Jonah 1

The Book of Jonah opens not with an oracle but with a flight. The prophet Jonah son of Amittai — mentioned once in 2 Kings 14:25 as a northern prophet active under Jeroboam II — receives a direct commission: Arise, 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 would destroy the northern kingdom in 722 and that stands, in the theological imagination of the Hebrew Bible, as the great enemy of Israel. Jonah's response is to go to Joppa and book passage to Tarshish — most likely Tartessos in southern Spain, the far end of the Phoenician trade routes and the western edge of the known world. The narrator records the geography with deadpan precision. He is told to go east; he goes as far west as the ancient world allows.

The storm that overtakes the ship is a standard instrument of divine attention in ancient Near Eastern narrative, but the book deploys it with careful irony. The pagan sailors — Phoenician merchants of mixed religious background — respond to the crisis with exactly the piety one expects of the godly: each man prays to his god, cargo is jettisoned to lighten the ship, lots are cast to identify the guilty party. Jonah, the professional prophet, the man sent by the LORD, is asleep in the hold. The captain has to wake him and ask him to pray. When the lot falls on Jonah he tells the sailors he is fleeing from the LORD who made the sea and the very storm they are in; they are stunned. They try everything they can before they will throw him over. They ask the LORD's forgiveness beforehand. When the sea calms they fear the LORD greatly, sacrifice, and make vows. Chapter 1 ends with the sailors worshipping the God of Israel and the prophet of Israel inside a fish. The inversion is the first of the book's sustained ironies.