Jonah

What Jonah is about

Jonah is the only prophetic book that is entirely a story about the prophet, and the prophet does not come out of it well. That is the point.

God tells Jonah to go to Nineveh, capital of Assyria — the empire that would destroy his country, remembered for cruelty on an industrial scale — and warn it. Jonah goes the opposite way, boards a ship, and sleeps through the storm his flight causes. The pagan sailors pray, act decently, and try everything before throwing him overboard at his own suggestion. He is swallowed by a great fish, prays a psalm from inside it, and is deposited on the shore.

He goes. He preaches the shortest sermon in scripture — five words in Hebrew — and the entire city repents, king and livestock included. God relents.

And Jonah is furious. His complaint in chapter 4 is the key to the whole book: he says he ran in the first place because he knew God was gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and he suspected this would happen. He wanted Nineveh destroyed. The book closes with God asking him about a plant he did not grow, and then about a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left — and does not record Jonah’s reply. The question is left sitting with the reader.

Where it sits in the story

Jonah stands among the Minor Prophets as the outlier: no oracles against Israel, no collected sayings, just narrative. It belongs with Ruth as one of the Old Testament’s strongest statements that God’s concern reaches past Israel’s borders.

Jesus refers to Jonah more than once — to the three days, and to the men of Nineveh who repented at a lesser preaching than his own.

Why it is worth reading

Because it is aimed at religious insiders rather than outsiders. Everyone in this book behaves better than the prophet: the sailors, the Ninevites, the fish, the plant. Jonah is a mirror held up to anyone who has ever been glad that God’s mercy has limits, and it is very funny about it right up until the moment it stops being funny.