The account of a prophet sent to preach against a great foreign city who takes ship in the opposite direction, is thrown overboard in a storm at his own suggestion, is swallowed by a great fish appointed for the purpose, prays from inside it for three days and three nights, and is vomited onto dry land. Sent a second time, he preaches, the city repents from the king down to the animals, the threatened destruction is called off, and the prophet is furious that it was. The book closes not with the prophet but with a question put to him about a plant, a worm, and whether God may pity a city of a hundred and twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left. The Qur'an refers to Yunus in several places, including the prayer from the darkness that Islamic devotion has kept in constant use.
Facts
Meaning
Central MotifA prophet who flees his commission, is swallowed, and resents the mercy he is sent to announce 1 History
Historical NoteThe book gives no indication that Jonah's prayer inside the fish is a plea for rescue; instead it reads as a psalm of thanksgiving composed largely of quotations and echoes from the Psalms, spoken as though deliverance were already accomplished rather than still being sought. 1 Historical NoteThe book names its prophet after a minor figure mentioned briefly in Second Kings as active under King Jeroboam the Second in the eighth century BCE, though most scholars date the book itself centuries later, treating it as a didactic tale rather than a contemporary historical record. 1 Text
Source TextQur'an 21:87 to 21:88, 37:139 to 37:148 and 68:48 to 68:50 2 Source TextThe Book of Jonah, four chapters 1 Scholarship and Forensics
Scholarly NoteClassical rabbinic commentary reads Jonah's flight not as ordinary cowardice but as a prophet who understood that a foreign city's repentance would make Israel's own resistance to correction look worse by comparison, a reading recorded already in the tradition surrounding the book's liturgical use. 3 Scholarly NoteThe book is read in full on the afternoon of the Day of Atonement in Jewish practice 3 Controversy
Point in DisputeThe Qur'anic references to Yunus are scattered across three surahs and give no continuous narrative on their own, unlike the Bible's four connected chapters, so the fuller Islamic storyline about him draws substantially on hadith and tafsir rather than the Qur'anic text alone. 2 Sources
Primary SourceThe Book of Jonah differs in form from the other Hebrew prophetic books: rather than a collection of oracles, it is a short third-person narrative about a prophet, part of why critical scholars read it as a later didactic composition rather than a direct prophetic record. 1 Learn More
The Ship, the Fish, and the City
The book opens without preliminaries: the word comes to Jonah to go to Nineveh and cry out against it, and he gets up to flee to Tarshish, which is in the opposite direction and is as far west as the writer's geography reaches. A storm comes up. The sailors, each praying to his own god, throw the cargo overboard and find the prophet asleep below; the lot falls on him, and he tells them to throw him into the sea, which they try hard to avoid doing before they finally do. The sea goes calm at once, and the sailors, who are the only characters in the book who behave well without prompting, offer sacrifices and vows. A great fish appointed for the purpose swallows him, and from inside it he prays a psalm of thanksgiving in the past tense, as if the rescue has already happened, before being vomited onto dry land.
Sent a second time with the same instruction, he walks into the city and delivers a single line: forty days more, and Nineveh is overthrown. The response is immediate and total, from the people to the king, who comes down from his throne, sits in ashes, and decrees a fast that includes the animals. God relents. The prophet is not relieved but angry, and says that this is exactly why he ran in the first place, because he knew God to be gracious and merciful and ready to relent from punishment, and asks to die.
The Plant, the Worm, and the Question
The last chapter is the one the book was built for. Jonah goes east of the city, makes a shelter, and sits down to see what will happen to it. God appoints a plant to grow over him and give shade, and he is very glad of it; then God appoints a worm, which attacks the plant so that it withers, and a scorching east wind, and he asks again to die. God asks whether he does well to be angry about a plant, and Jonah says he does, angry enough to die. The book ends on the reply, which is a question and not a statement: you cared about a plant you did not grow and that came up overnight, and should I not care about a great city with a hundred and twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals. There is no answer recorded, and the prophet is left sitting there.
Jewish practice reads the whole book aloud in the afternoon of the Day of Atonement, which places its argument about repentance and divine relenting at the point of maximum weight in the year. Christian reading has focused instead on the three days and three nights in the fish, which a gospel saying takes as the only sign that will be given, and early Christian funerary art used the sequence of Jonah being swallowed, cast up and resting under the plant as one of its most common images. The Qur'an refers to Yunus, also called the companion of the fish and the one of the whale, at several points, and preserves his cry from within the darkness, that there is no god but God and that he was among the wrongdoers, which remains one of the most widely recited supplications in Islamic devotion.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
The book of Jonah sends its prophet to preach at Nineveh.
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Originated In
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