5. An account of the time in which Jonah lived. He was older than Isaiah and Hosea. The King of Nineveh was not Sardanapalus, but his father, Pul.
Out of 2 Kings 14:25, it is able to be gathered, that Jonah lived under Jeroboam II, King of Israel, for whom he appears to have been the author of expelling the Syrians from the Trans-Jordanian cities in the name of the Lord: unless perhaps already before Jeroboam, under Joash his Father, he predicted that it was going to happen, that Jeroboam would do this. Moreover, the last years of Jeroboam II agree with the first years of Uzziah, King of Judah: and so Jonah was more ancient than Isaiah, Hosea, and their συγχρόνοις/ contemporaries. And it is also evident from this, that the King, whose repentance is commended in Jonah 3:6, was not Sardanapalus, as Calvin and others suppose, since he was a ὁμόχρονον/contemporary to neither Joash not Jeroboam II, but later than both: but rather was Sardanapalus’ father Ascrazapes, called Ocrazapes in Eusebius, Cyndaraxes in Stephanus,[1] but in the Sacred Books, 2 Kings 15:19; 1 Chronicles 5:26, פּוּל/Pul (from whom, according to the Most Learned Ussher on the Year of the World 3233, the son Sardanapalus to have been named Sardanapul). For he, reigning forty-one years before Sardanapalus, falls into the times of Joash and Jeroboam II.
[1] Stephanus Byzantium wrote a geographical dictionary, entitled Ethnica, which only survives in fragments.