Jonah Sent to Nineveh
about 760 BC, traditional dateTraditional date
The book of Jonah tells of a prophet of Israel who is sent to preach against Nineveh, flees by sea, is swallowed by a great fish and then sees the Assyrian city repent and be spared. Jesus later speaks of “the sign of Jonah”.
Kings names a prophet Jonah son of Amittai, from Gath-hepher, a town in the territory of Zebulun in the north, who foretold that Jeroboam II would restore Israel’s borders (2 Kings 14:25) (Joshua 19:10–13). The book that bears his name tells a single story about him.
The word of the Lord, it says, sent Jonah to Nineveh, the great city of Assyria, to preach against its wickedness. He went the other way, down to the port of Joppa, and boarded a ship for Tarshish (Jonah 1:1–3). A storm came up. The sailors cast lots to find who was to blame, the lot fell on Jonah, and at his own word they threw him into the sea, which grew calm (Jonah 1:4–16). A great fish swallowed him, and he was inside it three days and three nights. He prayed from its belly, and it vomited him out on dry land (Jonah 1:17–2:10).
Sent a second time, Jonah went to Nineveh and cried out that in forty days the city would be overthrown. The people believed God. The king left his throne, sat in ashes and ordered a fast in sackcloth for people and animals alike. God saw, the book says, that they turned from their evil way, and did not bring the disaster (Jonah 3).
Jonah was angry. He had fled, he says, because he knew God to be “a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger” (Jonah 4:1–2). He sat down east of the city under a plant that God made grow in a night and wither the next morning. The book ends with God asking Jonah whether he should not care about Nineveh, a city of more than 120,000 people and many animals (Jonah 4:5–11).
The book shows Israel’s God sending a prophet to a foreign city and sparing it when it repents. In the Gospels Jesus refuses his generation any sign but “the sign of Jonah”. Matthew explains the sign by Jonah’s three days and nights in the fish, set beside the Son of Man’s three days in the earth, and both Matthew and Luke add that the people of Nineveh, who repented at Jonah’s preaching, will condemn a generation that did not (Matthew 12:39–41) (Luke 11:29–32).
How this is dated
Traditional date. From later tradition or from internal biblical chronology, with no outside anchor.
The book of Jonah carries no date. The only anchor is the notice in Kings that Jonah son of Amittai prophesied about Jeroboam II, who reigned forty-one years over Israel in the first half of the eighth century BC (2 Kings 14:23–25). Edwin R. Thiele, The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings (3rd ed., 1983), puts that reign at 793–753 BC, and the timeline places the story about 760 BC on that basis.
When the book was written, and what kind of book it is, are debated. It speaks of Nineveh’s greatness in the past tense (Jonah 3:3) and does not name the Assyrian king. Jack M. Sasson, Jonah (Anchor Bible, 1990), places its final form after the exile, and Hans Walter Wolff, Obadiah and Jonah (English translation 1986), reads it as a didactic story. Others argue that it presents itself as an account of real events: T. Desmond Alexander, “Jonah and Genre”, Tyndale Bulletin 36 (1985), pp. 35–59, and Douglas Stuart, Hosea–Jonah (Word Biblical Commentary, 1987). The narrative below follows the book as it stands.