God's Irritating Love, An Introduction to Jonah

The short book of Jonah is often the subject of a children's summer program (or Veggie Tales?) -- a guy runs from God and gets swallowed by a whale -- but the real story is much deeper, much messier (and the "whale" identification is very modern, not Jewish.)

The Setting

Without preamble, we see a prophet told to carry God's message to the enemy nation of Assyria, to the city of Nineveh. The background implies a time in the eighth century BC, after 800 BC but definitely before 745 BC, before Assyria has attacked Israel. Jonah is mentioned briefly in 2 Kings 14:25, during the reign of Jeroboam II.

Nineveh, an important city throughout the times of the Assyrian Empire will eventually be the capital city of Assyria in the reign of Sennacherib, about 700 BC, before falling to an army of Babylonians and Medians under the control Nabopolassar in 612. 

Outline

Like the book of Ruth, this story falls naturally into four pieces:

1. Jonah's flight westward, away from Nineveh,
2. Jonah's salvation in the belly of the fish,
3. Jonah's visit to Niniveh,
4. Jonah's anger at God's work.

The book is unusual; our main character, a Jewish prophet, is not much of a hero. God works through Jonah, despite Jonah's stubbornness. The book portrays a "good" legalistic Jew in poor light, who runs from God's compassionate plans and reacts in anger to God's love. The LORD God, YHWH Elohim, does indeed care for those nasty pagan Gentiles!

Resources and References

My practice is to read through the text from the New International Version (NIV), copied into the blog and italicized in blue.  At the head of each blue paragraph of text I place a short title; after the text I place my thoughts or comments in black.  I begin this process with my own reactions and thoughts and then supplement these comments with gleanings from a commentary or two.

The real goal of this blog is to force me to read every verse thoughtfully. I hope that you, too, read the passages thoughtfully! (As I read, I discover various rabbit trails and provide  hyperlinks in pink, created so that one can click on a link and and follow the rabbit trail if they desire.)

For the book of Jonah, I have relied mainly on a commentary by H. L. Ellison in The Expositors Bible Commentary series, edited by Frank E. Gaebelein, volume 7.

There are other resources online.

• Amongst the online commentaries provided by EasyEnglishBible, is an online commentary on Jonah. (The Easy English Bible commentaries are easy to read, with deliberately simple language intended for those for whom English is a second language. The Old Testament text is included in the commentary.) 
• The Gospel Coalition now has a set of online commentaries. Here is their commentary on Jonah.
• I highly recommend the Bible Project video on Jonah. It does an excellent job of quickly covering this short book and does not hesitate to point our Jonah's role as an anti-hero. An older and longer video gives a sermon by Tim Mackie on this book. As Tim Mackie points out, we need a deeper look of this book than that provided by Veggie Tales! 😁 Mackie continues with four more sermons on Jonah here, here, here and here.

A Biblical Archaeological Society article on the use of Jonah during Yom Kippur is here.