Jonah

The Runaway and the God of the Second Time

Most people remember the fish. The fish is the least surprising thing in the book. A God who made the sea can appoint a fish. What should stop us cold is everything around it: a prophet who hears God clearly and runs the other way, pagan sailors who pray harder than he does, the most violent city on earth putting on sackcloth, and a preacher who is furious that his sermon worked. Jonah is not a story about a man who got swallowed. It is a story about a God whose mercy is bigger than His messenger’s heart.

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Authorship & Setting

The book is named for its main character, “Jonah the son of Amittai” (1:1). Jewish and Christian tradition have long held that Jonah wrote it or supplied its account, though the story is told in the third person and the text itself names no writer. What is certain is that Jonah was a real prophet. Second Kings 14:25 records that he prophesied under Jeroboam II, king of Israel (roughly 793–753 BC), and that his word came true when Israel’s northern border was restored. Jesus spoke of Jonah, the fish, and Nineveh’s repentance as actual events (Matthew 12:39–41), and that settles the question for the believer.

Jonah came from Gath-hepher in the territory of Zebulun, a few miles from where Nazareth would one day stand. The Pharisees would later sneer that “out of Galilee ariseth no prophet” (John 7:52). They had forgotten Jonah.

Nineveh sat on the Tigris River in Assyria, one of that empire’s great cities and later its capital. Assyria was the superpower of the age and notorious for its cruelty. Its own royal inscriptions boast of flaying, impaling, and piling heads outside conquered cities. Within a few decades of Jonah’s ministry, Assyria would destroy the northern kingdom of Israel and carry its people away (2 Kings 17:6). Jonah’s reluctance was not laziness. He knew exactly who these people were, and he did not want them spared.

Key Figures

• Jonah — a true prophet of Israel who hears the LORD plainly, understands His character correctly, and still runs. His problem was never a lack of knowledge.
• The sailors — Gentile seamen, each crying to his own god, who end the storm fearing the LORD and offering sacrifice (1:16). They show more concern for Jonah’s life than Jonah shows for Nineveh’s.
• The king of Nineveh — unnamed, the ruler of a violent people, who comes down from his throne, covers himself with sackcloth, sits in ashes, and calls the whole city to turn from its violence (3:6–9).
• The people of Nineveh — “sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand” (4:11), who believe God on the strength of a single sentence of preaching.
• The LORD — the real main character, who pursues, appoints, spares, and teaches. He has the first word of the book and the last.

Hebrew Word Study

יוֹנָה — Yonah

“Dove.” Hosea used the same word to describe Israel in his day: “Ephraim also is like a silly dove without heart” (Hosea 7:11), fluttering between Egypt and Assyria instead of trusting God. Jonah lives up to it, flighty and running. His father’s name, Amittai, comes from emet, “truth” or “faithfulness.” The dove, son of faithfulness, is not very faithful. But the God who called him is.

יָרַד — yarad

“To go down.” Watch the direction of Jonah’s flight. He “went down to Joppa”(1:3), went down into the ship, “was gone down into the sides of the ship” (1:5), and finally “went down to the bottoms of the mountains” (2:6). Running from God is never level ground. Every step away is a step down. The turn comes at the very bottom: “yet hast thou brought up my life from corruption, O LORD my God.”

מָנָה — manah

“To appoint” or “prepare.” The KJV renders it prepared: the LORD “prepared a great fish” (1:17), “prepared a gourd” (4:6), “prepared a worm” (4:7), and “prepared a vehement east wind” (4:8). Fish, plant, worm, and wind all obey the first time. The only thing in the book that argues with God is His prophet.

חוּס — chus

“To pity” or “spare,” to look on something with compassion and hold back from destroying it. God uses the same verb twice at the end: “Thou hast had pity on the gourd… And should not I spare Nineveh?”(4:10–11). Jonah felt it for a plant that shaded his head for a day. God feels it for a city full of souls. The whole book turns on that one word.

Eight-Movement Narrative Outline

MOVEMENT ONE

The Call and the Flight (1:1–3)

“Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before me” (1:2). Nineveh lay to the east. Jonah bought a ticket west, to Tarshish, as far as the known world ran. Twice in one verse the reason is given: he went “from the presence of the LORD.”He paid the fare himself. Disobedience always costs something, and the bill usually comes later.

MOVEMENT TWO

The Storm and the Sleeping Prophet (1:4–10)

“But the LORD sent out a great wind into the sea”(1:4). Hardened sailors are terrified, throwing cargo over the side and crying out to their gods. Jonah is below deck, fast asleep. The ship’s captain has to wake the man of God and tell him to pray. When the lot falls on him, Jonah makes a fine confession: “I am an Hebrew; and I fear the LORD, the God of heaven, which hath made the sea and the dry land” (1:9). Every word of it was true. He just wasn’t living it.

MOVEMENT THREE

Overboard (1:11–17)

Jonah tells them the only way out: “Take me up, and cast me forth into the sea; so shall the sea be calm unto you” (1:12). The sailors row hard for land rather than do it. Then they pray to the LORD for mercy over this man’s life, throw him in, and the sea goes still. “Then the men feared the LORD exceedingly, and offered a sacrifice unto the LORD, and made vows” (1:16). Even running, Jonah’s life brought pagans to worship. And God was not finished with him: “Now the LORD had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.”

MOVEMENT FOUR

Prayer from the Deep (2:1–10)

It took the belly of a fish to get Jonah praying. His prayer is steeped in the Psalms. Weeds wrapped around his head, the deep closed over him, and he sank to the roots of the mountains. “When my soul fainted within me I remembered the LORD” (2:7). He sees clearly now: “They that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercy” (2:8). He ends with the heartbeat of the whole Bible: “Salvation is of the LORD” (2:9). Then God speaks to the fish, and the fish obeys.

MOVEMENT FIVE

The Second Time (3:1–4)

“And the word of the LORD came unto Jonah the second time” (3:1). Few verses in Scripture carry more grace. God does not replace His runaway prophet. He repeats the call. This time Jonah goes. He walks a day into a city of three days’ journey and delivers what may be the shortest sermon in the Bible, five words in Hebrew: “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown” (3:4).

MOVEMENT SIX

A City in Sackcloth (3:5–10)

“So the people of Nineveh believed God” (3:5). From the greatest to the least they fasted and put on sackcloth. The king himself stepped off his throne and sat in ashes, and decreed that every person “turn every one from his evil way, and from the violence that is in their hands” (3:8). His reasoning is humble: “Who can tell if God will turn and repent, and turn away from his fierce anger, that we perish not?” (3:9). They had no promise to stand on, only the hope that God is merciful. And He is. “God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not” (3:10).

MOVEMENT SEVEN

The Angry Prophet (4:1–5)

Here is the real reason he ran. “It displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry” (4:1). Then he prays, and his prayer is a complaint built out of Scripture: “I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil” (4:2), the very words God spoke of Himself to Moses (Exodus 34:6). Jonah had his theology right. He simply did not want it applied to his enemies. God answers with a question: “Doest thou well to be angry?” (4:4). Jonah doesn’t answer. He walks out east of the city, builds a booth, and sits down to watch, hoping for fire.

MOVEMENT EIGHT

The Gourd, the Worm, and the Question (4:6–11)

God prepares a plant to shade Jonah’s head, and Jonah is “exceeding glad of the gourd” (4:6). Then God prepares a worm to kill it and a scorching east wind to follow. Jonah is angry enough to wish himself dead over a plant. So the LORD draws the lesson: Jonah had pity on a gourd he never planted or tended, which sprang up in a night and perished in a night. “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?” (4:11). The book ends right there, on a question. We never hear Jonah’s answer. The question is left open for every reader to answer instead.

Christ Typology

The sign of the prophet Jonas. When the scribes and Pharisees demanded a sign, Jesus gave them one: “For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:40). Jonah went down into the deep and came up alive on the third day. Christ went down into death and rose on the third day. The fish was never the point. It was the pointer.

One cast out, and the storm is stilled. On the ship, one man was thrown into the deep so that the rest would live and the sea would go calm. Caiaphas said more than he knew when he declared that it was expedient “that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not” (John 11:50). But notice the difference. Jonah went into the sea because of his own sin. Jesus went into death for ours.

A greater than Jonas is here. Jonah slept through a storm while running from God. Jesus slept through a storm too, then rose and rebuked it: “Peace, be still” (Mark 4:39). Jonah preached judgment to Nineveh and sulked when it repented. Jesus looked over Jerusalem and wept (Luke 19:41). Jonah preached five words; Nineveh repented. Jesus preached the kingdom, and many would not. That is why He said the men of Nineveh will rise in judgment against that generation, “and, behold, a greater than Jonas is here” (Matthew 12:41).

Joppa again. Jonah ran from Joppa to keep God’s mercy away from the Gentiles. Some eight centuries later, another man sat on a rooftop in Joppa, a man Jesus had called “Simon Bar-jona” (Matthew 16:17), son of Jonah. There God showed Peter a vision and sent him to the house of a Roman centurion. Peter went (Acts 10). What the first Jonah refused at Joppa, the son of Jonah obeyed at Joppa, and the door of the gospel opened to the nations.

Personal Application

Jonah’s trouble was never that he misunderstood God. He could recite God’s character from Exodus word for word. His trouble was that he did not want God to be that way toward people he hated. That is a sin that grows easily in church people. We love mercy for ourselves and our own. We are not so sure about mercy for the ones who hurt us, the ones on the other side of the political line, the ones whose sins are uglier than ours. Ask yourself honestly: is there a Nineveh in your life, a person or a people you would secretly rather see judged than saved?

Then look at your direction. Running from God is always a descent — down to Joppa, down into the ship, down into the deep. If you have been heading the other way from something God told you plainly to do, you already know how the path slopes. The good news is in chapter three. “The word of the LORD came unto Jonah the second time.”God did not discard His prophet. He went after him through a storm, a fish, and a scorching wind. If you have run, the call has not been withdrawn. Get up and go.

And stay in the booth with Jonah long enough to hear God’s question. He cared about a gourd. God cares about the souls in the city. Our comfort, our shade, and our preferences get a great deal of our affection. The lost get far less. The book ends without Jonah’s answer because God wants yours. Should He not spare them? Then pray for them, and go.

TO GOD BE ALL THE GLORY · MARANATHA

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