Jonah

Jonah



(fl. eighth century b.c.)

Old Testament prophet, the central figure in a story that raises the issue of conditional prophecy.
Jonah lived in the northern Israelite kingdom during the reign of Jeroboam II. However, the small book that bears his name does not profess to be his own work. Almost certainly, it is much later, and almost certainly, it is not biographical. It tells how the Lord commanded Jonah to go to Nineveh, the Assyrian capital, and denounce the wickedness of its people. This motif of a message for non-Israelites is one of the features that show the book to be written at a later time. Jonah is afraid and tries to escape, going aboard a ship bound for Tarshish, probably Tartessus in Spain.
When the ship is endangered by a storm, the crew decide that their guilty passenger is bringing bad luck, and they throw him overboard. His life is saved when the Lord causes a “great fish” to swallow him; inside it, he utters a prayer of remorse and thanksgiving, and after three days, the fish vomits him onto land. Commanded again by God, he goes to Nineveh and tells its people that their city will be destroyed. The king is shaken, and, with his encouragement, the Ninevites do penance and even pray to the God of Israel. The city is not destroyed. Jonah is angry. God, however, says that, in the circumstances, he has every right to show mercy—after all, he showed mercy to Jonah himself—and the prophet should learn to practice that virtue.
The story is a fable, which, in inculcating its moral, brings out a point implied in older prophetic writings. A prophecy may be inspired and valid yet conditional: a warning, perhaps, rather than a prediction. If so-and-so happens, a certain consequence will follow. In this case, if the Ninevites persist in their sins, God will inflict punishment. But if
the first contingency is deflected, the consequence may be also.
There is no point in speculating about the fish or asking whether Jonah could have survived inside it for three days. It is probably derived from Hebrew mythology. In the New Testament (Matthew 12:40), it is explicitly a whale, and Jonah’s experience is an anticipatory symbol of Christ’s entombment and resurrection.