throw a man who was a stranger, and who had entrusted his life to them, into such certain destruction. But at last, when their misfortune overwhelmed them and the ship was just about to go down, and when they were urged to it by the prophet himself and by fear for their own safety, they threw him into the sea; and at this the sea became calm. It is also reported that Jonah was swallowed by a whale, and that when he had been there three days and as many nights, he was thrown up at the Black Sea, alive and without any injury to his body. There, on praying to God, he obtained pardon for his sins, and went to the city of Nineveh, where he stood where he could be heard and preached that in a very little time they would lose the dominion of Asia. When he had proclaimed this, he returned. I have given this account of him as I found it written. [d]

When King Jeroboam had passed his life in great happiness and had ruled forty years, he died and was buried in Samaria, and his son Zechariah took the kingdom. In the same way Uzziah, the son of Amaziah, began to reign over the two tribes in Jerusalem, in the fourteenth year of Jeroboam’s reign. His mother was Jecoliah, a citizen of Jerusalem. He was a good man, by nature righteous and great-hearted, and very hardworking in taking care of the affairs of his kingdom. He marched against the Philistines, beat them in battle, took the cities of Gath and Jabneh, and broke down their walls. After that campaign he attacked the Arabs who bordered on Egypt. He also built a city on the Red Sea and put a garrison into it. After this he overthrew the Ammonites and made them pay tribute. He also conquered all the countries as far as the borders of Egypt, and then began to take care of Jerusalem itself for the rest of his life. He rebuilt and repaired all those parts of the wall that had fallen down through age or through the neglect of the kings before him, as well as the whole part that the king of Israel had thrown down when he took his father Amaziah prisoner and entered the city with him. Moreover, he built a great many towers, each seventy-five feet high, built walled towns in desert places and put garrisons into them, and dug many channels for carrying water. He also had many work animals and an immense number of cattle, for his country was good for pasture. He was also given to farming: he took care to cultivate the ground, and planted it with all sorts of plants and sowed it with all sorts of seeds. He had around him an army of picked men, three hundred and seventy thousand in number, under generals and commanders of thousands who were men of courage and unconquerable strength, two thousand in number. He divided his whole army into companies and armed them, giving every man a sword, with bronze shields and breastplates, and bows and slings; and besides these he made for them many war machines for besieging cities, such as hurled stones and darts, with grappling hooks and other instruments of that kind. [i]

While Uzziah was in this state and making provision for the future, his mind was corrupted by pride and he became insolent. This came from his abundance of things that soon perish, and he despised that power which lasts forever, which consists in piety toward God and in keeping the laws. So he fell through the very success of his affairs, and was carried headlong into those sins of his father, into which the splendor of his good fortune and the greatness of his achievements had led his father too, since he could not manage them well. So when a notable day came and a general festival was to be celebrated, he put on a priest’s robe and went into the temple to offer incense to God on the golden altar. Azariah the high priest, who had eighty priests with him, forbade him to do it, telling him that it was not lawful for him to offer sacrifice, and that none but the descendants of Aaron were permitted to do so. When they cried out that he must leave the temple and not sin against God, he was enraged at them and threatened to kill them unless they held their peace. Meanwhile a great earthquake shook the ground, and a crack opened in the temple, and the bright rays of the sun shone through it and fell on the king’s face, so that leprosy seized him at once. And before the city, at a place called Eroge, half the mountain broke away from the rest on its west side, rolled half a mile, and came to a stop against the mountain on the east, so that the roads, and the king’s gardens too, were blocked. As soon as the priests saw that the king’s face was infected with leprosy, they told him of the calamity that had come on him, and ordered him to leave the city as an unclean person. He was so ashamed of the dreadful thing that had happened, and so aware that he no longer had any right to speak out, that he did as he was ordered, and suffered this miserable and terrible punishment for an ambition beyond what befits a man, and for the impiety against God that it involved. So he lived outside the city for some time and led a private life, while his son Jotham took over the government. After that he died of grief and anxiety at what had happened to him, having lived sixty-eight years and reigned fifty-two of them; and he was buried by himself in his own gardens. [o]