Gath-hepher

Gath-hepher was a town in the tribal inheritance of Zebulun in lower Galilee (Joshua 19:13), most famous as the birthplace of the prophet Jonah son of Amittai (2 Kings 14:25, Jonah 1:1). Jonah is the Galilean prophet who first reluctantly fled west to Tarshish rather than preach repentance to the hated Assyrians at Nineveh — and ended up in the belly of the great fish. The note about Jonah and Gath-hepher in 2 Kings 14:25 quietly records the only Old Testament prophecy that Jonah actually delivered to Israel before his famous Nineveh mission: that King Jeroboam II of Israel would restore the borders of Israel "from Lebo-hamath to the Sea of the Arabah." The site is identified with Khirbet ez-Zurra near Mash'had, three miles northeast of Nazareth — meaning Jonah grew up just a few miles from where Jesus would later grow up centuries later. Pharisees who scorned Jesus by saying "no prophet arises from Galilee" (John 7:52) were therefore simply wrong: Jonah was Galilean.