Jonah and the Fish: The Prophet Who Ran

God tells Jonah: Go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me. Nineveh is the capital of Assyria, the empire that destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel. God is asking Jonah to go there and give them a chance to repent. Jonah's response is immediate and decisive: he goes to Joppa and takes the first ship in the opposite direction — to Tarshish, the far western edge of the known world.

A great storm arises. The sailors are terrified, each crying out to his own god, throwing cargo overboard. Jonah is asleep in the hold. The captain wakes him: How can you sleep? Get up and call to your god! The crew casts lots to find who has brought this trouble, and the lot falls on Jonah. He tells them: I am Hebrew, I fear the God who made the sea and the land — and I am fleeing from him.

Throw me into the sea, he says. The storm will stop. The sailors try to row to shore anyway. They cannot. Finally, apologizing to God as they do it, they throw Jonah overboard. The sea stops its raging. The sailors make vows to the Lord.

A great fish swallows Jonah. He is in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights. From inside, he prays — a psalm of thanksgiving, oddly, as if the fish is already salvation compared to drowning — and God speaks to the fish, which vomits Jonah onto dry land.

The word of the Lord comes again: go to Nineveh. This time Jonah goes. He walks into the city one day's journey and announces: Forty days more and Nineveh will be overthrown. That is his entire sermon. But the king of Nineveh believes. He rises from his throne, takes off his robe, covers himself in sackcloth, sits in ashes, and issues a royal decree: humans and animals alike must fast and cry to God. Who knows whether God will turn and relent?

God sees their turning and relents. And Jonah is furious — the most darkly comic ending in all the prophets. He knew God would do this. This is why he fled. He did not want to save Nineveh. He wanted to watch it burn.