Be sure to subscribe to the YouTube channel or Follow Bible Fiber wherever you listen to podcasts!
On the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo included the prophet Jonah among his progression of scenes from the Old Testament. Jonah, larger than the other Hebrew prophets in the painting, awkwardly leans back and looks up at the ceiling. Art analysts have proposed that Michelangelo was portraying Jonah as his alter ego. The prophet’s hands appear ready to hold a palette, and he contorts his body like an artist on a scaffold gazing at a masterpiece.
There is something in the story of Jonah’s unabashed self-interest that both ignites the imagination and convicts the conscience. Most readers, with the narrator’s gentle nudging, recognize a piece of themselves in the prodigal prophet. As much as Jonah horrifies us, we also identify with his selfishness and narrow-mindedness. Michelangelo is unique in that he had the chance and talent to portray his Jonah-likeness onto one of the most celebrated frescoes in Rome, but we are all with him in the projecting of our own weaknesses onto Jonah, the most flawed of prophets.
Anger versus compassion
In the last chapter, Jonah completed his commission. He put Nineveh on alert that she had 40 days before the city’s destruction, but the unexpected happened. The king and the people repented fully and wholeheartedly. The prophetic books only show two instances where God’s messengers inspired repentance: Joel and Jonah. Ironically, Jonah’s authentic spiritual lament came from the Assyrian Empire, an enemy of Israel that is loathed throughout the rest of the Bible. Nineveh, the Assyrian city, was the epitome of evil in the history of Israel. Yet, the way the Ninevites repented so humbly and forthrightly rendered them above reproach.
God felt compassion for the Ninevites of Jonah’s time and spared the city. When God’s anger subsided, Jonah’s anger flared up. He regretted ever coming to Nineveh. He asked Yahweh, “Is not this what I said while I was still in my country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing” (4:2).
Jonah rejected God’s command from the beginning, not because he was afraid of the Assyrians or what they may have done to him. This is what most readers assume from reading the first chapter, since Jonah’s fears go unnamed. No, Jonah did not want to preach judgment against Nineveh because he knew there was the possibility that if they repented, God would cancel his judgment. Jonah did not believe the Ninevites deserved the mercy of Yahweh.
At the book’s end, Jonah, our anti-hero, engaged with God in an almost childish pouty manner. His former revival inside the whale lapsed back to arguing with God. God asked Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry?” (4:4). Jonah ignored the question. He left the city and traveled east, the opposite direction from which he had entered. Apparently, he was in no hurry to return to Israel. To witness Nineveh’s destruction, Jonah searched for the best vantage point.
Just as God appointed the storm to wake Jonah from his spiritual and literal stupor, and the whale to save him from the seafloor, he appointed a tree to grow up and give Jonah shade. The tree grew quickly overnight, like Jack’s beanstalk. According to the text, Jonah was “very happy about the tree” (4:6). The next day, a weevil chewed the plant’s roots, leaving it to wither. The sun-exposed prophet became upset. To further his discomfort, God sent a hot wind from the east. With his shade gone, Jonah had a tantrum, perhaps induced by heatstroke.
Supernatural
The book of Jonah is unique among the prophets for its rapid progression of supernatural events. For this reason, Bible scholars notice that Jonah’s story more closely aligns with the nonliterary prophets, Elijah and Elisha, than with the rest of the 12 Minor Prophets. Jonah pales in comparison to Elijah and Elisha as a prophet, yet all three have supernatural elements in their stories. Elijah ran from the evil queen Jezebel, who aimed to kill the true prophets. Elijah begged God, “take my life away” (1 Kings 19:4). Jonah used Elijah’s exact words, “take my life away,” while he sat outside the city of Nineveh (4:3). The author of Jonah might have been drawing a comparison between Elijah’s admirable moment of distress when he was tired of battling idolatry in the land, and Jonah’s self-centered moment of distress. Jonah’s concern for his lost shade tree was greater than his concern for the entire nation.
The shriveling tree was an object lesson with the purpose of Jonah’s achieving self-revelation. God asked Jonah for a second time: “Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?” (4:9). Jonah responded, “Yes, angry enough to die.” Gently, lovingly, like talking to a child, God explained to Jonah that if he cared so much for a bush that he did not plant or grow, how much more should God care for an entire nation. God made the 120,000 people of Nineveh and its animals. He described the Ninevites as a people who do “not know their right hand from their left” (4:11). This may be a reference to the Ninevites lack of knowledge of Yahweh’s laws. Destroying his own handiwork gave God pain, and he was trying to convey that pain to Jonah. Once again, Jonah’s own self-interest blinded him to God’s truth. It frustrated Jonah that the tree could no longer fulfil its purpose for him. The book abruptly ends with God’s question to Jonah still hanging in the air: “Should I not be concerned about Nineveh?” (4:11). The author leaves us to wonder whether Jonah ever opened his eyes to the expansiveness of God’s love.
Jonah’s selfishness brings Jesus’s parable of the unmerciful servant to mind. His selfishness is reminiscent of the parable in which a king pardoned his servant’s massive debt, but the servant compelled another servant to repay him in full or face imprisonment (Matt. 18:23-25). Showing mercy to others, as we have been shown mercy, is a principle first rooted in the Hebrew scriptures and expounded upon in the New Testament teachings of Jesus. Like Jonah, we all undeservedly have been recipients of God’s mercy and compassion. It is not up to us to withhold it from others.
Israel flourishing
Although Jonah’s short-sightedness as a prophet was reprehensible, a little historical background is important to show how Jonah might not have been as selfish as he seems. Jonah’s fear of God saving the hated Ninevites might have been linked to his knowledge of earlier prophecies. The prophet Hosea, for example, predicted that one day Assyria would overrun Israel (Hos. 9:3, 6). Perhaps Jonah hoped that if God destroyed Assyria beforehand, it would spare Israel. The rescue of the Kingdom of Israel might have been what Jonah had in mind.
During Jonah’s day, Israel was flourishing under Jeroboam II. With Assyria undergoing famine, civil unrest, weak leadership, and military defeat, Israel took advantage of the Assyrian retreat to take back her northern borders. Remember, Jonah was the nationalist prophet who had told Jeroboam II that his territory would expand (2 Kgs. 14:25-28). Jonah rightly estimated that if Nineveh repented and Assyria resurged, it would be at Israel’s expense. Indeed, Assyria attacked Israel in 712 BCE, not long after Jonah’s visit to Nineveh. The empire’s slash-and-burn policy left the Northern Kingdom a smoking ruin. Assyria deported the 10 tribes of Israel, and their kingdom was never restored.
God withheld the judgment of Nineveh for a time. Their repentant response to Jonah’s reluctant message bought them decades, deferring their punishment but not canceling it. Just as Jonah’s revival did not last long after he was swallowed by the fish, Nineveh’s humble spirit quickly dissolved. When their recognition of Yahweh’s call faded, and they again stood in opposition to God, destruction was inevitable. In 612 BCE, an alliance of Medes and Babylonians overthrew Nineveh.
God’s expansiveness
When Jonah complained to God that he was inclined to forgive Nineveh because he was merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, he was quoting a familiar credal statement with roots in Exodus 34:6. On Mount Sinai, Yahweh had passed in front of Moses, describing himself with all these exact qualities.
Jonah was setting the creed before Yahweh as a complaint and not as a praise, a fact that moves the reader to wince. In Jonah’s limited perspective, he understood these attributes of God as descriptors of God’s covenant relationship to Israel. Why should Yahweh extend the same measure of compassion to Israel’s most despised enemy? Until Jonah, the other Minor Prophets had delivered oracles against other nations. Jonah’s theme challenges the reader: What is God’s relationship to the nations, if even the harshest of Israel’s enemies can also be objects of God’s grace? After Amos’s OAN and Obadiah’s oracle against the Edomites, Bible critics might accuse the prophets of delivering nationalist propaganda against Israel’s enemies. However, the book of Jonah promotes another nation. Israel and Judah never even come up in the exchanges between God and Jonah.
The challenge of Jonah’s themes tested the hearts of readers in Israel and Judah for generations. How could their God, the one who had stretched out his arm and delivered them from slavery in Egypt, treat another nation so mercifully? Jonah expected Yahweh’s lovingkindness to be reserved for his covenant people.
Just as Jonah rejected God’s mercy for the Ninevites, some early followers of Jesus opposed preaching to uncircumcised Gentiles. The book of Acts preserves the tenuous moment in Christian history when the same spirit of Jonah was present with the disciples. The message of John 3:16 and God’s love for the world is rooted in this story of a reluctant prophet and his resistance to an expansive God. Jonah was the preface to what ultimately led to the Great Commission. The prophet had learned the hard way that it was not up to man to decide how God extends his grace.