Jonah: The Prophet From My Own Hills

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Unknown. It is a story about Jonah son of Amittai, a real prophet of the 700s BC. It was not written by him.

When: Most scholars date it after the exile, between the 500s and 300s BC. It speaks of Nineveh as a city of the past.

Where it fits: Set in the 700s BC, under King Jeroboam II, when the real Jonah prophesied (2 Kings 14:25), a few decades before Assyria destroyed the northern kingdom; written centuries later, most likely after the exile.

Where I quote it: The sign of Jonah (Matthew 12:39–41; Luke 11:29–32). The people of Nineveh will rise at the judgment (Luke 11:32).

If you only read three chapters: It has four. Read all of it, and do not stop before the last verse.

Words to Know

Nineveh — the great city of Assyria, and later its capital. Assyria destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel, and Nineveh became a byword for cruelty.

Tarshish — a port at the far western end of the known world, perhaps in Spain. As far from Nineveh as a man could get.

Great fish — the book never says whale.

Sackcloth — rough cloth worn as a sign of grief and repentance.

The Book in Brief

The LORD tells Jonah son of Amittai to preach against Nineveh, the great city. Jonah boards a ship going the other way, to Tarshish.

God sends a storm. The sailors pray to their gods while Jonah sleeps below. They cast lots, and the lot falls on Jonah. He tells them to throw him into the sea. They row hard for land instead, but in the end they throw him in. The sea grows calm, and a great fish swallows Jonah. There, in chapter 2, he prays, and after three days and three nights the fish spits him out on dry land.

In chapter 3 God sends him again, and this time he goes. He walks into Nineveh calling out that in forty days it will be overthrown. The people believe God and fast in sackcloth, and the king orders even the animals to fast. God sees them turn from their evil ways and spares the city.

In chapter 4 Jonah is angry enough to ask to die. God grows a vine to shade him, then sends a worm to kill it. The book ends with God’s question: should he not care about Nineveh, that great city? Jonah never answers.

Jonah son of Amittai was a real prophet. The book of Kings mentions him, in the 700s BC, and says he came from Gath-hepher (2 Kings 14:25).

Gath-hepher is in Galilee, on the hills a short walk from Nazareth.¹

Once, when Nicodemus spoke up for me, the other Pharisees answered him, Search, and see that no prophet has arisen out of Galilee (John 7:52). They forgot Jonah. He came from my own hills.

Running the other way

God tells Jonah to go to Nineveh, the great city of Assyria, and preach against it.

Assyria was the empire that would soon destroy the northern kingdom and carry off its people. Its kings decorated their palace walls with pictures of the prisoners they had skinned and impaled. Asking an Israelite prophet to go and preach to Nineveh was like asking him to walk into the enemy’s capital and offer them a chance.

So Jonah gets up and runs the other way. He takes a ship to Tarshish, at the far western edge of the world (Jonah 1:3).

Go deeperThe real Nineveh

Nineveh was real, and its ruins are still there, across the Tigris River from the modern city of Mosul, in northern Iraq.

It became the capital of Assyria only around 700 BC, under King Sennacherib. In the real Jonah’s day, the kings of Assyria ruled from another city, Kalhu, which you may know as Nimrud.² Sennacherib rebuilt Nineveh on a grand scale. He built himself a palace he called the Palace Without a Rival, and a city wall about twelve kilometers (seven and a half miles) around, with more than a dozen great gates.³

Even so, it was not the city of the book. Jonah says that Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, three days’ journey across (Jonah 3:3). A walk around Sennacherib’s walls would take an afternoon, not three days. The book also speaks of the king of Nineveh (Jonah 3:6), a title the Assyrian kings did not use. They called themselves king of Assyria. These are among the reasons scholars think the book was written long after the city was gone, when Nineveh had become a name from the past.⁴

The ruins lie in two mounds. For centuries the smaller one has been called Nebi Yunus, the prophet Jonah, because a shrine said to hold Jonah’s tomb stood on top of it. In July 2014, the fighters of the Islamic State blew the shrine up. After Iraqi forces drove them out in 2017, archaeologists found that they had dug tunnels under the ruins, hunting for antiquities to sell. The tunnels had broken into an Assyrian palace of the time of Sennacherib and his son Esarhaddon, with an inscription of Esarhaddon still in place.⁵

The sailors

A storm hits the ship. The sailors, who are pagans, each pray to their own gods and throw the cargo overboard. Jonah is asleep below deck.

When they find out the storm is his fault, Jonah tells them to throw him into the sea. And the sailors refuse. They row hard to get back to land and save him. Only when they cannot do it do they throw him over, and even then they pray first that God will not hold his death against them (Jonah 1:13–14).

The pagan sailors are kinder to the prophet than the prophet is willing to be to Nineveh. That is the first joke in the book. There are more.

The fish

God sends a great fish to swallow Jonah, and he is in its belly three days and three nights (Jonah 1:17). He prays, and the fish spits him out on dry land.

People have spent a great deal of energy arguing about whether a man could survive inside a fish. That is not the point of the story. The fish is how God gets a runaway prophet back on the road.

Go deeperHistory or parable?

For most of history, Jews and Christians read Jonah as a record of things that happened. The historian Josephus, writing near the end of the first century, tells it among the stories of the kings of Israel. His version holds some surprises. He says the fish carried Jonah to the Black Sea and spat him out there alive. And he says nothing about Nineveh repenting. In his telling, Jonah simply announces that Nineveh will lose its power over Asia.⁶

Today many scholars, including many believers, read Jonah as a story told to make a point, something like a parable. They point to the impossible size of the city, the animals in sackcloth, the king who has no name, the prophet’s comic sulking, and the lack of any Assyrian record of a city turning to Israel’s God. Others answer that Jonah was a real prophet (2 Kings 14:25), that the God who made the sea can command a fish, and that I spoke of the people of Nineveh repenting (Luke 11:32).⁴

The argument produced one famous fake. In 1891, newspapers in America and Britain ran the story of a “modern Jonah,” a sailor named James Bartley, swallowed by a sperm whale off the Falkland Islands and found alive when the crew cut the whale open. For decades preachers and books repeated it as proof that the story of Jonah could be true. In 1991 the historian Edward Davis traced it to its source. The ship in the story, the Star of the East, was not a whaling ship, no James Bartley appears on its crew list, and the captain’s wife, who sailed with her husband, wrote that there was “not one word of truth in the whale story.”⁷

The shortest sermon

Jonah finally goes to Nineveh. He walks a day into the city and preaches a sermon that is five words long in Hebrew: In forty days, Nineveh will be overthrown! (Jonah 3:4).

No call to repent. No mention of God’s mercy. Just doom.

And the whole city repents. The people fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest to the least. The king comes down from his throne and sits in ashes. He orders that even the animals fast and wear sackcloth (Jonah 3:5–8). Picture the cows in sackcloth. The book is laughing, and also deadly serious.

God sees, and God does not destroy the city.

Why Jonah ran

Now we find out why Jonah ran in the first place. It was not fear. It was this:

Therefore I hurried to flee to Tarshish, for I knew that you are a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness, and you relent of doing harm (Jonah 4:2).

He quotes God’s own description of himself, from Exodus, back at God as a complaint. He knew God would forgive them. He did not want them forgiven. He would rather die than see it, and he says so (Jonah 4:3).

The plant and the question

Jonah sits outside the city, hoping it will be destroyed anyway. God makes a plant grow up to shade him, and Jonah is happy. Then God sends a worm to kill the plant, and a hot wind, and Jonah is angry enough to die over the plant.

Then God asks the question the whole book was written to ask:

You have been concerned for the vine, for which you have not labored, neither made it grow … Shouldn’t I be concerned for Nineveh, that great city, in which are more than one hundred twenty thousand persons who can’t discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much livestock? (Jonah 4:10–11).

And the book ends. Jonah never answers.

The question is left for you.

The sign of Jonah

People kept asking me for a sign, some proof from heaven. I told them they would get only one.

This is an evil generation. It seeks after a sign. No sign will be given to it but the sign of Jonah, the prophet. For even as Jonah became a sign to the Ninevites, so the Son of Man will also be to this generation … The men of Nineveh will stand up in the judgment with this generation, and will condemn it: for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, one greater than Jonah is here (Luke 11:29–32).

The sign was a preacher, and a city that listened. The people of Assyria, the enemy, repented at five words. My own people had heard far more from me.

Matthew adds a line comparing Jonah’s three days in the fish to the Son of Man’s three days in the earth (Matthew 12:40). Luke does not have it.⁸ The King James translates the sea creature in Matthew as a whale. The Greek word means a sea monster.

On the Day of Atonement

In later centuries my people came to read the whole book of Jonah in the synagogue every year on the afternoon of the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the year.⁹

On the day they asked God to forgive them, they read a story about God forgiving their enemies, and about a prophet who could not stand it.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Jonah 4:1–11.

You will find: why Jonah really ran away, and the question the book ends with.

Then read Luke 11:29–32.

The Short Version

• Jonah came from Gath-hepher in Galilee, near Nazareth, though people said no prophet comes from Galilee.
• He ran from preaching to Nineveh, the great city of Israel’s cruelest enemy.
• The pagan sailors and the whole city of Nineveh behave better than the prophet.
• Jonah was angry because he knew God would forgive them. The book ends with God’s question, unanswered.
• The sign of Jonah was a preacher and a city that repented.