To listen to Bible Fiber, be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel or follow Bible Fiber wherever you listen to your podcasts (like Apple or Spotify)
The book of Jonah is the most exciting of all the prophetic books. Check almost any illustrated children’s Bible, and Jonah is the only Minor Prophet to warrant an appearance. Jonah is the only prophet to get his own musical production; he is the only Hebrew prophet to have a full-length Veggie Tales movie. Jonah is the most familiar prophet for most Christian adults, but mostly because they learned of his story as children.
Reading Jonah with fresh adult eyes and amongst the other Minor Prophets prompts you to realize how awkwardly the book fits among the other prophetic writings. The literary differences, in both format and message, between Jonah and the other prophets are striking. Jonah technically is not a prophetic book. The author did not write it as an oracle, and it is not written in the first-person voice. It is a narrative, written anonymously, telling a story in third person about Jonah. In fact, Jonah is the only prophetic book that takes a mocking tone toward the prophet-in-focus. Out of four chapters in the book, only five words are classified as an oracle.
Because of all the dissimilarities, many biblical scholars puzzle over Jonah’s categorization. Is the book truly a historical narrative, as it is most often read? Is it an allegory, or maybe a parable? Let’s take a look at how Jonah lines up with other biblical books.
Dating
Jonah begins in the traditional manner of a prophetic book: “Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai, saying, ‘Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me’” (1:1-2). The prophet’s name and his commission from Yahweh appears at the beginning of the book, as an ancient reader would have expected. From there, however, the book quickly diverges from the typical prophetic template, as Jonah fled “away from the presence of the Lord” (1:3).
God had commissioned Hosea to marry an unfaithful wife, Joel had been told to gather a post-apocalypse assembly, and Amos had to leave his fields in Judah to minister in Israel. In each instance, the prophets obediently answered their hard calls from the Lord. Jonah is the first prophet to completely resist God’s directive.
To be fair to Jonah, no other prophet had received a commission that entailed leaving the Holy Land. Even when other prophets delivered oracles against other nations, they were able to do so within the comfort of their own communities. God had tasked Jonah with giving his oracle directly to Nineveh, one of the most important cities in the Assyrian Empire. Jonah was supposed to announce to the Ninevites that Yahweh, the God of Israel, had taken notice of Nineveh’s wickedness!
In Jonah’s first scene, the prophet travels to Joppa and boards a ship to Tarshish, which would have been a pricey ticket. Tarshish may refer to a city in Spain or an area in Asia Minor. In either case, Jonah was heading in the opposite direction from Nineveh. Yahweh sent a storm to shake Jonah out of his stubborn disobedience. The storm was so violent that even the experienced sailors were frightened. The Hebrew word for “hurl” is tul, and it is repeated three times in this section with a climactic effect. The storm hurled the boat, causing the sailors to hurl cargo into the sea, and eventually compelling them to hurl Jonah overboard.
Pagan sailors
The Phoenician crew was a cosmopolitan lot. They each cried out to their own god, which was the norm in a polytheistic society (1:5). When one god failed to answer their prayers, they would cry out to the next. The sailors recognized that the storm resulted from a divine force, unlike Jonah, who was sleeping through the storm in the boat’s hull. The author was highlighting the alertness of the pagan sailors to God’s punishing hand, in contrast to Jonah’s spiritual stupor. The sailors commanded Jonah to “Get up! Go!” and to pray to his god (1:6). The Hebrew imperative from the sailors was the same wording God had used in commissioning Jonah: “Get up! Go!” No other book in the Hebrew bible has a confrontation like this, in which a group of pagans are outshining an Israelite with their sensitivity to the hand of Yahweh.
When the storm threatened to capsize the boat, the sailors desperately cast lots to determine which passenger had angered God. The lots singled out the guilty party: our anti-hero, Jonah. Only then did Jonah confess how he had angered the God of the Hebrews.
Lot casting was common in the ancient Near East. Even though it may seem to conflict with tenets of Judaism, there are several instances in the Old Testament when religious leaders had cast lots as a legitimate means of determining God’s divine bidding. One Proverb notes, “The lot is cast into the lap, but the decision is the Lord’s alone” (Prov. 16:33). The Urim and Thummim stones were part of the vestments of the High Priest, but the priests also used them to discern God’s will (Lev. 16:8, Num. 26:55, Josh. 18:10, 1 Sam. 14:41). Using the two colored stones was the priestly version of tossing a coin. With this in mind, an ancient reader in Judah would not have passed judgment on the sailors’ methods of truth-seeking.
Even after the lot pointed to Jonah, the sailors gave Jonah a chance to speak for himself. They were fair-minded and not eager to find a scapegoat. They asked Jonah to declare his religion and nationality. Jonah replied, “I am a Hebrew.” He added, “I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land” (1:9). Jonah understood the storm was targeting him and he believed that only his death would pacify Yahweh. He explained to the sailors that he had been trying to run away from Yahweh (1:10). Horror-stricken, the sailors did not doubt the link between Jonah’s disobedience and the cause of the storm. All was made clear to them.
The sailors were reluctant to throw Jonah over, but after attempting and failing to navigate the ship to dry land, they prayed and implored God not to hold them responsible for the death of an innocent man. This demonstrates that these men were genuinely seeking to appease the God of the Hebrews, whom Jonah had offended. Their intentions were noble, and as soon as they threw Jonah from the boat, the wind and waves calmed down. Then, “the men feared the Lord, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows” (1:16).
Why did the author of Jonah contrast the wisdom and spiritual discernment of pagan sailors with the foolishness of a prophet of Yahweh? Normally, we might expect the prophet to be the one to see God’s message clearly, but throughout the book, Jonah is the flawed character. His defiance differs from the Gentile sailors’ earnest seeking of the one true God who controls the seas. In each scene in this moment of crisis, they acted wisely, justly, and appropriately. The author intended for the effect to be shocking and to expose the self-righteousness of Jonah, an Israelite.
The sailors cried out to God using his covenantal name, which had been revealed only to the Hebrews: “Please, Yahweh, we pray, do not let us perish on account of this man’s life. Do not make us guilty of innocent blood; for you, Yahweh, have done as it pleased you” (1:14). Apart from the sailor’s prayer, there are no other instances in the Hebrew scripture of pagans saying the sacred name.
In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the faith lesson strikes the same chord as the story of Jonah on the boat. In both Jonah and the Good Samaritan, the heroes who were Gentiles were more in sync with God’s will than the Hebrews. The Samaritan, the hated neighbor of first-century Judeans, saved a dying man on the road after a temple priest and a Levite had ignored the man’s suffering. Both testaments compel the reader to admire those who the Hebrews held in contempt and to observe them outperforming their upright community members—a humbling process.
Literary style
We have established that the book of Jonah stands out among the Minor Prophets for its uniqueness. The plot twists, the satire, and the theological lessons give the book an almost metaphorical feel. The narrative style of presentation makes Jonah seem out-of-place coming after prophetic oracles. Dramatic details in the story, such as a violent storm, the swallowing of Jonah by a fish, Nineveh’s total conversion, and a seemingly magical tree may seem like the elements of a parable. However, when Jesus taught in parables, he explained the important morals so that the audience understood his method. Jonah ends abruptly and inconclusively, delivering no interpretation or explanation. For this reason, I don’t believe Jonah is a parable.
Some have proposed that Jonah is an allegory, and one must interpret the story to understand its message. Scholars who advocate for the allegorical nature of Jonah most often point to the meaning of the prophet’s name. Jonah, in Hebrew, means dove. In the allegorical interpretation, Jonah represents the nation of Judah and/or Israel. The boat ride to Tarshish symbolizes the rebellion of the nation. Jonah’s three days of repentance inside the belly of the fish is the period of exile. God’s command for the fish to spit Judah onto dry land is like God prompting the heart of Cyrus the Great to allow the Jews to return to the promised land. Judah would use those years in exile to repent of their past sins and to restore their relationship with Yahweh, just as Jonah did by praying inside the belly of the fish.
The problem with interpreting Jonah allegorically is that allegories require every aspect in the book to have a symbolic equivalent. In Jonah, there are plenty of details that do not have symbolic parallels to Judah’s exile. Also, nothing in the book of Jonah explicitly states that the reader is interacting with an allegory.
The most important confirmation that Jonah was a historical, and not figurative, person comes from 2 Kings 14:25: “according to the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, which he spoke by his servant Jonah son of Amittai, the prophet, who was from Gath-hepher.” We know from this verse that the prophet Jonah was from the Northern Kingdom and lived during the reign of Jeroboam II (793-753 BCE). Without the cross-reference in 2 Kings, the book of Jonah possesses nothing internally that points to its dating. And even though it seems like a dry reference to one of Jonah’s prophecies, the oracle that he spoke to King Jeroboam II fits what we already know about Jonah’s lack of a prophetic spine.
Jonah used his prophetic authority to assure Jeroboam II that his borders would expand northward, a prophecy that surely delighted the ungodly king. Even then, Jonah seems to have been the kind of prophet who avoided speaking hard truths. The prophecy he gave Jeroboam II did indeed play out, but it was a nationalistic, ear-tickling prophecy to a king who did evil in the sight of the Lord. Remember that Amos also lived during the reign of King Jeroboam II, after the king was already successful in battle. With boldness, Amos prophesied in the temple of Bethel that Jeroboam would die by the sword, and all of Israel would go into exile (Amos 7:11). Amos was likely killed because of his commitment to speak truth.
The first chapter of Jonah ends with his rescue: “But the Lord provided a large fish to swallow up Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights” (1:17). In my recollection of Jonah and the whale from children’s bibles, the fish was God’s punishment for Jonah, but in a forthright reading, the fish was all part of God’s rescue plan for the wayward prophet. By swallowing Jonah, the fish saved him from drowning, which would have happened in about 18 minutes. The fish gave Jonah a second chance that he wouldn’t have had otherwise. That is the amazing grace of our saving God, even as it extends to a narrow-minded, rebellious prophet.