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Jonah

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This article is about Jonah, the Biblical prophet. For other uses, see Jonah (disambiguation).
Yunus redirects here. For the Bangladeshi economist and Nobel Peace Prize winner, see Muhammad Yunus
The Prophet Jonah, as depicted by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel

Jonah (יוֹנָה "Dove", Standard Hebrew Yona, Latin Ionas, Tiberian Hebrew, and Arabic يونس Yunus or Yunis in Islamic Qura'anic terms) was a person in the Biblical Old Testament and Jewish Tanakh, the son of Amittai ("True"), from the Galilean village of Gath-hepher, near Nazareth.

Summary of the Book of Jonah

God ordered Jonah to preach at the city of Nineveh. Jonah did not want to, and tried to avoid God's command by sailing to Tarshish. A huge storm arises. The sailors, realizing this is no ordinary storm, cast lots, and learn that Jonah is to blame. Jonah admits this, and states that if he is thrown overboard, the storm will cease. The sailors throw him overboard, and the seas calm. Jonah is miraculously saved by being swallowed by a large fish. In chapter two, while in the great fish, Jonah prayed to God and asked forgiveness and thanked God for being so faithful, and the result was, God commanded the fish to vomit Jonah out.

God again orders Jonah to visit Nineveh and preach to its inhabitants. He therefore went there and walked through it, crying "In forty days Nineveh shall be destroyed." The Ninevites believed his word, and appointed a public fast, from the meanest of the people to the greatest; the king himself putting on sackcloth and sitting in ashes. God had compassion and did not bring His wrath against the city at that time.

Jonah is embittered by this. He questions the need for his journey, stating that since God is merciful, it was inevitable that God would yield to the Ninevites' entreaties--what need, then, for Jonah's journey? After this he retired out of the city and made a shelter for himself, waiting to see if the city would be destroyed or not.

The Lord caused a plant (in Hebrew a kikayon) to grow over his shelter, giving Jonah some shade from the sun. Later, a worm bit the plant's root and it withered. Jonah, being now exposed to the burning heat of the sun, became faint and desired that God would take him out of the world.

The Lord said unto him, "Do you have reason to be concerned at the death of a plant, which cost you nothing, which rises one night and dies the next; yet would you not have me pardon such a city as Nineveh, in which are 120,000 persons not able to distinguish their right hand from their left, and many beasts besides?"

The city of Mosul is a historic center for the Nestorian Christianity of the Assyrians, containing the tombs of several Old Testament prophets such as Jonah, who is commemorated in a rare joint Muslim/Christian shrine (originally a Nestorian church, now a mosque), and the somewhat more obscure Nahum. Nineveh is to the east of Mosul on the eastern valley ridge above it.

Dating of Jonah

He was a prophet of the ten–tribe kingdom of Israel, and predicted the restoration of the ancient boundaries (II Kings 14:25-27) of the kingdom. This prophecy was already fulfilled during the reign of Jeroboam II, under whom Jonah exercised his ministry. Historically, this may mean he was contemporary with the prophets Hosea and Amos; or possibly he preceded them. If so, and if the Book of Jonah was, in fact, written by the prophet himself, Jonah is the very oldest of all the prophets whose writings we possess. He is often placed in the 8th century BC.

However, the city of Nineveh is described as "great" and serves as a metaphorical stronghold of sin, a role it could only play when it was Assyria's capital in the 7th century BCE. For this reason (and the story's usage of loan words from languages which would not have been common in Jeroboam's time, and its elements of fantasy), many, both scholars and skeptics, regard this tale as fictional.

The person of Jonah

His personal history is mainly to be gathered from the Book of Jonah, traditionally ascribed to the prophet himself, although this is not stated in Scripture. In the book, Jonah is a reluctant and uncompassionate prophet. This story contains a two-fold characterization of Jonah: (1) a reluctant prophet of doom to heathen Nineveh, and (2) a "Son of man" type. The character of Jonah, who wants Nineveh destroyed, is contrasted with that of God, who is compassionate toward Jew and Gentile, human and animal.

The fish

Though often called a whale today, the Hebrew, as throughout scripture, refers to no species in particular, simply sufficing with "great fish" or "big fish". According to some Bible scholars, the size and habits of the white shark correspond entirely to the representations given of Jonah's being swallowed.[1] In Jonah 2:1 (1:17 in English translation), the original Hebrew text reads 'dag gadol' (דג גדול), which literally means "great fish."

The LXX translates this phrase into Greek as ketos megas (κητος μεγας). The term ketos alone means "huge fish," and in Greek mythology the term was closely associated with sea monsters. (See http://www.theoi.com/Ther/Ketea.html for more information regarding Greek mythology and the Ketos.) Jerome later translated this phrase as piscis granda in his Latin Vulgate. However, he translated ketos as cetus in Matthew 12:40.

At some point, cetus became synonymous with whale (e.g. cetyl alcohol, which is alcohol derived from whales). In his 1534 translation, William Tyndale translated the phrase in Jonah 2:1 as "greate fyshe," and he translated the word ketos (Greek) or cetus (Latin) in Matthew 12:40 as "whale." Tyndale's translation was, of course, later incorporated into the Authorized Version of 1611. Since, the "great fish" in Jonah 2 has been most often interpreted as a whale.

The throats of many large whales (as well as that of a large whale shark specimen, which could be found in the Mediterranean) can accommodate passage of an adult human. There are some 19th century accounts of whalers being swallowed by sperm whales and living to tell about it, but these stories remain unverified.

Jonah in Islam

Like many important biblical people, Jonah is also important in Islam as a prophet who is faithful to God (Allah) and delivers his messages. He is known to Muslims by his Arabic name, Yunus. Sura 10 of the Quran, the Islamic holy book, is named "Sura Yunus" after him, though there is only one reference to him in that sura, in verse 98.

Jonah and Jason

In 1995 the classicist Gildas Hamel revived a long-forgotten theory connecting the story of Jonah with that of the Greek hero Jason ("Taking the Argo to Nineveh: Jonah and Jason in a Mediterranean context," Judaism Summer, 1995; online). Drawing on the Book of Jonah and Greco-Roman sources—including Greek vases and the accounts of Apollonius of Rhodes, Valerius Flaccus and Orphic Argonautica—Hamel identifies a number of shared motifs, including the names of the heroes, the presence of a dove, the idea of "fleeing" like the wind and causing a storm, the attitude of the sailors, the presence of a sea-monster or dragon threatening the hero or swallowing him, and the form and the word used for the "gourd" (kikayon, a hapax legomenon within the Hebrew Bible). Hamel argues the Hebrew author was reacting to and adapting this mythological material to communicate his own, quite different message.

References to Jonah (Arabic: Yunus) in the Qur'an


Public Domain This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Easton, Matthew George (1897). Easton's Bible Dictionary (New and revised ed.). T. Nelson and Sons. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)

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