Jonah: Introduction and Chapter 1

Jonah was the son of a man named Amittai. We have a pretty good indication of when he prophesied because he is mentioned in II Kings 14:25, in the time of Jeroboam II, who reigned in the late 9th-early 8th century B.C. This would make Jonah at least a contemporary with Amos and Hosea, and perhaps even earlier. The book of Jonah is what he is most famous for, but we learn from the passage in II Kings that the Lord used him to deliver other messages as well.

Jonah was to preach to Nineveh, the capital of Assyria; so there is no preaching to the Jews in this book at all. That country was a rising power, not totally in its heyday yet, but close. The Assyrians will sack Samaria in 722/21, but be overthrown by the Babylonians in the 630s. The prophet Nahum, who also preaches to Nineveh, will tell that story.

Chapter One

Jonah flees from God (vs. 1-3)—God told Jonah to go and “cry out” against Nineveh. Jonah didn’t want to do it, so he decided to flee to Tarshish. We don’t know exactly where Tarshish was, but it wasn’t where God wanted Jonah to go. Notice that when Jonah boarded the ship at Joppa to go to Tarshish, “he paid the fare thereof” (v. 3). If he had gone where the Lord told him, Jehovah would have taken care of him.

Jonah cast into the sea (vs. 4-17)—The Lord was displeased, of course, and “sent out a great wind on the sea, and there was a mighty tempest on the sea, so that the ship was about to be broken up” (v. 4). The mariners did everything they could to save the ship, including tossing all the cargo into the sea and praying to their own gods (v. 5). Jonah was sleeping through all of this (v. 5). His shipmates wake him up and bid him to call upon his God; maybe He’s the one who can save them, their gods hadn’t helped yet. To find out who was to blame for this catastrophe (a bit of superstition here, but it worked, no doubt through the direction of God), the men cast lots. The lot fell on Jonah, who explained why the Lord was sending this tempest. When asked what could be done to calm the sea, Jonah said, "Pick me up and throw me into the sea; then the sea will become calm for you. For I know that this great tempest is because of me" (v. 12). Even though this was the prophet of God speaking, and it was fairly obvious that his message came from Jehovah, the other men on the ship, to their credit, didn’t want to do what Jonah told them to—they were trying to save his life. But the storm worsened (v. 13), and they simply had to do what Jonah bid them in order to save their own lives. They asked the Lord to forgive them for what they were about to do. Well, since it was God’s will that Jonah be cast into the sea, it wasn’t a sin, but again these men appear honorable. They toss the prophet overboard, “and the sea ceased from its raging” (v. 15). Jonah’s companions might have been converted completely to Jehovah, because “the men feared the LORD exceedingly, and offered a sacrifice to the LORD and took vows” (v. 16). So Jonah has already done some good, even though he had been disobeying God.

Jonah didn’t die, of course. “Now the LORD had prepared a great fish to swallow Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights” (v. 17). This “great fish” was almost certainly not a whale, as the old King James Version suggests in the New Testament. A whale can’t swallow a human, its throat isn’t big enough. We don’t know what the fish was, but it doesn’t matter. It acted at God’s command. And the prophet learned his lesson. To spend three days and nights in the depths of a fish’s stomach must have been a hair-raising experience.