Everyone remembers the fish. The fish is an incident. This is the man who ran away from God — and who was furious when God forgave the city he had run from. The book tells you its own point in chapter four, and it is not the one most of us were taught.

The key is 4:2

Nineveh repents, God relents, and Jonah is furious. Then he explains himself, and the explanation is the book:

“Lord, isn’t this what I said would happen when I was still in my own country? That’s why I tried to run to Tarshish in the first place. I knew that you are a merciful and compassionate God, patient, and always ready to forgive and to reconsider your threats of destruction.”Jonah 4:2 · GW

I knew it. That is why he ran.

Read the first chapter again with that in hand and it changes completely. Jonah is not a coward. He is not afraid of Nineveh, and he is not running because the errand is dangerous. He runs because he is confident he will succeed. He can see exactly how it will go — he will preach, they will repent, God will forgive — and he wants no part of it. This is not cowardice. It is objection.

And notice what he is objecting with. The words in 4:2 are not his own. They are the oldest confession Israel has about the character of God, spoken to Moses on the mountain:

“The Lord, the Lord, a compassionate and merciful God, patient, always faithful and ready to forgive.”Exodus 34:6 · GW

Every worshipping Israelite knew that sentence. It is the thing you say about God when you are grateful. Jonah throws it at Him as an accusation. He is not complaining that God broke His character — he is complaining that God kept it, and kept it toward the wrong people.

Why Nineveh, of all cities

This is not squeamishness about foreigners in the abstract. Nineveh was the capital of Assyria, and Assyria was the empire whose cruelty was a byword — Nahum 3:1 calls it “that city of bloody violence… completely full of lies and stolen goods, never without victims,” and Isaiah 10:13 puts its self-confident pride in the king’s own mouth: I did this with my own two powerful hands. In Jonah’s day it was greedy for power and, for the moment, weakened — its enemies had pushed the borders to within a hundred miles of the city.

So put the two facts side by side. Jonah is the prophet who promised Israel its borders back. He is now sent to warn — and so to save — the one nation on earth capable of taking them away again, and which within a generation would wipe the northern kingdom off the map entirely.

He very likely hoped that by staying silent they would be engulfed in judgment and cease to be a threat. His flight is patriotism. That is what makes it so hard to dismiss, and so uncomfortable to read.

An unusual book

Jonah is unique among the prophets in being almost entirely narrative. There are no oracles to speak of; there is a story, and one sentence of preaching in it. Far more attention has been paid to it than to longer books, because of its miraculous nature, and many scholars do not accept it as literal history.

Jesus, however, made use of the book and referred to its history more than once — Matthew 12:38–41 and Luke 11:29–32. And he did not use it as a fish story. He used the Ninevites as a rebuke: “The men of Nineveh will stand up with you at the time of judgment and will condemn you, because they turned to God… when Jonah spoke his message.” The pagans repented at one sentence from a reluctant prophet. That is the use Jesus makes of it.

Outline of Jonah

I. The first call and disobedience

Commission given and rejected, 1:1–3. Tarshish means “to smelt” — a place where minerals were extracted, and so a name fitting many places; this one was probably Tartessus, in Spain. Which is to say: the far end of the known world, and in precisely the opposite direction. He does not negotiate and he does not argue. He buys a ticket.

The storm, 1:4–7. His confession, 1:8–12. Asked who he is, Jonah answers with his creed — “I’m a Hebrew. I worship the Lord, the God of heaven. He is the God who made the sea and the land” — while fleeing across the sea that God made. The sailors are terrified; he is asleep.

Thrown into the sea, 1:13–17. Telling them to throw him overboard is not despair. It is a great insight into the character of God: put me in God’s hands, He is a just God. He would sooner face God’s justice directly than watch a boatful of pagans drown for his disobedience — which is the first crack in his own argument, and he does not appear to notice it.

Prayer and salvation, 2:1–10. It should be noted that his entire prayer is a collection of verses from the Psalms. He is not composing. He is praying the only words he has, the ones he had learned by heart — which is what most people do at the bottom.

The prayer ends “Victory belongs to the Lord” — salvation is the Lord’s to give. He says it in the fish. He will spend chapter four objecting to God giving it.

II. Second call and obedience

He goes to Nineveh, 3:1–4. One sentence of preaching: “In forty days Nineveh will be destroyed.” No mercy offered, no terms, no call to repent. Read it as the bare minimum a man can do and still say he obeyed.

Nineveh repents, 3:5–9. The city is saved, 3:10. “God saw what they did. He saw that they turned from their wicked ways. So God reconsidered his threat to destroy them, and he didn’t do it.” The shortest sermon in Scripture produces the largest repentance in Scripture, and the preacher is appalled.

Jonah’s anger, 4:1–4. Jonah’s reproof, 4:5–11. Compare his mood with Elijah’s under the juniper tree, I Kings 19:4 — both prophets asking to die, but for opposite reasons. Elijah because he thinks he has failed. Jonah because he has succeeded.

The things God prepares

Four times in this short book God prepares something, and it is worth listing them together:

God is as active in the discomfort as in the rescue, and the last three are aimed at Jonah rather than at Nineveh. The argument with the prophet gets as much of God’s attention as the salvation of the city.

The last word is a question

Jonah is angry about the plant. He did not plant it or make it grow, it lasted a night, and he grieves it — he had more concern for a shrub than for people. God takes that and turns it round:

“Shouldn’t I feel sorry for this important city, Nineveh? It has more than 120,000 people in it as well as many animals. These people couldn’t tell their right hand from their left.”Jonah 4:11 · GW

And that is the end. The book stops on a question and never records Jonah’s answer. We are not told whether he came round, because the question has stopped being about him.

What the story shows is the all-reaching heart of God’s love, set against the religious selfishness of Jonah — a bigot who cannot believe God loves the world. Even under the Old Covenant, the binding promise given at Sinai, Israel and Judah were chosen, but they were never the whole of God’s concern.

The same argument, eight centuries later

Jonah’s book stops on God’s question and never records an answer. The argument is taken up again in Acts — and Luke tells it in a way that is very hard to read as accidental.

Peter is praying on a roof in Joppa. That is the port Jonah went down to when he was running from this same errand. There Peter sees a sheet let down from heaven holding every kind of animal, and is told to kill and eat:

“But I answered, ‘I can’t do that, Lord! I’ve never put anything impure or unclean into my mouth.’”Acts 11:8 · GW

That is Jonah’s answer. A direct command from God, and a flat refusal on the grounds that the wrong sort of people are involved. It has to be said to Peter three times before he stops arguing.

Then he is sent to the house of Cornelius — a Roman army officer, a serving soldier of the occupying power. The shape is Jonah’s exactly: God sends His man to the enemy. Peter goes, and what he says on arriving is the sentence Jonah could never bring himself to say. “Now I understand that God doesn’t play favorites. Rather, whoever respects God and does what is right is acceptable to him in any nation.” Acts 10:34–35

And when he gets home the church puts him on trial for it. His whole defence is one sentence — “So who was I to interfere with God?” Acts 11:17 — and then the objections stop:

“Then God has also led people who are not Jewish to turn to him so that they can change the way they think and act and have eternal life.”Acts 11:18 · GW

11:18 is 11:8 played out. The refusal, then the revelation in the home of Cornelius, then the church falling silent and praising God for precisely the thing Jonah sat outside the city walls hoping would not happen. God asked the question at the end of Jonah and got no reply. Here He gets one — eight centuries later, out of the same harbour, from a second prophet who also began by saying no.

One last thing to carry forward. Roughly a century after Jonah, Nahum announces the fall of this same Nineveh, and it finally comes. The mercy was real, and it was not permanent. Read in that order, Nahum lands very differently.