Jonah is Paul’s typological opposite. Indeed, in the whole Old Testament, it would be difficult to find a more perfect foil to Paul than Jonah. Whereas Paul crosses the sea to enact God’s saving purposes for the Gentiles, Jonah crosses the sea to avoid bringing Gentiles God’s mercy. For that reason, it is easy for us to miss an important similarity between Jonah and Paul: they were both profound theologians of God’s grace to the Gentiles. Jonah—not merely the book of Jonah, but Jonah himself—anticipated by hundreds of years Paul’s crucial insight. Jonah, like Paul, realized that God’s mercy on disobedient but repentant Jews was a sign and guarantee of his mercy on disobedient but repentant Gentiles. 

The argument backing up Jonah’s theology is subtle, implicit in the details of Jonah’s complaint to God at the start of chapter 4. In this essay I examine how Jonah uses Scripture to reach a very Pauline conclusion about grace for Gentiles.

Misapplied Quotations?

Jonah begins his prayer of complaint in Jonah 4:2 by saying that the Lord’s mercy on the repentant city of Nineveh was just what he—Jonah—had said would happen when the Lord first called him in Israel. How did Jonah know what the Lord would do? We might be tempted to answer: because he knew God’s character. This wouldn’t be wrong, but it would be incomplete. Jonah knew what Scripture said about God’s character. We know this because Jonah tells us so:

“For I knew that you were ‘a gracious God and compassionate, slow to anger, and great in steadfast-love’, ‘and relenting from the evil.’”

What Jonah knew about God, he knew from Exodus, the book he cites here. But the first question that should occur to us is, how do words given to Israel at Mount Sinai (the context for the citations) justify Jonah’s expectation that God will be gracious to Ninevites? Every Israelite knew that God was gracious and compassionate with his bride-nation, covenanted to himself at the holy mountain. But how can Jonah apply these words to Nineveh? It’s at this point that the details of the quotations matter.

The Freedom of God’s Steadfast-Love

The first citation is from Exodus 34:6, the words of the Lord when he makes all his glory pass before Moses, not as a procession of glorious images, but a procession of words. “The Lord, the Lord, a compassionate God and gracious, slow to anger, and great in steadfast-love and faithfulness.” Jonah repeats this, but with two slight variations, when he says, “I knew that you were a gracious God and compassionate, slow to anger, and great in steadfast-love.” The first change is the inversion of “gracious” (ḥnnwn) and “compassionate” (rḥwm) two words which are nearly synonyms. Perhaps the inversion is not meaningful; it is the sort of thing you’d expect from someone who’s internalized a text and is reciting it from memory. 

On the other hand, Jonah’s inversion of the two words matches the order found in Exodus 33:19, when God had told Moses what he intended to do—and actually does do in Exodus 34:6-7—namely, make his glory pass before Moses. In God’s preview of the event in chapter 33 he explains its meaning: “I will be gracious with the one I am gracious with (ḥnn), and I will be compassionate with the one I am compassionate with (rḥm).” In other words, the grace and compassion of the Lord are free. Jonah knew about God’s freedom, and he might be tipping us off to this by following the order found in Exodus 33:19.

Whether Jonah’s word-order reversal is meaningful or not, his second variation very likely is. Jonah stops the quotation from Exodus 34 at the word “steadfast-love” (ḥsd), just before the word “faithfulness” (ʾmt). This is an odd omission. The words steadfast-love and faithfulness are commonly paired together (the two Hebrew words appear in the same verse thirty-three times), and they, like gracious and compassionate, have considerable semantic overlap. But they aren’t quite synonymous. Steadfast-love is often associated with covenant loyalty, but it can also describe kind deeds outside a covenant. For example, Abimelech tells Abraham, before they make a covenant, that he has dealt with Abraham in “steadfast-love” (ḥsd). Faithfulness, on the other hand, strongly implies a previous commitment, an obligation to which one is faithful, whether a promise or a covenant.

Jonah knows that the Ninevites have no claim on God’s faithfulness: God has made no commitments, he has cut no covenant with them. But God is free to show steadfast-love to them, drawing them into the circle of his mercy. God’s freedom to show grace and compassion (Exo. 33:19) means that God can bestow his steadfast-love on anyone he chooses, even, Jonah realizes, the enemies of God’s people.

Forgiving Apostasy

The final phrase in Jonah’s list of God’s attributes—“relenting from disaster”—doesn’t come from Exodus 34 but from Exodus 32, not from a description of God’s character, but from a narrative of what God did. In Exodus 32:12, Moses intercedes for idolatrous Israel: “relent from this evil with your people.” The Lord does just as Moses begged: “And the Lord relented from the evil which he said he would do with his people” (32:12).

This is just, of course, what the king of Nineveh hopes will be the result of his decree of national repentance: “Who knows whether God will turn and relent, and turn from his burning anger, and we will not perish?” (Note, in passing, how the king is presented in a way reminiscent of Moses interceding in Exodus 32.) Having seen the repentance of Nineveh, “God relented from the evil which he said he would do with them, and he did not do it.” This wording from Jonah 3:10 is identical to the wording in Exodus 32:14 (in spite of what you might think from reading the ESV or NIV), apart from a change from “the Lord” to “God,” highlighting the shift from an Israelite to Gentile context, and the addition in Jonah of “and he did not do (it).”

Both the narrative of God’s mercy in Jonah 3:10, and Jonah’s complaint in 4:2, intentionally recall God’s mercy on Israel in Exodus 32. A reader might complain, Nineveh isn’t Israel! The connection is theologically untenable. Jonah, of course, knew better than anyone that Nineveh wasn’t Israel. But he also knew from reading the Pentateuch that idolatrous Israel wasn’t true Israel either. And a false Israel was, in fact, worse than a Gentile nation, liable to even greater cursing. So if God would relent of the evil he had spoken against his own apostate, adulterous bride-nation, then he would also relent of the evil he had spoken against a nation of wicked Gentiles—if they repented.

Jonah and Joel

A final Scriptural connection is worth noting. Jonah’s recital of God’s character and deeds from Exodus is practically identical to one found in Joel’s plea with Judah to repent in Joel 2:13. Joel, like Jonah, reverses compassionate and gracious. Joel, too, omits faithfulness. Joel, too, adds on relents from evil. Beyond that, Joel 2:14 begins with the exact wording used by the king of Nineveh in Jonah 3:9: “Who knows whether he will turn and relent?” (my ywdʿ yšwb wnḥm).¹

Perhaps Jonah depends on Joel, in which case the king’s words in Jonah 3:9 have been given a form by the author that intentionally replicates Joel, or draws on a common stock of expressions related to repentance (after all, the king of Nineveh didn’t speak Hebrew). Or, as seems more likely to me, Jonah came first, and Joel’s wording shows his familiarity with that book and its theological center.

Whatever the genealogical relationship between the books, the Scriptural-theological relationship is clear. Joel knew the kind of God it would take to forgive apostate Judah if she would repent; the very God who had mercy on his bride when she committed adultery in her bridal chamber in Exodus 32. And if Joel is alluding to Jonah, then he’s quite purposefully putting Judah into the position of Nineveh, down to his concern for children and nursing infants (2:16; cf. Jon. 4:11) and livestock (bhmh, 1:18, 20; 2:22; cf. Jon. 3:7, 8; 4:11).²

As for Jonah, he knew that the God who forgives apostate Israel would forgive Gentiles, too. If Paul can be accused of misapplying Old Testament texts to Gentiles—as when he applies to Gentiles the prophecy of Hosea about God’s re-acceptance of divorced, dispossessed Israel (Rom. 9:25-26)—it’s an exegetical trick he learned from the Old Testament itself. 

Jonah and Paul Again

The kind of theology that Jonah and Paul engaged in went beyond a knowledge of just the meaning of Scripture, systematized in neat, abstract categories. Jonah and Paul did theology with Scripture itself, Scripture they had internalized, memorized, and meditated on, drawing conclusions about things that the text didn’t say explicitly.

In our own churches, not every Christian can master a system of theology. But every Christian can be mastered by the words of Scripture. And that is the best curriculum of all, a curriculum for theological wisdom, theological faithfulness, and, without contradiction, theological creativity.

But as the contrast between Jonah and Paul makes clear, it is not enough to internalize the words of Scripture, or even to reflect on them and do faithful, creative theology with them. Those words must master our hearts. They must be words inscribed on hearts of flesh, not hearts of stone.

Joshua Jensen is a Bible translator in northeast Cambodia, where he lives with his wife, Amy, and their seven children.

1. Neither the ESV nor the NIV—not even the NASB, for that matter—translates Joel 2:14 and Jonah 3:9 in a way that shows this exact verbal repetition. ↩︎
2. Again, readers of the ESV and NIV can be forgiven for failing to know that the same Hebrew word appears in all these verses. In fairness, the translators can be forgiven, too, given the range of meanings borne by the term bhmh. ↩︎