Chapter One

1–2. The mission of the prophet Jonah to Nineveh, 3. his attempt to avoid this mission, and 4–16. God’s punishment for this.

Jonah 1:1. And the word of the Lord came to Jonah, son of Amittai, “And it came to pass” (vajehij)—thus many books of the Old Testament begin (Josh 1:1; Ruth 1:1; Judg 1:1; 1 Sam 1:1; and others), and on the basis of such a beginning it is incorrectly concluded that the book of the prophet Jonah is not a complete work but a fragment. “The word of the Lord”—the customary designation in Scripture of divine revelation communicated precisely to prophets (Isa 2:1; Jer 1:1; Hos 1:1; Zeph 1:1; Mic 1:1; Hag 1:3; Zech 1:9, and others). As for the form of this revelation, there are no indications of it in this case. By analogy with other places in Scripture where this expression is used, one can understand this word as a simple inner impulse which a person senses not as his own, but as coming to him from outside, from a higher power, namely from God. If, therefore, the revelation that came to the prophet Jonah was not accompanied by any extraordinary signs, but occurred entirely within him, it becomes understandable how the prophet could have resolved to disobey the “word of the Lord.” “To Jonah, son of Amitai” (Church Slavonic: Amaphii). The name of the prophet—“Jonah” (from the verb janah in the passive sense—to be oppressed) according to the explanation of blessed Jerome means an oppressed being, one who groans, and then a moaning dove. He is called the son of Amitai without doubt by patronymic, not in a metaphorical sense—“son of truth” (amitai with the Hebrew meaning truth), as the rabbis explain it (D. Kimchi, I. Abarbanel), to confirm the Jewish tradition identifying Jonah with the son of the widow of Zarephath, raised to life by the prophet Elijah (1 Sam 17:17-23).

Jonah 1:2. Rise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me. “Rise, go to Nineveh...” The mission of a Hebrew prophet with preaching to heathen Nineveh seems to many to be an unprecedented event in the history of Hebrew prophecy, contradicting even the very purpose of prophetic ministry, which was established to preserve the true religious life in the Hebrew people alone, and therefore even incredible. One cannot deny, certainly, that the immediate task of Old Testament prophets was to “be watchmen over the house of Israel” (Ezek 3:17), but in keeping with the fact that the Hebrew people had a universal purpose, prophetic ministry too must have fulfilled not only national but also universal tasks. And we can point to many examples of prophetic word being directed straight at heathen nations and calling them to amendment and participation in salvation (Isa 13:1-24:1; Jer 46:1-51:1; Ezek 25:1-32:1). If that is so, there is nothing strange in Jonah’s mission to Nineveh, when other prophets prophesied about Egypt, Edom, Moab, Syria, Babylon, and even Nineveh itself (Nah 1:1-3:1; Zeph 2:13-15). “Call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.” The Hebrew “ki,” translated in this verse as “for” (Church Slavonic: yako, Latin: quia), more often means not a causal connection but the conjunction of a dependent clause—“that.” Translating thus in this place, we get an indication of the content of Jonah’s preaching in Nineveh: call out that their evil has come up before me. In this way, Jonah’s preaching in Nineveh must have contained not merely a prediction of its speedy destruction, as might appear from (Jonah 3:4), but also a rebuke of their evil deeds, undoubtedly accompanied by a call to repentance and therefore to salvation. The prophet Jonah himself understood his mission in this way, which is why he fled from it, so as not to be a messenger of salvation to the heathen; similarly, Jesus Christ points to the repentance and salvation of the Ninevites as the fruit of Jonah’s word (Matt 12:41). This understanding is confirmed by the Hebrew verb “kara” used here, which means not to predict the future, but to preach in the broad sense of the word, to proclaim, to make known what God has commanded.

Jonah 1:3. And Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. So he paid the fare and went down into it, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord. “And Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.” By Tarshish, to which Jonah fled, must be understood the country inhabited by the descendants of Tarshish, son of Javan (Gen 10:4). Initially the descendants of Tarshish settled in Cilicia, where they built the city of Tarsus; however, in this case we must understand not the Tarsus near Palestin, but rather distant Spain, the chief center of Phoenician maritime commerce (Isa 23:1-14; Jer 10:9), from whose name ships of distant sailing were called Tarshish ships (Ps 47:8; 1 Sam 10:22). The impulse for Jonah to flee to Tarshish was undoubtedly that he wished by this to divert the mission to Nineveh from himself. The example of attempting to avoid a divine mission in the history of Old Testament prophets is not unique (Exod 3:11; Jer 1:6), but it is peculiar in its motives and in part in its form (flight). The prophet decided not to go to Nineveh because he did not want its salvation, did not want this salvation to be accomplished through him. “That is why I fled to Tarshish,” he says in exasperation when he saw that Nineveh was not destroyed, “for I knew that You are a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger and abounding in mercy and compassionate” (Jonah 4:2). Are such thoughts and feelings worthy of an Old Testament prophet and can they be imagined as traits of the character of God’s messenger? To answer this question correctly, we must free ourselves from the prejudiced view by which biblical sacred figures, to preserve their halo of holiness, are presented to us in a kind of spiritual immobility. We must remember that biblical saints are “men like us in all respects” (Acts 14:15); therefore their moral height they attained not all at once, not without struggle and suffering, not without dependence on the influences of the time and environment surrounding them. And the prophet Jonah was a man of his own time and people. The Jews then generally thought that all pagans were enemies of Jehovah and deserved only His anger and punishment. The law itself partly fostered this attitude toward them, with the purpose of turning them away from all things pagan. It was quite natural, then, that the prophet Jonah before his calling thought about pagans as his compatriots did. Now, when the voice of God within him called the prophet to go with a message of repentance and salvation to the Ninevites, his soul was seized by a profound struggle. He must overcome the narrow religious nationalism ingrained in him from birth, according to which only the Jews were considered God’s people, and acquire the opposite view, that God has mercy for all, that pagans too are called and capable of receiving God’s salvation. The prophet could not go to preach in Nineveh without penetrating to this conviction, his obedience to Jehovah could not be automatic. And so the prophet does not hide from us the human weakness that he displays in this spiritual struggle: without extraordinary signs from God he could not reeducate himself, and therefore determined to “flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.” The prophet probably chose this method of avoiding the mission because he supposed that beyond the boundaries of the promised land, as a place of special presence of God (“the presence of God”, cf. Gen 4:14), he would no longer hear within himself the voice calling him to preach to the pagans. The Orthodox Church in its hymn supplements the remark made about the prophet Jonah’s motives for flight by saying that the prophet fled “lest the prophecy be falsified” (canon of Andrew of Crete). That is, the prophet Jonah had no confidence in the sincerity and durability of the repentance of the pagans and thought that, having received salvation for a momentary repentance and then returning again to their sins, they would laugh at the unfulfilled prophecy spoken against them, mock the impotence of the Hebrew God, and insult Him. In this way, the prophet’s flight was not a conscious resistance to God’s will, but a manifestation of special zeal for the glory of Jehovah before the pagans. “And came to Joppa”—the only harbor the Hebrews had since the time of Solomon (See concerning it 2 Chr 2:16; 1 Esd 5:53; 1 Macc 10:76).

Jonah 1:4. And the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and there was a mighty tempest on the sea, so that the ship threatened to break apart. “And the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and there was a mighty tempest on the sea.” Tempests on the Mediterranean Sea and especially off the coast of the Joppa harbor are a common occurrence. According to the testimony of Josephus Flavius (“On the Jewish War” II, 9, 3) and modern travelers (de-Solis, Noroff) the roadstead of the Joppa harbor and in general the southeastern shore of the Mediterranean are subject to winds, so that here frequent disturbances are observed. In view of this, Jonah’s book is often reproached for an excess of the miraculous. It is said that such natural phenomena as the rising of a storm on the sea and its cessation (Jonah 1:4), the swallowing of a man by a great fish (Jonah 2:1), the noonday heat, a scorching wind, a worm eating into plants (Jonah 4:6-8), which occur through natural forces and the laws of nature, are presented in the book as special acts of God, accomplished by God’s direct command. In this way, for the full naturalness of the phenomenon, it is considered necessary to eliminate any thought of God’s participation in the workings of nature. Such is undoubtedly the widespread view of our time, but not such is the religious view of the world. According to the latter, everything that occurs in the world, as the so-called laws and forces of nature, is at the same time the work of God, ruling the world. The very laws of nature constitute not something entirely separate from God’s will, but are viewed as the expression of the Creator’s will regarding nature. In this understanding, there is nothing strange in the fact that a person presents even natural phenomena as occurring by God’s will and passes over the laws of nature, as only intermediate causes. In Jonah’s book, as a work having religious and moral purpose, such mention is more than appropriate (although in it natural factors of natural phenomena are also mentioned: the wind producing the storm, the worm eating into plants). On the basis of this one can only note the religiosity of its author, and not criticize it for an excess of the miraculous and alleged incredibility of the narrative.

Jonah 1:5. Then the mariners were afraid, and each cried to his god. And they hurled the cargo that was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them. But Jonah had gone down into the inner part of the ship and had lain down and was fast asleep. “Then the mariners were afraid and each cried to his god.” The mariners were not chance passengers on the ship, but men for whom sailing was a livelihood, from Hebrew malahijm—rowers, oarsmen. They were undoubtedly heathens and probably came from Phoenician coastal cities. In the religion of all coastal peoples generally, prominent place was occupied by gods of the sea and water, and to them, naturally, the mariners appealed with prayers for deliverance from the raging waves. At the same time, they did not neglect natural means of deliverance: “And they hurled the cargo that was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them.” “But Jonah had gone down into the inner part of the ship and had lain down and was fast asleep.” The behavior of the prophet seems strange: while the others on the ship in fear for their lives are praying for deliverance, he goes to the hold and calmly falls asleep. This happened because the text’s author in this place speaks of a later moment before an earlier one, employed the device hysteron proteron, as in verse 10 and Jonah 4:5. In reality, the prophet Jonah undoubtedly went to rest before the storm occurred. Exhausted by the internal struggle occurring in him and perhaps by hasty travel to Joppa, having calmed himself by the decision finally made, Jonah “was fast asleep.” Some commentators understand the entire subsequent narrative up to and including chapter II as a dream that came to the prophet. However, there is absolutely no basis in the text for this supposition, and the historical authenticity of the narrative in chapter II is no less attested than other parts of the book (See the Introduction for this).

Jonah 1:6. So the captain of the ship came and said to him, “What do you mean, you sleeper? Arise, call upon your God! Perhaps this god will give a thought to us, that we do not perish. In this verse one need not be troubled by the fact that the ship’s captain, a heathen, addresses an unbeliever, a Hebrew, with the request that he pray to his God, and expresses hope of obtaining deliverance from Him. A heathen polytheist, alongside his own gods, acknowledged the real existence of the gods of other peoples. In particular, Scripture speaks of cases where heathens acknowledged Jehovah as the God of the Hebrews more than once (2 Sam 18:25; Ezra 1:2-3), and we have the same thing in this place.

Jonah 1:7. And they said to one another, “Come, let us cast lots, that we may know on whose account this calamity has come upon us.” So they cast lots, and the lot fell upon Jonah. “So they said to one another, ‘Come, let us cast lots, that we may know on whose account this calamity has come upon us.’” In ancient times it was a widespread belief that extraordinary calamities befall people because of some great sins (Job 4:8-11). Sharing this belief, the mariners decided that the great storm had come upon them because of some extraordinary sin committed by someone aboard the ship. They sought to discover the culprit by casting lots. This custom existed among many ancient peoples, both pagan and Hebrew, and both believed that not blind chance decided the matter, but God (or the gods) controlled the lots (Josh 7:14; 1 Sam 10:20-23; Acts 1:26; Cicero, De natura deorum, 3:36). “So they cast lots, and the lot fell upon Jonah.” Thus the book of the prophet Jonah gives us to understand that not only those casting the lots believed that God controlled them, but in reality this was the case.

Jonah 1:8. Then they said to him, “Tell us on whose account this calamity has come upon us. What is your occupation? And where do you come from? What is your country? And of what people are you? Contains a series of questions which the mariners addressed to Jonah after the lot pointed to him as the cause of the calamity. These questions were probably asked from different sides and by people in a state of agitation, so there is no strict sequence in them. The first question: “on whose account has this calamity come upon us?” is absent in some codices (Cod. 115), and in others (384) it stands in the margin; it should be understood not as a question to Jonah about some third person, but as directed at him: who are you, speak up? The following questions concern the origin of the prophet Jonah, his occupation and immediate intentions (the latter is clear from the addition in the Church Slavonic text: “Where are you going?”) In all this the mariners thought to find something that would shame Jonah and explain to them why the lot fell upon him.

Jonah 1:9. And he said to them, “I am a Hebrew; and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land. “I am a Hebrew; and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.” We must suppose that the words cited constitute only the beginning of Jonah’s speech aboard the ship; then Jonah sincerely told about his mission to Nineveh and his flight from the presence of Jehovah, as is evident from the second half of verse 10. The storm that had occurred and the lot that had fallen upon him must have struck the prophet more than the rest on board; in them he saw signs of God’s infinite greatness and his own wrongness; both of these he sincerely confesses before the heathens, first clarifying to them that the God of the Hebrews is the God of the whole universe (heaven, sea, and dry land), only upon acquiring this idea could the heathens understand all the rest in his speech: what concern does Jehovah have with Nineveh and why is it terrible to disobey such a God.

Jonah 1:10. Then the men were exceedingly afraid and said to him, “What is this that you have done!” For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord, because he had told them. It conveys the impression the mariners received from the prophet’s speech. They “were exceedingly afraid... for the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord,” meaning that their fear was religious, before Jehovah; they were afraid of His greatness and might. Undoubtedly, the mariners also sensed that before them stood not an ordinary man, but one chosen by God to receive a revelation from Him, although heavily guilty before Him; this is evident from the whole subsequent relationship of the mariners to the prophet Jonah (verses 12–14).

Jonah 1:11. Then they said to him, “What shall we do to you, that the sea may quiet down for us?” For the sea grew more and more tempestuous. “Then they said to him, ‘What shall we do to you, that the sea may quiet down for us?’” In the usual case, the mariners of course knew what they must do with a man who had incurred the anger of the gods and brought great calamity, but this was no usual case. Before them stood not a great sinner, but one chosen by God, truly bearing heavy guilt before God, but they hardly clearly understood it (see verse 14); the God who had punished them, Jehovah, was so unlike their pagan gods that they did not dare to appease Him in the usual pagan ways. Therefore, they turned to the prophet, asking him to pronounce judgment upon himself and to indicate a way to appease Jehovah.

Jonah 1:12. He said to them, “Take me and hurl me into the sea; then the sea will quiet down for you, for I know it is because of me that this great tempest has come upon you. “Take me and hurl me into the sea... for I know it is because of me that this great tempest has come upon you.” In this answer from Jonah, first of all, is evident his deep consciousness of his guilt before God. Because of his consciousness of his extraordinary guiltiness, he wishes to be punished in an extraordinary manner, as the storm and the lot indicated: “hurl me into the sea.” There is not the slightest display here of bravado about his life, nor extraordinary pride and self-love, by which the prophet supposedly wishes to die sooner than go against conviction to preach to the heathens, and thus continue to dispute with Jehovah “even to death.” Death in the waves of the sea appears to the prophet Jonah as the only way out to save his innocent fellow travelers, whom he certainly pitied: “hurl me into the sea and the sea will quiet down for you.” In this case the prophet performed an act of the highest love for people (John 15:13) and his person appeared before us in all its immeasurable height.

Jonah 1:13. Nevertheless the men rowed hard to get back to dry land, but they could not, for the sea grew more and more tempestuous against them. Jonah 1:14. Therefore they called out to the Lord, “O Lord, let us not perish for this man’s life, and lay not on us innocent blood; for you, O Lord, have done as it pleased you. Jonah 1:15. So they picked up Jonah and hurled him into the sea, and the sea ceased from its raging. The mariners did not at once carry out Jonah’s judgment against himself. First they tried to use all means to save the prophet by putting him ashore. When this failed, before hurling him into the sea, they addressed a fervent prayer to Jehovah, asking Him not to count “innocent blood” against them. Here one is struck by the sympathy the men aboard showed for Jonah and their deep religiosity. It is said that in this place, as later in the account of the Ninevites (Jonah 3:5-9), the heathens in Jonah’s book are idealized. What is recounted of them is both incredible in itself and incredible that it was written by Jonah or anyone close to him in time, for the negative attitude of the Jews toward pagans is well known. Thus, on a small foundation a great conclusion is built about the inauthenticity of the book, its later origin, and the legendary rather than historical character of its content. But what is incredible in the fact that the heathens on the ship turned out to be good men, capable of expressing sympathy for a man who, for their salvation, determined to suffer alone? What is incredible in the fact that sailing on the sea amid dangers taught them to pray? But it is pointed out that they prayed not only to their own gods, but also to Jehovah, the God of the Hebrews (verse 14). Indeed, in the use of God’s names, the author of Jonah’s book is very precise: when speech concerns God in general, as the Almighty Creator and Master of all, he uses the divine name Elohim (Jonah 1:5-6), while when God is spoken of in His relationship to the prophet Jonah, as the God of the Hebrew people, He is called Jehovah (Jonah 1:1). Therefore, in verse 14, where “Jehovah” stands, one must understand that the ship’s crew prayed to the God of the Hebrews, the God of Jonah, because they asked that He not count Jonah’s death against them, and it would be strange if they asked this of their own gods. If there is nothing of incredible idealization in the place we are examining, but only truth about the heathens, then such truth Jonah could fully have written, for he did not fear to speak it even in the face of death (verse 12).

Jonah 1:16. And the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows. “And they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.” Jewish tradition says that those aboard the ship became proselytes to Judaism. There is nothing incredible in this. The power of Jehovah they saw with their own eyes and confessed it in their prayer: “for you, O Lord, have done as it pleased you” (verse 14); saved by Him (not by their own gods) from evident death, they felt themselves obligated to Him, and therefore “made vows.” However, the text speaks only of the fact that those aboard were seized by religious enthusiasm; this after everything that had happened cannot be subject to doubt.