Summary: Bible - Book of Jonah

The GIST

Jonah, a book of the Bible, is the shortest and strangest of prophetic careers: a man told to preach to a great foreign city runs the other way, is thrown into the sea, swallowed by a fish, delivered, obeyed beyond all expectation, and furious about it. The book is one of the twelve Minor Prophets in the Hebrew Bible and stands in the Christian Old Testament in four chapters. Unlike its neighbours it is almost all story. The prophet's actual message takes up half a verse.

A prophet named Jonah son of Amittai is mentioned in 2 Kings, which places him in the reign of Jeroboam II of Israel, but the book itself names no king and gives no date. Most scholars think it was written long afterwards, pointing to words and motifs found in later Aramaic sources, and mainstream scholars generally read it as fiction with a strong streak of satire; a minority, among them the Assyriologist Donald Wiseman, argue against treating it as late or as a parable. However it is read, its subject is plain enough: how far the mercy of God reaches, and how hard that can be for the people who thought it was theirs.

What It Says

Flight (chapter 1). The book begins with a command: "Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before me." The second sentence begins with the word that defines the prophet: "But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the LORD". He goes down to Joppa, finds a ship, pays his fare and goes aboard. The storyteller makes the direction of travel felt, down to the port, down into the ship, and soon down further still.

God answers with weather. He "sent out a great wind into the sea", and the ship is close to breaking up. The sailors pray, each to his own god, and throw the cargo overboard. Jonah is below deck, "fast asleep". The captain shakes him awake with a rebuke that could stand over the whole book: "What meanest thou, O sleeper? arise, call upon thy God". The crew cast lots to find who is to blame, "and the lot fell upon Jonah." They fire questions at him, and his answer is a creed that sits oddly with his behaviour: "I am an Hebrew; and I fear the LORD, the God of heaven, which hath made the sea and the dry land." He is running by sea from the God who made the sea.

Here the book's irony starts to bite. The foreign sailors act better than the prophet. When Jonah tells them, "Take me up, and cast me forth into the sea; so shall the sea be calm unto you", they refuse at first and row hard for land. Only when that fails do they pray to Jonah's God not to hold them guilty of innocent blood, and throw him over. At once "the sea ceased from her raging." The men "feared the LORD exceedingly", offer a sacrifice and make vows. The runaway has made converts without meaning to. Then comes the famous sentence: "Now the LORD had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights."

The prayer from the deep (chapter 2). The one stretch of poetry in the book is a psalm, prayed "out of the fish's belly". It has been compared with the Psalms and with the Song of Hannah, and it is a thanksgiving, not a plea. Jonah looks back on drowning as though rescue had already come: "I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the LORD, and he heard me; out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice." The images are of a man sinking: "the floods compassed me about", "the weeds were wrapped about my head", "I went down to the bottoms of the mountains". At the lowest point he turns: "When my soul fainted within me I remembered the LORD". He promises sacrifice and the payment of his vows, and ends with the line that sums up the chapter: "Salvation is of the LORD." Then, without ceremony, "the LORD spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land."

Nineveh (chapter 3). The story starts again almost word for word: "And the word of the LORD came unto Jonah the second time". This time he goes. Nineveh is "an exceeding great city of three days' journey". Jonah walks one day in and delivers a sermon of eight words in English: "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown." It names no sin, offers no terms and holds out no hope.

The response is immediate and total. "So the people of Nineveh believed God, and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them even to the least of them." The king leaves his throne, takes off his robe, covers himself with sackcloth and sits in ashes. His decree reaches even the livestock: "Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste any thing". Man and animal alike are to wear sackcloth and "cry mightily unto God", and everyone is to turn "from his evil way, and from the violence that is in their hands." The king claims no certainty, only a chance: "Who can tell if God will turn and repent, and turn away from his fierce anger, that we perish not?" And God does: "God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way", and he does not bring the disaster he had announced.

The angry prophet (chapter 4). Any other prophet would count this a triumph. "But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry." Now, at last, he explains why he ran. It was not fear. "I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness". He fled because he suspected God would forgive, and he did not want Nineveh forgiven. He would sooner die: "it is better for me to die than to live." God's reply is a question, gentle and unanswered: "Doest thou well to be angry?"

Jonah goes out to the east of the city, builds himself a shelter and sits down to watch what will happen. God then teaches him with three small things, each "prepared" as the fish was. First a gourd, which grows up to shade him, "So Jonah was exceeding glad of the gourd." Then a worm, which attacks the plant at dawn so that it withers. Then "a vehement east wind", and a sun that beats on his head until he faints and again asks to die. God repeats the question, this time about the plant, and Jonah snaps back: "I do well to be angry, even unto death."

The last words belong to God. Jonah pities a plant he did not tend, "which came up in a night, and perished in a night". Then the question on which the whole book turns: "And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?" There the book stops. Jonah gives no answer, and the reader is left holding the question.

What it teaches. Everything in the story obeys God except the prophet: the wind, the sea, the fish, the plant, the worm, and above all the pagans, sailors and Ninevites alike, who pray and repent while Jonah sleeps or sulks. The comedy has a serious edge. Jonah knows his theology perfectly and recites it twice, once to the sailors and once in anger, and it is exactly the kindness he confesses that he cannot bear to see spent on his enemies.

Why It Matters

In Judaism the book is read on the afternoon of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, to prompt reflection on God's readiness to forgive those who repent. The story is retold in the Quran. Fragments were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, though the Qumran community's own writings make no reference to it.

Christians have read it through the Gospels. Matthew and Luke record Jesus interpreting the book, with Jonah as a "type": as the prophet spent three days in the fish, so Jesus would spend three days in the tomb, and the repentance of Nineveh is held up against a generation that does not repent. Augustine, writing around 409, defended the miracle against pagan mockery, observing that to question one miracle is to question them all, and he too read Jonah as a figure of Christ. The main medieval commentary, the Ordinary Gloss, leaned on Jerome and explained Jonah's reluctance as love for his own people.

The creature itself has a history. The Hebrew says "great fish". The Greek translation used a word associated with sea monsters, the Latin followed, and over time that word came to mean whale; William Tyndale wrote "greate fyshe" in Jonah and "whale" in Matthew, and the King James translators kept both. The plant has its own debate: Jerome rendered it as ivy where others had gourd.

Modern readers have found still more in it. In Jungian analysis the belly of the whale is a symbolic death and rebirth, and it is a stage in Joseph Campbell's hero's journey. One contemporary Jewish educator sees Jonah as a seeker of theological truth frustrated by people who want religion only for comfort, and reads the episode of the plant as teaching that comfort is a real human need which need not crowd out God.

Who Should Read It

Almost anyone, since it can be read in a single sitting. Children love the fish; adults find that the hard part comes after it. It is for readers who enjoy a story with wit and a sting, for anyone who has resented mercy shown to someone they thought did not deserve it, and for anyone who wants to see how much a Bible book can do in forty-eight verses.