Jonah 1 Study Notes

1:1 Jonah in Hebrew means “dove.” His father’s name Amittai means “faithful [is Yahweh].”

1:2 Nineveh on the east bank of the Tigris River became the Assyrian capital after 705 BC, well after Jonah’s day. Its ruins are found in the northern part of modern Iraq, opposite the city of Mosul 220 miles northwest of Baghdad. For Jonah, Nineveh was an arduous journey of more than 500 miles to the northeast of Samaria. His probable route—first traveling north and then east—would have made the trip closer to 600 miles. God’s holiness is offended by sin. He showed himself judge of the world by holding these distant pagans accountable for their evil, though he also showed his mercy by commanding his prophet to warn them.

1:3 To flee . . . from before the Lord’s presence is to attempt the impossible since God is everywhere, though people still try. (See 4:2 for why he fled.) Joppa on the Mediterranean coast just south of modern Tel Aviv was one of Israel’s few natural seaports. The location of Tarshish is uncertain. Its association with ships (1Kg 10:22) suggests it was near the sea. The “ships of Tarshish” used by King Jehoshaphat on the Red Sea were probably merchant ships of design similar to those used by sailors from Tarshish on the Mediterranean Sea. Tarshish has sometimes been identified with Paul’s home of Tarsus in Cilicia or the city of Tharros on the island of Sardinia west of Italy. But the most probable identification of Tarshish is the Phoenician colony of Tartessus, located on the Guadalquivir River on the southwestern coast of Spain about 2,000 miles west of Palestine. This is about as far in the opposite direction from Nineveh as Jonah could have gone.

1:4 The verb translated threatened means literally “was thinking about.”

1:5-6 Jonah’s spiritual decline is depicted in parallel with the descriptions of his response to God’s call. He was told to “get up” (v. 2) to go to Nineveh, but instead he “went down to Joppa” (v. 3), “went down” to the ship (v. 3) and finally went down to the lowest part of the vessel. Eventually he will be swallowed by a fish and sink down “to the foundations of the mountains” at the bottom of the sea (2:6). Only then did he hit bottom and begin to go back up. His deep sleep in the midst of a storm also symbolizes his spiritual condition. It may have been a symptom of depression stemming from his willful disobedience.

1:7-8 The sailors’ pagan worldview held that misfortune was the fault of an angry god. They asked Jonah questions seeking to know what could be done to pacify his angry god.

1:9 Worship is literally “fear.” Fear of God in the OT is the respect that a person has for God, causing him to turn from evil and obey God’s commandments (Gn 22:12; Jb 1:8; 28:28; Pr 8:13). Ironically, God’s prophet Jonah showed no such fear by his disobedience. It is also ironic that Jonah fled to avoid preaching to Gentiles in Nineveh, but now found himself preaching to Gentiles in the ship. The title the Lord stands in place of “Yahweh,” which means “He is [present]” and is God’s personal name in the OT, ordinarily rendered in translation as “Lord” in small caps (as in vv. 1,3,4,10,16,17). The substitution in translation of the title “Lord” for the personal name Yahweh goes back to postexilic Jewish reluctance to pronounce the divine name.

1:10-11 Perhaps what frightened the sailors was that Jonah’s God had created the sea. They hoped that some kind of sacrifice might calm the sea.

1:12-15 Rather than submitting to God, Jonah asked these men to kill him by throwing him overboard. Yet despite Jonah’s confession of guilt, these pagan Gentiles had moral scruples about sending a man to his death and tried to row ashore instead. Only after they saw no other option and had prayed that the Lord would not hold them accountable for taking a human life did they throw Jonah into the sea. The integrity and spiritual sensitivity of these Gentiles would have shocked Israelite readers of this book, confronting their belief that non-Hebrews were unworthy of God’s mercy. Certainly this is a lesson Jonah himself needed.

1:16 When the sea calmed, these Gentile sailors were seized by a great fear of the Lord. They were so overpowered by the experience that they could do nothing but worship the Lord (see note at 1:9). Jonah, who was fleeing from a mission to preach to Gentiles, had unintentionally converted an entire crew of Gentile sailors.

1:17 The great fish that swallowed Jonah was not necessarily a whale. Yarns of a sailor surviving Jonah-like in a whale have been widely repeated in recent centuries, but no account has ever been authenticated. Three days and three nights parallels Christ’s resurrection on the third day (Mt 12:40).