Jonah the Prophet

In the Scriptures

Outside the book that bears his name, Jonah appears once in the historical books: "Jonah the son of Amittai, the prophet, who was of Gath-hepher" foretold the restoration of Israel's borders from the entrance of Hamath to the sea of the Arabah, fulfilled under Jeroboam II (2 Kings 14:25). This places him in the northern kingdom in the first half of the eighth century BC, an elder contemporary of Amos and Hosea and, in the traditional reckoning, a successor in the prophetic line of Elisha. Gath-hepher lay in Galilee of the Gentiles, a few miles from the later Nazareth — a fact the Fathers relished against the Pharisees' claim that "out of Galilee ariseth no prophet" (John 7:52).

The Book of Jonah tells the story on which his whole veneration rests. The word of the Lord came to him: "Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it." Jonah rose — and fled in the opposite direction, taking ship at Joppa for Tarshish, "from the presence of the Lord." The Lord hurled a great wind on the sea; while the pagan sailors each cried to his own god and threw the cargo overboard, the prophet slept in the hold until the shipmaster woke him — a heathen bidding a prophet pray. The lot fell on Jonah, and his confession is the creed of the whole book: "I am a Hebrew; and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land." At his own bidding — "take me up, and cast me forth into the sea" — the sailors, praying that innocent blood not be laid to them, threw him overboard; the sea ceased its raging, and the sailors feared the Lord, sacrificed, and made vows: the first-fruits of the Gentiles, converted by the prophet's very flight.

"And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah" — the κῆτος, the sea-beast, of the Septuagint — "and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights." From that living tomb he prayed the psalm that the Church has sung ever since: "I cried unto the Lord out of my affliction, and he heard me; out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice… The waters compassed me about, even to the soul; the depth closed me round about… yet hast thou brought up my life from corruption, O Lord my God" (Jonah 2). And the fish, at the Lord's command, vomited Jonah out upon the dry land.

The word came a second time, and Jonah went to Nineveh, "an exceeding great city of three days' journey," and cried his eight-word sermon of doom — forty days, in the Hebrew text, three days in the Septuagint, and Nineveh shall be overthrown. And the unthinkable happened: the Ninevites believed God. They proclaimed a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest to the least; the king rose from his throne, laid aside his robe, and sat in ashes, decreeing that man and beast alike fast and cry mightily to God — "who can tell if God will turn and repent?" And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way, and repented of the evil he had said he would do.

The last chapter turns the searchlight on the prophet himself. Jonah was displeased exceedingly and angry: this, he says, is why he fled — "for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness." He asked to die, sat down east of the city in a booth to see what would become of it, and God appointed a plant — the qiqayon, the "gourd" of the old versions — to shade his head, and Jonah rejoiced in it with great joy. Then God appointed a worm at dawn, and the plant withered; and a scorching east wind, till Jonah fainted and again asked to die. The book ends with God's unanswered question, one of the summits of the Old Testament: "Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for which thou hast not laboured… and should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand, and also much cattle?"

The sign of Jonah

Jonah's Orthodox veneration rests above all on the Lord's own words. To the scribes and Pharisees demanding a sign, Jesus answered: "An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonah: for as Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale's belly, so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh shall rise in judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: because they repented at the preaching of Jonah; and, behold, a greater than Jonah is here" (Matthew 12:39–41; cf. 16:4; Luke 11:29–32).

The Church accordingly reads the whole book as prophecy in action. Jonah's descent into the deep and the beast's belly is the type of Christ's death and descent into Hades; his three days in the fish, of the three days in the tomb; his casting up unharmed, of the Resurrection; the sailors saved through his self-offering, and Nineveh spared at his preaching, of the salvation of the Gentiles; even his sulking under the withered gourd was read by the Fathers as the figure of Israel grieving at the mercy shown the nations. For this reason the entire Book of Jonah is one of the Old Testament readings of the Paschal vigil, chanted at the Vesperal Liturgy of Holy Saturday as the Church waits at the tomb: the one prophetic book read complete in the Byzantine rite, at the one moment its typology comes true.

The sixth ode: Jonah in the daily prayer of the Church

Jonah's prayer from the belly of the fish (Jonah 2:3–10) is the sixth of the nine biblical canticles appointed at Matins, and every canon ever composed in the Byzantine tradition therefore carries Jonah within it: the irmoi and troparia of each canon's sixth ode are modelled on his cry from the deep — "I cried unto the Lord out of my affliction…" — usually turned into the worshipper's own confession of engulfing sin and rising hope. By a happy providence of the calendar, on the very day of Jonah's memory the Church sings, at the leavetaking of the Elevation of the Cross, the katavasia of the Cross for Ode 6:

In the belly of the sea-beast Jonah stretched out his palms in the form of a cross, plainly prefiguring the saving Passion; wherefore, coming forth on the third day, he sketched beforehand the Resurrection, transcending the world, of Christ God, who was nailed in the flesh and by his rising on the third day enlightened the world.

(Translated for this collection from the Greek: Νοτίου θηρὸς ἐν σπλάγχνοις…)

Traditions and tomb claims

A tradition recorded in the pseudo-Epiphanian Lives of the Prophets and repeated by Jerome and the later synaxaria identifies Jonah with the son of the widow of Zarephath, raised from the dead by Elijah (1 Kings 17) — so that the prophet of the Resurrection-sign was himself a man once raised, and the "son of Amittai," son of truth, was the boy whose raising made his mother confess "the word of the Lord in thy mouth is truth." The same tradition has him retire after the Nineveh mission to Gentile country, and die and be buried in the land of his fathers.

His grave has been claimed since antiquity in several places. The most famous claim is Nebi Yunus, "the prophet Jonah," one of the two mounds of ancient Nineveh itself, opposite Mosul: a shrine-mosque over the reputed tomb stood there for centuries until it was blown up by the Islamic State in July 2014 — the destruction exposing, beneath the shrine, the remains of an Assyrian palace. A second claim is kept at el-Meshhed, ancient Gath-hepher, his native town in Galilee; a third at Halhul near Hebron; and Lebanese tradition venerates a site near Sarafand, the ancient Zarephath. As with most prophets, no claim can be verified; the multiplicity is itself a witness to the breadth of his cultus among Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike.