The reluctant prophet sent to the enemy capital
Jonah is four short chapters and the only prophetic book in the Hebrew canon that does not consist of oracles. It is a narrative, and the narrative is at the prophet's expense. Jonah is told to go preach to Nineveh — the capital of the Assyrian empire, which will eventually destroy the northern kingdom of Israel — and he refuses. He runs in the opposite direction. The LORD pursues. The story is, structurally, a comedy in the classical sense: the protagonist resists at every turn and the LORD wins anyway.
The geography matters. Nineveh sits on the Tigris in modern Iraq. Tarshish, where Jonah flees, is on the Atlantic coast of Spain — the opposite end of the known world. Jonah is not just disobeying; he is going as far away from his vocation as the geography of the ancient Near East allowed.
The storm scene (Jonah 1) is staged so the Gentile sailors look better than the Hebrew prophet. The sailors pray to their gods. They throw cargo overboard. They wake Jonah, who has been sleeping below decks, and tell him to pray too. They cast lots to find the cause of the storm and the lot falls on Jonah. They try to row back to land rather than throw him overboard. When they finally do throw him overboard, they pray for forgiveness for what they are about to do. The sea stops. The sailors offer a sacrifice and make vows to the LORD (Jonah 1:16). The pagan sailors are converted before the Hebrew prophet has preached a word.
The great fish (Jonah 2) has held the Christian imagination since the patristic period. Christ himself reads the three days in the fish as a type of his own three days in the tomb: "As Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth." (Matthew 12:40) The sign of Jonah, in Christ's mouth, is the resurrection. The fish becomes a grave that is also a delivery vehicle. Jonah's prayer from inside it (Jonah 2:2–9) is a psalm of descent and return — *out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice.* The Christian liturgical tradition (especially the Eastern liturgies) reads Jonah's prayer on Holy Saturday for exactly this reason.
The Nineveh sermon (Jonah 3) is one of the shortest in the canon: "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown." (Jonah 3:4) That is the entire recorded preaching. It does not name the LORD. It does not call for repentance. It is, on its face, a flat prediction of destruction. And it works. The whole city repents — humans and animals together fast and put on sackcloth, by royal decree. The king sits in ashes. The LORD relents. The sermon Jonah did not want to preach has converted the city he wanted destroyed.
The last chapter is where the book's real subject becomes visible. Jonah is furious. He goes outside the city, builds a hut, and waits to see if maybe the LORD will still wipe the place out. He prays the angriest prayer in the prophetic literature: "O LORD, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster." (Jonah 4:2) Jonah is quoting the LORD's own self-revelation to Moses (Exodus 34:6) — and is angry that the LORD is, in fact, the kind of God he said he was.
The LORD's response is the question the book ends on. He grows a plant for shade, then a worm kills it. Jonah pities the plant. The LORD asks: "Should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 people who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?" (Jonah 4:11) The book ends without Jonah's answer. The reader is given the question.
The Christian reading holds Jonah as the typological figure of Christ on the resurrection side and as the typological figure of the church on the mission side. The grumbling, ethnocentric prophet who is angry that the LORD's mercy is wider than his theology was — that is the church being called past its prejudice toward the enemies it would rather see destroyed. The sign of Jonah, for the Christian reader, is two things at once: the resurrection, and the call to preach to the city the prophet would rather flee.
Related entries: Nineveh, Rome, The Exodus