Where was Jonah sent, and where did he flee?

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Jonah was sent to Nineveh, the great city of Assyria on the Tigris opposite today's Mosul in Iraq, about 820 km north-east of his home town Gath-hepher in Galilee in a straight line. Instead he went down to the port of Joppa, today's Jaffa, and took ship for Tarshish in the opposite direction. Where Tarshish was is disputed: the usual view is Tartessos in south-western Spain, where the map puts its point near Huelva, about 3,825 km west of Joppa; Sardinia, Carthage and Tarsus in Cilicia have also been proposed. The map marks it as disputed, and the Jonah tour leaves it out, since he never arrived. 2 Kings names "Jonah, the son of Amittai, the prophet, which was of Gath-hepher", in the reign of Jeroboam II of Israel (c. 793–753 BC); the map's tour is set at 780 BC. The book of Jonah opens with the command "Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it", and the flight: "But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the LORD, and went down to Joppa; and he found a ship going to Tarshish". After the storm and the fish he went to Nineveh, "an exceeding great city of three days' journey", and its people repented; Jesus held up the Ninevites as an example: "The men of Nineveh shall rise in judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it". Gath-hepher is placed at Tel Gat Hefer, about 5 km from Nazareth. Joppa was the chief port of the central coast, the harbour to which cedar from Lebanon was floated for Solomon's Temple; Jerome, describing Paula's pilgrimage of the 380s, names it as the port of Jonah's flight. Nineveh became the capital of Assyria under Sennacherib about 700 BC, with a wall about 12 km long, and fell to the Babylonians and Medes in 612 BC; later tradition placed the tomb of Jonah on the mound of Nebi Yunus there. Tarshish in the prophets is a far land of silver, iron, tin and lead reached by sea; those who place it in Spain point to the metal-rich coast that Greek writers knew as Tartessos, but the name also stands for distant seafaring in general, as in the ships of Tarshish.