Jonah: God's mercy even to enemies

About the book

Jonah's name means ‘dove’. 2 Kings names "Jonah son of Amittai, the prophet from Gath-hepher" (2 Kings 14:25), a village in Galilee, as the one who foretold that Jeroboam II would restore Israel's borders. Jonah was a prophet of the northern kingdom in the eighth century BC, and the map under the Jesus tab places the book in the divided monarchy (930–586 BC). Other prophetic books gather what a prophet said; this one tells what happened to a prophet. It does not name its author.

Nineveh was a great city of Assyria, the empire that crushed its neighbours with cruelty and would soon destroy the northern kingdom. When God sent Jonah to preach against it, he took a ship the other way, for Tarshish.

The church has long read Jonah as history. Jonah is a real prophet known from Kings, and the book tells its story as an account of events. Above all, Jesus made Jonah's three days in the fish a sign of his own death and resurrection, and said that the men of Nineveh will stand at the judgment and condemn his generation (Matthew 12:41). Many scholars, among them evangelicals, who stress the authority of Scripture and the telling of the gospel, hold this view.

Many other scholars read the book as a story told later, often placed after the exile, with the historical prophet as its hero, to teach that God's mercy reaches the nations. They point to late features in its Hebrew, to the title ‘king of Nineveh’ for the king of Assyria (Jonah 3:6), and to its shape: pagan sailors and Ninevites turn to God at once, while only the prophet sulks, as in a story told to teach. Christians who read it so still receive it as God's word, and take Jesus to be drawing on a story everyone knew. Both readings hold fast to what the book teaches: God cares even for enemies.

How it unfolds

Key passages

From inside the fish Jonah confesses, "Salvation is from the LORD!" (Jonah 2:9). Yet when that salvation reaches Nineveh, he is angry. At his short warning "the Ninevites believed God" and put on sackcloth (Jonah 3:5). "When God saw their actions— that they had turned from their evil ways— He relented from the disaster He had threatened to bring upon them" (Jonah 3:10). This was why Jonah had run:

I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger, abounding in loving devotion — One who relents from sending disaster.

Jonah 4:2

These are the words with which God proclaimed his name to Moses (Exodus 34:6), and with which Joel called Israel to return (Joel 2:13). Jonah turns them into a complaint. The English pastor Matthew Henry says that Jonah speaks "as if showing mercy were an imperfection of the Divine nature, which is the greatest glory of it" Matthew Henry. Jonah grieves over a vine that grew up in a night and withered in a night, and God asks him:

So should I not care about the great city of Nineveh, which has more than 120,000 people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well?

Jonah 4:11

The book ends on that question, with no answer from Jonah; the question is left with the reader. Nineveh's story does not end here. More than a century later, when Nineveh had turned to cruelty again, Nahum announced its fall (Nahum). Read together, the two books show a God who spares the repentant and does not leave evil unpunished.

The book and Christ

To those who demanded a sign, Jesus said that none would be given but the sign of the prophet Jonah:

For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

Matthew 12:40

Augustine, the North African church leader, observed that Jonah foretold Christ's death and resurrection less by his words than by what he went through Augustine, City of God 18.30. And Jesus said, "now One greater than Jonah is here" (Matthew 12:41). Jonah went to his enemies unwillingly; Christ died for us "when we were enemies of God" (Romans 5:10). Risen, he told his disciples that "repentance and forgiveness of sins will be proclaimed to all nations" (Luke 24:47). The mercy shown to Nineveh now goes out to every people.

Reading it

Four chapters make one sitting; begin with Jonah 1. In chapter 1, notice the pagan sailors, who cry out to the LORD and fear him greatly before the prophet prays at all (Jonah 1:16); in chapter 2, a prayer woven from the Psalms. At the end, try answering God's question yourself, then go on to Micah.

Practice