People of the Bible

Jonah

Prophets · Around 760 BC · Appears in The book of Jonah

Jonah is the reluctant prophet who ran from God's call to preach to the great enemy city of Nineveh, was swallowed by a great fish, and after three days was delivered to obey at last. When Nineveh repented and God spared it, Jonah was angry, and God taught him a lesson about mercy that reaches to every nation.

But I will sacrifice unto thee with the voice of thanksgiving; I will pay that that I have vowed. Salvation is of the LORD.Jonah 2:9 (KJV)

The prophet who ran away

The word of the LORD came to Jonah with a hard command: Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it, for their wickedness is come up before me. Nineveh was the capital of Assyria, a cruel and terrifying empire and the mortal enemy of Israel, and Jonah wanted no part in warning it. So he rose up to flee from the presence of the LORD in the opposite direction, boarding a ship at Joppa bound for Tarshish, the far end of the known world. It is the only book of a prophet that begins with the prophet running from God.

But no one flees the presence of the LORD. God sent out a great wind, and a tempest so violent that the ship threatened to break up, while Jonah, strangely, slept below deck. The terrified sailors cast lots to find who was to blame, and the lot fell on Jonah, who confessed that he was fleeing the God who made the sea and the dry land. When the storm only grew worse, Jonah told them to throw him into the sea, and reluctantly they did, and the sea grew calm at once, and the sailors feared the LORD and offered sacrifice to him.

Three days in the deep

As Jonah sank into the waters, the LORD prepared a great fish to swallow him, and he was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. In that dark and hopeless place, Jonah prayed. Out of the depths he cried, and God heard him; he remembered the LORD when his soul fainted within him, and confessed with new understanding, Salvation is of the LORD. His prayer was not a bargain but a surrender, the turning of a runaway heart back toward the God who had pursued him even into the sea.

The LORD spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out onto the dry land, a rescued and chastened man. The prophet who had run from God's mercy had now himself been the object of it, plucked from certain death. It was a costly and humbling deliverance, and it left Jonah alive to do the very thing he had fled. The word of the LORD came to him a second time with the same command, and this time Jonah went.

The repentance of Nineveh

Jonah walked into the great city and preached the shortest and bluntest of sermons: Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown. What happened next was beyond anything he wanted. The people of Nineveh believed God, and from the greatest of them to the least they proclaimed a fast and put on sackcloth. Even the king rose from his throne, laid aside his robe, and covered himself with sackcloth, and decreed that all should turn from their evil ways and cry mightily to God, that perhaps he would relent. And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way, and he spared the city.

This was the whole trouble, from Jonah's point of view. He had feared exactly this, that God would forgive his enemies. And so the great revival of a pagan city, one of the most remarkable in all Scripture, was met not with the prophet's joy but with his fury. He went outside the city to sulk and to wait, still hoping, perhaps, to see it destroyed.

God's argument for mercy

Jonah was so angry that God had spared Nineveh that he wished to die, and he confessed the real reason he had fled at the first: he knew that God was gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, ready to relent from sending harm. It is a startling complaint, a prophet angry at the goodness of God. Rather than rebuke him harshly, God chose to teach him. He caused a leafy plant to grow up over Jonah and give him shade, and Jonah was glad of it; then God sent a worm to wither it, and a scorching wind, until Jonah again wished to die.

When Jonah grieved bitterly for the withered plant, God pressed the lesson home with a question that ends the whole book. Jonah had pitied a plant he did not make or tend, which came up in a night and perished in a night. Should not God, then, spare Nineveh, that great city, in which were more than sixscore thousand people who could not tell their right hand from their left, and also much cattle? The book closes on that unanswered question, leaving Jonah, and every reader, to weigh the width of God's compassion against the narrowness of the human heart.

A real prophet of Israel

Though his book reads almost like a parable in its stark simplicity, Jonah was a real prophet of Israel. He is mentioned in the book of Second Kings as Jonah the son of Amittai, the prophet who foretold that God would restore the borders of Israel in the days of King Jeroboam. He was, in his own land, a messenger of good news and national restoration, accustomed to prophesying blessing and mercy for his own people.

That background helps explain his rebellion. To carry a message of mercy to Nineveh, the brutal capital of the empire that most threatened Israel, was to preach salvation to the enemy, and Jonah could not bear the thought that God might spare them. His story turns the searchlight away from the sins of a distant city and onto the heart of a believer who loved his nation more than he loved the mercy of God, and it asks whether the people of God will be as wide in their compassion as the God they serve.

His character and where he points to Christ

Jonah is the honest portrait of a believer at war with God's mercy. He knew God to be gracious and slow to anger, and that was exactly why he ran, unwilling to see his enemies forgiven. He is stubborn, self-pitying, and painfully human, more concerned for a shade plant than for a city of lost people. Yet God does not give up on him, but patiently teaches him, and through Jonah confronts the narrow, tribal reflex in all of us that would keep God's grace for ourselves. His book is one of the Bible's strongest early witnesses that salvation was always meant for all nations.

Jesus himself named the sign of Jonah as the picture of his own death and resurrection, saying that as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so the Son of man would be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. Jonah was cast into the deep so that others might live, and rose to bring a message of repentance to a Gentile city. Jesus went down into death willingly, not as a runaway but as a Savior, and rose to bring repentance and life to all nations. And Jesus warned that the men of Nineveh, who repented at the preaching of Jonah, would rise in judgment against those who would not repent, for behold, a greater than Jonah is here.

A note on the sources: everything above is drawn from the biblical text itself. Where a detail comes from later tradition rather than Scripture, it is named as tradition. Dates for the earliest figures are traditional and approximate, and Scripture does not always give them. The aim is to tell each life honestly, and to let it do what the whole Bible does, point to Jesus Christ the Lord.

Related: Daniel · Elijah · All the people of the Bible