I said, 'I have been banished from your sight; Yet I will look again toward your holy temple.'
"I will look again toward thy holy temple ..." "Thus, Jerusalem was not yet destroyed, for the temple was still standing."[23]  Now the Babylonian army had completed the destruction of the temple in 586 B.C., after a siege of 18 months, consequent upon Zedekiah's rebellion."[24] However, the moral and spiritual ruin of the temple had occurred much earlier under Rehoboam, Abijah, and Asa, in whose reigns the golden treasures of the temple had been robbed and all kinds of abominations introduced into its services,[25]  leaving us with the certainty that such an affectionate mention of the temple as that which occurs here could not have been made by a prophet like Jonah except about the approximate time we have assigned as the date of this book.  This mention of the temple as still standing completely explodes the efforts to date this in the fifth century or in postexilic times.  The critics know this, of course; so they insist that Jonah was not actually referring to the temple in Jerusalem, but to God's eternal temple in heaven!  However, the dual mention of God's "holy temple" both here and in  Jonah 2:7, below, has its most simple and obvious meanings a plain reference to the temple of Solomon then standing in Jerusalem.  Denials of this are invariably grounded in a determination to deny the whole prophecy by late dating it.