The Story of Jonah
The story of Jonah is one of the shortest books in the Bible. Four short chapters, and yet they hold a storm, a great fish, the largest city of the ancient world, and a question from God that the book never answers.
Most people remember the fish. The fish is the least of it. This is a story about a man who ran from mercy, and about a God who would not stop being merciful, not to a pagan city, and not to the prophet sulking outside its walls.
The Call and the Flight
Jonah son of Amittai was a prophet in Israel, and one day the word of the Lord came to him: go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it, for its evil has come up before me. Nineveh was the capital of Assyria, the empire that terrorized Jonah's people.
So Jonah rose, and went in the opposite direction. He went down to Joppa, paid his fare, and boarded a ship for Tarshish, at the far edge of the known world, fleeing, the text says, from the presence of the Lord.
He was not afraid of Nineveh. He was afraid, as he admits later, that God might forgive it. So he ran.
The Storm and the Great Fish
The Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and the ship began to break apart. The sailors panicked and prayed each to his own god, throwing cargo overboard. Jonah was asleep in the hold.
The captain shook him awake. The sailors cast lots to find whose fault the storm was, and the lot fell on Jonah. He admitted everything: I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord who made the sea and the dry land, and I am running from him. Throw me into the sea, he said, and it will quiet down for you.
The sailors did not want to. They rowed hard for land, and only when the sea grew wilder did they cry to the Lord for pardon and throw Jonah overboard. The sea went still at once, and the pagan crew offered sacrifice to the God of Israel on the deck.
And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow Jonah. For three days and three nights Jonah was in its belly, in the dark of the deep. From that darkness he prayed: out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice. On the third day the fish spat him out onto dry land.
Nineveh Repents
The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, the same word as before. This time he went. Nineveh was so large it took three days to cross, and Jonah walked one day into it and preached the shortest sermon in Scripture: forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.
Then something happened that no prophet in Israel had ever managed to produce at home. The whole city believed. The people proclaimed a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least. The king of Nineveh rose from his throne, laid aside his robe, sat in ashes, and decreed that neither man nor beast should eat or drink.
And God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, and God relented. The city was spared.
The Vine and God's Question
This should be the happy ending. Instead, the book gives us its strangest and most honest chapter. Jonah was furious. He prayed in anger: I knew it, Lord. This is why I fled. I knew you were gracious and merciful, slow to anger. Take my life, for death is better to me than life.
Jonah went out east of the city, built himself a little shelter, and sat down to watch, still hoping fire might fall. God appointed a vine to grow up over him, giving shade to his head, and Jonah was glad for the vine. Then at dawn God appointed a worm, and the vine withered. The sun beat down, the east wind blew, and Jonah again asked to die.
Then God spoke the last words of the book. You pity the vine, for which you did not labor, which came up in a night and perished in a night. Should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?
The book ends there. Jonah never answers. Neither, the story implies, have we.
What the Story of Jonah Means
The story of Jonah is a story about the width of God's mercy, and about how hard that width is for us to bear. Everyone in the book responds to God except the prophet: the storm obeys, the sailors convert, the fish obeys, the pagan city repents, even the vine and the worm do as they are appointed. Only Jonah resists, because only Jonah has an enemy he wants God to hate.
That is the sting of the book. Nineveh had truly hurt Jonah's people. His anger was not petty; it was the anger of the wounded. And still God asks him, gently, whether mercy toward the enemy is really so unbearable.
The unanswered question is the whole point. The book refuses to close the loop, because the question is addressed to the reader. Whoever your Nineveh is, the God of Jonah is already looking at it with pity, and asking whether you can learn to do the same.
Jonah in the Syriac Tradition
In the churches of the Syriac East, Jonah is not just a story. He is a season. Every year, three weeks before Great Lent, the Syriac churches keep the Fast of Nineveh, called in Syriac the Ba'utha d'Ninwaye, the Rogation of the Ninevites.
For three days the faithful fast and pray as the Ninevites did, remembering the city that repented and was spared. By tradition the fast arose in the Syriac heartland during a time of plague, when the people begged for mercy as Nineveh had. It has been kept for some fifteen centuries.
The Maronite Church, born of that same Syriac world, inherited this observance in its calendar, and its liturgy still sings of Jonah in the weeks before Lent. The three-day fast is a small rehearsal of the great one: what Nineveh did in desperation, the Church does in hope. For how the Maronites fast today, see the Maronite fasting rules.
The Sign of Jonah
Centuries later, in Galilee, some Pharisees asked Jesus for a sign. His answer, in Matthew 12:39-40, reached back to this little book: no sign will be given except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For 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.
The early Church read Jonah this way ever after. The descent into the deep, the three days in darkness, the return to the land of the living: Jonah's story became a figure of the death and resurrection of Christ.
Frequently Asked Questions
Was Jonah really swallowed by a whale?
The Hebrew text says a "great fish," not a whale; the whale entered the story through later translation. Christians have read the episode in different ways: some as literal history, some as an inspired parable about mercy. The Church has never made belief in the fish a test of faith. What the tradition insists on is the meaning: no depth is beyond the reach of God.
How long was Jonah in the fish?
Three days and three nights, according to Jonah 1:17. From inside the fish Jonah prayed a psalm of thanksgiving, and on the third day the fish released him onto dry land. Jesus took up this detail in Matthew 12:40, saying that as Jonah spent three days and three nights in the belly of the fish, so the Son of Man would spend three days in the heart of the earth.
What is the main message of the story of Jonah?
The main message of the story of Jonah is that God's mercy is wider than his people want it to be. Jonah runs not because he fears Nineveh but because he fears God will forgive it, and God does. The book ends with God's unanswered question to Jonah: should I not have pity on this great city? The question is left open so that every reader has to answer it.
What is the sign of Jonah?
In Matthew 12:39-40, when the Pharisees ask Jesus for a sign, he answers that no sign will be given except the sign of the prophet Jonah: 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. The sign of Jonah is Christ's death and resurrection, foreshadowed in Jonah's descent into the deep and his return to the land of the living.
Why did Jonah run away from God?
Jonah tells us himself, in Jonah 4:2. He fled because he knew God was gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and he suspected God would forgive Nineveh if it repented. Nineveh was the capital of Assyria, an empire that had brutalized Jonah's people. He did not want its people warned. He wanted them judged.
See also: The Peshitta, the Syriac Bible. Lebanon in the Bible. Great Lent in the Maronite Church. The Aramaic language of Jesus. The Story of Ruth. The Parable of the Prodigal Son.