he had
hired of this Joash, the king of Israel, as if he and they were then
idolaters, 2 Chronicles 25:6-9, it is most likely that these different
characters of Joash suited the different parts of his reign, and that,
according to our common copies, he was at first a wicked king, and
afterwards was reclaimed, and became a good one, according to Josephus.

[18] What I have above noted concerning Jehoash, seems to me to have
been true also concerning his son Jeroboam II., viz. that although he
began wickedly, as Josephus agrees with our other copies, and, as he
adds, "was the cause of a vast number of misfortunes to the Israelites"
in those his first years, [the particulars of which are unhappily
wanting both in Josephus and in all our copies,] so does it seem to me
that he was afterwards reclaimed, and became a good king, and so was
encouraged by the prophet Jonah, and had great successes afterward,
when "God had saved the Israelites by the hand of Jeroboam, the son
of Joash," 2 Kings 14:27; which encouragement by Jonah, and great
successes, are equally observable in Josephus, and in the other copies.

[19] When Jonah is said in our Bibles to have gone to Tarshish, Jonah
1:3, Josephus understood it that he went to Tarsus in Cilicia, or to the
Mediterranean Sea, upon which Tarsus lay; so that he does not appear
to have read the text, 1 Kings 22:48, as our copies do, that ships
of Tarshish could lie at Ezion-geber, upon the Red Sea. But as to
Josephus's assertion, that Jonah's fish was carried by the strength of
the current, upon a nean, it is by no means an improbable determination
in Josephus.

[20] This ancient piece of religion, of supposing there was great sin
where there was great misery, and of casting lots to discover great
sinners, not only among the Israelites, but among these heathen
mariners, seems a remarkable remains of the ancient tradition which
prevailed of old over all mankind, that I Providence used to interpose
visibly in all human affairs, and storm, as far as the Euxine Sea, it is
no way impossible; and since the storm might have driven the ship,
while Jonah was in it never to bring, or at least not long to continue,
notorious judge, near to that Euxine Sea, and since in three more days,
while but for notorious sins, which the most ancient Book of he was in
the fish's belly, that current might bring him to the Job shows to have
been the state of mankind for about the Assyrian coast, and since withal