Summary/Intro
The book of Jonah is far more than an unusual sea-story. It’s a story about a God who hurls a wind down to the earth in such a way as to stir up a previously undisturbed sea, so as to lead its sailors to hurl/cast lots and subsequently hurl Jonah overboard just in time to be swallowed by a fish and spewed out on the dry land three days later, all of which has been convened in order to foreshadow Israel’s long history, ultimately to be lived out by God’s own Son in his (Jonah-like) death, resurrection, and acceptance among the Gentiles.
The Scene is Set
The life of a prophet frequently pictures his message. Hosea marries a prostitute (and remains married to her) in order to picture his people’s relationship to their God. Ezekiel packs his bags and leaves Jerusalem in anticipation of the exile. Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey as a picture (and fulfilment) of the arrival of God’s king. And the life of Jonah, I suggest, pictures his message in a similar way.
But what is Jonah’s message?
Well, the main distinctive of the book of Jonah is its focus on the Gentile nations. It therefore seems significant that, unlike Israel’s other prophets, Jonah spends a lot of his time at sea because the sea regularly depicts “the nations” in prophetic texts (see, e.g., Is 11:9, 23:11, 43:16; Dan 7:2; Joel 2:20; Hab 1:14–17; 2:14; 3:8).
We can plausibly, therefore, take Jonah’s life to be a picture of Israel’s existence in the midst of the Gentile world.
With that piece of the puzzle on the table, other aspects of Jonah’s story slot into place.
Jonah is marked out by his disobedience. As a result, the first (documented) part of his life as a prophet makes an apt picture of Judah’s descent into exile. Jonah rejects God’s call, hands over his “wages/riches” to foreigners (cf. Ezek 16:14, 31, 34),[1] and sets out on a downwards trajectory (Jonah 1:3–5, where the verb “to descend” occurs three times in quick succession). Before too long he’s overcome by a deep sleep, his eyes firmly shut, just like those of Yahweh’s prophets (Is 29:10). And as time goes on, things only get worse. The waves become more and more tumultuous, as the nations do when God stirs them up against his people (Is 5:30; 10:26; 17:12–13; 51:14–15; Jer 6:23; Ezek 26:3; Dan 7:3). In the end, the only option is exile (2 Chr 36:16).[2] Jonah-Judah is thus picked up and tossed into the Gentile sea, at which point the previously tumultuous world goes quiet (Jonah 1:11–12). The sound of millstones is no longer heard within Judah (Jer 7:34; 16:9; 25:10; see also 5:25–26); her land lies desolate, enjoying its Sabbath rest (Lev 26:34–35; 2 Chr 36:20); and the nations grow still and silent (Zech 1:15).
Lexical Connections: Jonah & Jeremiah
Jonah’s life is thus a poignant picture of Judah’s descent into exile, which is underscored by the connection between its vocabulary and that of Jeremiah.
- Just as Jonah is beset by a “storm” (se‘ar), so Jeremiah thrice likens the arrival of the Babylonians to the onset of a “storm” (se‘ar) (Jer 23:19; 25:32; 30:23).
- Just as Jonah’s sailors say they’ll “hurl” (t-w-l) him into the sea, so Jeremiah thrice says Yahweh will “hurl” (t-w-l) Israel into exile (Jer 16:13; 22:26, 28).
- And, just as the sailors do ultimately “cast” (sh-l-k) Jonah into the sea, despite their best attempts to save him, so Yahweh “casts” (sh-l-k) Israel into exile (Jer 7:15; 22:28; 52:3).
Other choices of vocabulary then associate Jonah’s stay in the belly of the fish with Judah’s stay in Babylon.
- Just as Babylon is granted (m-n-h) a time to govern Judah (per the first mene of Daniel 5:25’s Mene, Mene … ), so the fish is granted leave (m-n-h) to swallow Jonah.[3]
- Just as Jeremiah thrice describes how the Judeans grow “faint” (‘-t-p) in the aftermath of 587 BC (Lam 2:11, 12, 19), so Jonah is said to grow “faint” (‘-t-p) in the “heart” (levav) of the sea. Levav is “Babylon” spelt backwards.
- And, after he’s been swallowed up by the fish, Jonah explicitly describes himself as “expelled/exiled” (g-r-sh) from God’s presence. Like Daniel, he turns towards the Temple and prays. And, happily, God hears and answers Jonah-Judah’s prayer. What seems like an out of place reference to Jonah facing the Temple in Jonah 2:5 therefore makes perfect sense.
All this is underlined in Jeremiah 51’s prophecy of Jerusalem’s fall where Nebuchadnezzar is portrayed as a “sea creature” (tannin) who “swallows” the people of Israel, strips them of their “luxuries,” and then holds them captive until her “bars” (brikheha) are broken in pieces—as are the “bars of the earth” in Jonah 2:6.
Judah is even said to be led forth from the king of Babylon’s mouth (Jonah 2:6; cf. Jer 51:30, 34, 44; Lam 4:5).[4]
We therefore have multiple reasons to see Jonah as a picture of Israel, to which we can add the correlation between Jonah’s gradual descent into the sea and Judah’s gradual descent into exile as it’s set out in Leviticus 26.
Jonah Part Two
We thus come to the second panel of the book of Jonah (chs. 3–4), where God gives Jonah a second chance.
As before, God commissions Jonah to take his word to the Ninevites. This time, Jonah obeys. He arises, goes to Nineveh, and proclaims the word of God to the Ninevites, who respond in faith and repentance (3:5–10).
What are we to make of Jonah’s second journey as far as its symbolism is concerned? Or, to put the question another way, if the book of Jonah’s first panel (chs. 1–2) depicts Israel’s exile to and return from Babylon, then what does its second panel depict?
The answer is fairly straightforward: it depicts Judah’s second exile from Jerusalem—or, more precisely, it depicts the time when the early Church is scattered abroad and Peter (bar Jonah!) proclaims God’s word to a Gentile audience in Caesarea (Acts 8–10).
In light of these considerations, we can view the two panels of the book of Jonah against the backdrop of Scripture’s other sea-story, namely the flood story.
We can spell out some of these parallels more fully as follows. Noah sends out a dove (a yonah). The first time it’s sent out, the dove encounters a world engulfed in water (the world of Daniel’s colossus). Just as the dove finds no place of rest for her foot (Gen 8:9), so Israel finds no place of rest among the nations (Deut 28:65) (note the similarity between לא מצאה היונה מנוח לכף רגלה (lo-mots’ah hayyonah manoah lekhaf-regelah, Gen 8:9) and לא יהיה מנוח לכף רגל (lo-yihyeh manoah lekhaf-regel, Deut 28:65), and so the dove (Jonah-Judah) returns to square one. Seven days later, however, the dove is sent out for a second time. The dove’s seven days correspond to Jonah’s references to a three day stay in the belly of the fish, three-day journey to get to Nineveh (or to walk around it), and one-day journey into Nineveh (Jonah 1:17; 3:4). And, happily, the second time the dove-Jonah is sent out, it’s not simply confronted by a world under judgment; it returns with signs of new life in its mouth, just as Jonah-Peter returns with a story about new life in his mouth (which he reports to the Jerusalem council).
All well and good, one might say. But do we have any reason to think that Luke wants us to see Peter’s journey to Caesarea as an event that “fills up” the story of Jonah?
We do. For one thing, Peter and Jonah’s stories are set against similar backdrops. In Acts 9:30, Paul is forced to flee to Tarsus (Tarshish!). Afterwards, we find Peter in Joppa, where he’s said to be “by the sea.” And, just as Jonah’s story involves three occurrences of the verb “descend,” so too does Peter’s (cp. the use of katabaino in Acts 10:11, 20, 21).
Peter and Jonah’s stories are also, however, connected in more specific and instructive ways. The text of Acts 8–10 portrays Peter’s mission to the Gentiles as a redemptive echo of Judah-Jonah’s past failures.
Hence, just as Jonah became a light to Assyria only on the far side of his death and resurrection, so Judah becomes a light to the Gentiles only on the far side of Jesus’ death and resurrection, which brings new life to the world at large (Is 53–56; Ezek 37).
The Parable of the Plant
Finally, we come to Jonah 4, which draws an unusual book to an unusual conclusion. The sequence of events is roughly as follows. In 4:5, Jonah builds himself a shelter from the sun and sits down beneath it. In 4:6, God then causes a plant to spring up and overshadow Jonah. Jonah rejoices in the shade that the plant affords him, although whether he attributes it to the plant or his shelter isn’t entirely clear. Either way, the next day God sends a worm to gnaw through the plant’s root (4:7), which causes it to wither. Jonah thus finds himself exposed to the east wind that subsequently arises, at which point he realises how little shelter he has in the plant’s absence (4:8–9).[5]
How do these events fit into Jonah’s story? Is the point of chapter 4 simply that Jonah is small-minded while God is merciful? Or is the parable of the plant meant to teach us a more nuanced lesson than that?
The answer, I suspect, is the latter. Jonah isn’t simply an example of small-mindedness; his attitude towards the plant is meant to teach us something about God’s attitude towards Nineveh (4:10–11). Let’s see if we can identify what that is.
The first thing we should note is that the events in Jonah 4:5–8 are described in highly exaggerated terms: the shade that the plant affords Jonah is said to “deliver him from evil,” the plant is said to be “smitten/slain” by a worm, and, as a result of his exposure to the east wind, Jonah says he wants to end his life. Like Jonah himself, the plant, worm, and wind seem to be symbols of deeper realities.[6] But what?
We’re given a clue by the fact that all three things (the plant, worm, and wind) are said to arise by divine “appointment” (m-n-h), which brings to mind the fish (Babylon) that God “appointed” earlier in the book.
Let’s therefore see if we can establish some helpful connections between the two panels of the book of Jonah. Suppose we take the last appointed entity in Jonah’s second panel (the wind) to depict the last appointed entity in the first panel (Babylon). Does that help us to understand any other aspects of the parable?
It does. It associates Jonah’s imagery with that of Ezekiel since Ezekiel depicts Babylon as an “east wind” (Ezek 17). And, by extension, it allows us to identify what the plant is likely to depict. If the wind is Babylon, then we can reasonably take what previously shielded Jonah from the wind (i.e., the plant) to be Assyria, which constitutes a further point of resonance with Ezekiel since Ezekiel depicts Assyria as a tree in whose “shade” Israel has enjoyed protection (ch. 31). Identifying the plant with Assyria also seems plausible for other reasons. First, in Isaiah 14, the king of Assyria is referred to as a “son of the dawn” (ben shakhar), which is curiously reminiscent of Jonah’s description of the plant in chapter 4 as “a son of the night” (bin laylah), especially given that both the king and the plant are consumed by worms.[7] Second, God expects Jonah to re-assess his view of Assyria in light of the plant’s demise (4:10–11), which makes most sense if the plant depicts Assyria in some way.
Granted these observations, we can start to see the analogy between Jonah’s attitude towards the plant and God’s attitude towards Nineveh. Jonah was grateful for the plant’s existence. As soon as it died, Jonah wished it had been “spared/pitied” (kh-w-s). And the same could have been said about Assyria. True, Assyria was a hostile empire. But its existence had sheltered Judah-Jonah from other hostile forces. Indeed, as soon as Assyria disappeared (like the plant), Babylon came (like the east wind). Many of the Judeans who endured the Babylonian invasion in 587 BC might, therefore, have wished that God had spared Assyria in order to shelter them from Babylon.
That being so, the events of Jonah 4 are highly instructive. God’s world is an unfathomably vast, beautiful, and interconnected place (Job 38–41). You can’t pull up the tares in it without also pulling up a lot of wheat (cf. Matt 13:30). While Jonah was angry with God because of his failure to judge Assyria, he had no right to be, if for no other reason than the fact that he couldn’t comprehend what a world without Assyria might look like.
Assyria provided valuable shelter to 120,000 children together with huge numbers of animals, not to mention Judah—the nation from which God’s Messiah would arise. God alone knew what the destruction of Assyria in Jonah’s day might have meant for the wider world, and so God alone could determine whether Assyria should have been smitten or spared.
That doesn’t mean that nations should never go to war against one another; all of our actions are based on an imperfect knowledge of the relevant counterfactuals. But it does mean that we can’t justifiably be angry with God for choosing to spare a given nation. All of this brings us back to the grand narrative of the book of Jonah where God hurls a wind down to the earth in such a way as to stir up a previously undisturbed sea, so as to lead its sailors to hurl/cast lots and subsequently hurl Jonah overboard, just in time to be swallowed by a fish and spewed out on the dry land three days later, all of which happens in such a way as to foreshadow Israel’s long history, which is ultimately to be lived out by God’s own Son in his (Jonah-like) death, resurrection, and acceptance among the Gentiles. How can you second-guess the actions of a God like that?[8]
James attends a church in Romford, London, where he lives. His particular interests include figural interpretations of the Gospels, Biblical chronology, and the study of names. He regularly participates in the Theopolis podcasts, and posts on Thoughts on Scripture | James Bejon | Substack.
NOTES
[1] “You took … my gold and silver, which I had given you, and … with them you played the whore. … Men give gifts to prostitutes, but you gave your gifts to your lovers. … No one solicited you to play the whore, and yet you gave payment!”
[2] “But they kept mocking the messengers of God, despising his words and scoffing at his prophets, until the wrath of Yahweh arose against his people and there was no remedy.”
[3] For the use of M-N-H in Daniel’s riddle, see https://jamesbejon.substack.com/p/belshazzars-riddle-part-i.
[4] “Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon has devoured me; he has swallowed me like a sea-monster; he has filled his stomach with my delicacies. [Yet Yahweh] will punish Bel in Babylon, and take out of his mouth what he has swallowed” (Jer 51:34, 44). This reading of Jonah 1–2 explains an otherwise odd feature of Jonah 1:17–2:1. Jonah is said to be swallowed by a dag (a masculine noun) (1:17) but to pray from the belly of the dagah (a feminine/collective noun) (2:1). Why use a different word? Initially, the fish depicts the king of Babylon (masculine), who comes to Jerusalem and swallows up its people, but it later depicts the location from which Israel calls out to God, which is Babylon (feminine).
[5] The shelter that Jonah makes is said to provide him with a certain amount of shade, but it clearly doesn’t do much since, in its absence, the sun beats down on Jonah’s head (4:8)—an issue I hope to explore in a later post.
[6] The use of the verb “smite” isn’t unusual in the sun’s case; e.g., Is 49:10; Ps 121:6.
[7] That Isaiah 14 refers to the king of Assyria is a controversial claim that we don’t have time to go into here. Suffice it to say, the title “king of Babylon” isn’t an ethnic designator; it simply denotes the person in charge of Babylon at a given point in time. It could, therefore, be claimed not only by Nebuchadnezzar, but by Sargon the Assyrian, who conquered the city of Babylon in 710 BC, and by Cyrus the Persian, who conquered it in 539 BC. Indeed, the text of Isaiah 14:24–27 seems to identify the king of Babylon as an Assyrian (unless it has suddenly changed subject), and the interconnections between Isaiah 14’s “king of Babylon” and Isaiah 10’s “king of Assyria” provide further reasons to identify Isaiah 14’s king as an Assyrian: for instance, both are “smiters” of nations and wielders of “staffs” (Is 10:5, 15, 20, 24–27; 14:5–6), both exalt themselves with similar delusions of grandeur, and are brought low in similar ways (10:5–15; 14:9–17), and both of their falls cause the cedars of Lebanon to rejoice (10:5, 15, 33–34; 14:7–8).
[8] I’m thankful to Peter Williams for bringing many of these things to my attention.