Book of Jonah

“ Jonah could not bear to see the love promised to Israel alone, and cherished by her, bestowed equally upon her heathen oppressors. And he behaved after the manner of jealousy and of the heart that thinks itself insulted. He withdrew, and sulked in solitude, and would take no responsibility nor further interest in his work. Such men are best treated by a caustic gentleness, a little humour, a little rallying, a leaving to nature, and a taking unawares in their own confessed prejudices. All these—I dare to think even the humour—are present in God’s treatment of Jonah. ”

“ If the story of Jonah should not be a fact, even if Jonah had never lived, still would the profound truth of this narrative, the love of God for Nineveh and the so-called heathen, be none the less precious in the eyes of all those who love their fellow men. ”

“ For I am the Merciful and the Compassionate God, Who shows mercy upon every one, who turneth from his sins and repenteth.” And Jonah rose up and returned to the land of Israel and he died there. And the prophecy of Jonah [was made] two hundred years and more before the advent of our Lord Jesus Christ, and he prophesied in the days of ‘Amos the king and his son ‘Ozyan. And all the days of his life were one hundred years, seventy years as a prophet, and thirty years before he prophesied. Salutation to Jonah who slept in the belly of the whale. ”

“ JONAH Next, partly hidden from view, we see Jonah, the unwilling prophet, who tried to run away when the Lord told him to take his message of warning to Nineveh. The people in this city were known to be very wicked, and Jonah feared they might kill him, so he took a boat and started away in another direction. We all know of the fearful storm that arose and how the sailors prayed to their gods and urged Jonah to pray to his. But Jonah could not pray to God when he was disobeying Him. ”

“ This prophet may also be the hero of the much later book of Jonah, but how different a man is he! It is, however, the later Jonah who chiefly interests us. New problems have arisen out of the book which relates to him, but here we can only attempt to consider what, in a certain sense, may be called the surface meaning of the text.
This, then is what we appear to be told. The prophet Jonah is summoned to go to Nineveh, a great and wicked city (cf. 4 Esdras ii. 8, 9) , and prophesy against it. ”

“ Why, of all prophets, Jonah should have been selected as the type of Israel, is a question hard but perhaps not impossible to answer. In history Jonah appears only as concerned with Israel’s reconquest of her lands from the heathen. Did the author of the book say: I will take such a man, one to whom tradition attributes no outlook beyond Israel’s own territories, for none could be so typical of Israel, narrow, selfish and with no love for the world beyond herself? Or did the author know some story about a journey of Jonah to Niniveh, or at least some discourse by Jonah against the great city? ”

“ Of such a people Jonah is the type. Like them he flees from the duty God has laid upon him. Like them he is, beyond his own land, cast for a set period into a living death, and like them rescued again only to exhibit once more upon his return an ill-will to believe that God had any fate for the heathen except destruction. According to this theory, then, Jonah’s disappearance in the sea and the great fish, and his subsequent ejection upon dry land, symbolise the Exile of Israel and their restoration to Palestine. ”

“ Considered in its historical setting, the book of Jonah is one of the most spiritually daring books ever written. Jonah stands as a type of Jew who would not admit anything of worth in human beings outside of Judaism. ”

“ This confirms, say the orthodox commentators, the historical accuracy of the story of Jonah. "If," says Canon Liddon, "he would put his finger on a fact in past Jewish history which, by its admitted reality, would warrant belief in his own resurrection, he points to Jonah's being three days and three nights in the belly of the whale." This use of the incident by our Lord clearly authenticates the incident as an actual historical fact. So say the conservative theologians. ”

“ But how could they know that he came in the belly of a whale, or that he was not an impostor? Yet the Lord told them, through Jonah, that if they did not repent, they would all be destroyed in forty days. They concluded to repent, and the Lord spared them, which made Jonah angry. ”

“ How very real it is and how very noble! We see the storm, and then we forget the storm in the joy of that generous contest between heathen and Hebrew. But the glory of the passage is the change in Jonah himself. It has been called his punishment and the conversion of the heathen. Rather it is his own conversion. He meets again not only God, but the truth from which he fled. He not only meets that truth, but he offers his life for it.
The art is consummate. The writer will first reduce the prophet and the heathen whom he abhors to the elements of their common humanity. ”

“ And God said unto Jonah, “Art thou exceedingly sorry that the cucumber plant hath withered?” And Jonah said, “Yea, O Lord, I am exceedingly sorry, even unto death.” And God said unto him, “If thou art sorry for a cucumber plant which thou didst neither sow nor plant, and for which thou hast in no way labored, but which flourished in a day, and withered in a day, why should I not spare Nineveh, the great city wherein dwell more than ten hundred thousand men who know not their right hands from their left hands, besides very many beasts? ”

“ In the midst of the storm they are equally helpless, and they cast for all the lot which has no respect of persons. But from this the story passes quickly, to show how Jonah feels not only the human kinship of these heathen with himself, but their susceptibility to the knowledge of his God. They pray to Jehovah as the God of the sea and the dry land; while we may be sure that the prophet’s confession, and the story of his own relation to that God, forms as powerful an exhortation to repentance as any he could have preached in Niniveh. ”

“ The clash with the new foes produces a really terrible thirst for the blood of the heathen: there are schisms and intrigues within Israel which in our ignorance of her history during this time it is not possible for us to follow: the brighter gleams, which contrast so forcibly with the rest, may be more ancient oracles that the writer has incorporated with his own stern and dark Apocalypse.
In the Book of Jonah, on the other hand, we find a spirit and a style in which prophecy may not unjustly be said to have given its highest utterance. ”

“ Book 32 Jonah 32:001:001 Now the word of the LORD came unto Jonah the son of Amittai,
saying,
32:001:002 Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for
their wickedness is come up before me.
32:001:003 But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the LORD, and went down to Joppa ”

“ So they cast lots, and the lot fell upon Jonah.
32:001:008 Then said they unto him, Tell us, we pray thee, for whose cause this evil is upon us; What is thine occupation? and whence comest thou? what is thy country? ”

“ Matt. xii. 39, 41, and Luke xi. 29, 30. [1496] A generation, wicked and adulterous, seeketh a sign, and sign shall not be given it, save the sign of the [Pg 508] prophet Jonah. ... The men of Niniveh shall stand up in the Judgment with this generation, and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, a greater than Jonah is here. This generation is an evil generation: it seeketh a sign; and sign shall not be given it, except the sign of Jonah. For as Jonah was a sign to the Ninivites, so also shall the Son of Man be to this generation. ”

“ And others state that the whole book is a parable, intending to point out God's justice and mercy, and how prevalent repentance is to turn aside the threatened stroke of Divine wrath.
There is a fable, most probably of Phoenician origin, which, bearing some similitude to the history of Jonah, may have been taken from this book. Laomedon, king of Troy, having displeased Neptune, to appease him, was required to expose his daughter Hesione to be devoured by a sea-monster. She was chained to a rock, and was awaiting her fate at the next flux of the tide. ”

“ When the men of Nineveh heard the preaching of Jonah the prophet they were exceedingly afraid, and they believed on God and they repented and fasted and put on sackcloth made of hair and sat in the ashes. Then the king commanded that a herald should go round about proclaiming thus: “The king hath commanded that his nobles, and all the people, great and small, and women and children, and sheep and oxen and goats shall fast, and that they shall neither eat nor drink any water whatsoever, and they shall put on sackcloth made of hair; and similarly, even the beasts shall not eat grass. ”

“ And let all men forsake their evil works, that is to say, oppression, and fornication, and lying, and theft, and fraud, and blasphemy, in order that God may, peradventure, have mercy upon you, and remove His wrath from you.” And straightway all the people repented, and they fasted, and begged for mercy from God, blessed be His Name, and God had mercy on them. And the prophet Jonah was sad with a very great sadness, and he said, “O God, take my life, for death is more preferable to me than life.” And Jonah went outside the city and sat down there and fell asleep. ”

“ Its purpose is to illustrate God’s grace to the heathen in face of His people’s refusal to fulfil their mission to them. The author was led to achieve this purpose by a parable, through which the prophet Jonah moves as the symbol of his recusant, exiled, redeemed and still hardened people. It is the Drama of Israel’s career, as the Servant of God, in the most pathetic moments of that career. A nation is stumbling on the highest road nation was ever called to tread. ”

“ Jonah had the gift of prophecy, but had not received that grace which destroys the old man and creates the soul anew in Christ Jesus. This is the love of which St. Paul speaks, which if a man have not, though he had the gift of prophecy, and could miraculously remove mountains, yet in the sight of God, and for any good himself might reap from it, it would be as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. Jonah was a prophet, and yet had all his old bad tempers about him, in a shameful predominancy. Balaam was of the same kind. So we find that God gave the gift of prophecy even to graceless men. ”

“ We have here Jonah's discharge from his imprisonment, and his deliverance from that death which there he was threatened with—his return, though not to life, for he lived in the fish's belly, yet to the land of the living, for from that he seemed to be quite cut off—his resurrection, though not from death, yet from the grave, for surely never man was so buried alive as Jonah was in the fish's belly. ”

“ That though God may suffer his people to fall into sin, yet he will not suffer them to lie still in it, but will take a course effectually to show them their error, and to bring them to themselves and to their right mind again. We have reason to hope that Jonah, after this, was well reconciled to the sparing of Nineveh, and was as well pleased with it as ever he had been displeased. (2.) That God will justify himself in the methods of his grace towards repenting returning sinners as well as in the course his justice takes with those that persist in their rebellion ”

“ He paid the fare and went into it to go with them to Tarshish, [to flee] from before Yahweh.
4 But Yahweh cast a great wind in the sea, and there was a great storm in the sea, and the ship was in danger of breaking. 5 So each man cried out to his god, and they threw the cargo on the ship into the sea to lighten the weight, but Jonah went below decks, lay down, and fell asleep.
6 But the captain came to him and said: "Why are you going to sleep? Arise, call to your god! Maybe [one of] the gods will act on our behalf and we will not be lost." ”

“ They are now as earnest in praying to be saved from the peril of sin as they were before in praying to be saved from the peril of the sea, especially because Jonah appeared to them to be no ordinary person, but a very good man, a man of God, a worshipper of the great Creator of heaven and earth, upon which account even these rude mariners conceived a veneration for him, and trembled at the thought of taking away his life. ”

“ That he had so little affection for men as to be displeased and very angry at the conversion of the Ninevites and their reception into the divine favour. This was the sin of the scribes and Pharisees, who murmured at our Saviour because he entertained publicans and sinners; but is our eye evil because his is good? But why was Jonah so uneasy at it, that the Ninevites repented and were spared? It cannot be expected that we should give any good reason for a thing so very absurd and unreasonable ”

“ II. Where he prayed—in the fish's belly. No place is amiss for prayer. I will that men pray every where. Wherever God casts us we may find a way open to heaven-ward, if it be not our own fault. Undique ad cœlos tantundem est viæ—The heavens are equally accessible from every part of the earth. He that has Christ dwelling in his heart by faith, wherever he goes carries the altar along with him, that sanctifies the gift, and is himself a living temple. Jonah was here in confinement; the belly of the fish was his prison, was a close and dark dungeon to him ”