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Jonah

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For other uses, see Jonah (disambiguation).
"Yunus" redirects here. For the economist Muhammad Yunus, see Muhammad Yunus.
The Prophet Jonah, as depicted by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel

Jonah (יוֹנָה "Dove", Arabic يونس Yunus, Standard Hebrew Yona, Latin Ionas, Tiberian Hebrew was a prophet in the Biblical Old Testament and Jewish Tanakh and Muslim Qur'an who was swallowed by a great fish.

The story of Jonah

Jonah was the son of Amittai ("True"), from the Galilean village of Gath-hepher, near Nazareth. God orders Jonah to preach at the city of Nineveh. Jonah does not want to, and tries to avoid God's command by sailing to Tarshish. A huge storm arises. The sailors, realizing this is no ordinary storm, cast lots, and learn that Jonah is to blame. Jonah admits this, and states that if he is thrown overboard, the storm will cease. The sailors throw him overboard, and the seas calm. Jonah is miraculously saved by being swallowed by a large fish. In chapter two, while in the great fish, Jonah prays to God and asks forgiveness and thanks God for being so faithful, and, as a result, God commands the fish to vomit Jonah out.

God again orders Jonah to visit Nineveh and preach to its inhabitants. He therefore goes there and walks through it, crying "In forty days Nineveh shall be destroyed." The Ninevites believe his word, and appoint a public fast, from the meanest of the people to the greatest; the king himself putting on sackcloth and sitting in ashes. God has compassion and does not bring His wrath against the city at that time.

Jonah is embittered by this. He questions the need for his journey, stating that since God is merciful, it was inevitable that God would yield to the Ninevites' entreaties--what need, then, for Jonah's journey? After this he retires out of the city and makes a shelter for himself, waiting to see if the city will be destroyed or not.

The Lord causes a plant (in Hebrew a kikayon) to grow over his shelter, giving Jonah some shade from the sun. Later, a worm bites the plant's root and it withers. Jonah, being now exposed to the burning heat of the sun, becomes faint and desires that God take him out of the world.

The Lord says unto him, "Do you have reason to be concerned at the death of a plant, which cost you nothing, which rises one night and dies the next; yet would you not have me pardon such a city as Nineveh, in which are 120,000 persons not able to distinguish their right hand from their left, and many beasts besides?"

Jonah in Islam

Like many important biblical people, Jonah is also important in Islam as a prophet who is faithful to God (Allah) and delivers his messages. He is known to Muslims by his Arabic name, Yunus. Sura 10 of the Qur'an, the Islamic holy book, is named "Sura Yunus" after him, though there is only one reference to him in that sura, in verse 98.

The person of Jonah

His personal history is mainly to be gathered from the Book of Jonah, traditionally ascribed to the prophet himself, although this is not stated in Scripture. In the book, Jonah is a reluctant and uncompassionate prophet. This story contains a two-fold characterization of Jonah: (1) a reluctant prophet of doom to heathen Nineveh, and (2) a "Son of man" type. The character of Jonah, who wants Nineveh destroyed, is contrasted with that of God, who is compassionate toward Jew and Gentile, human and animal.

The fish

Though often called a whale today, the Hebrew, as throughout scripture, refers to no species in particular, simply sufficing with "great fish" or "big fish" (whales are mammals and not fish, but no such distinction was made in antiquity). According to some Bible scholars, the size and habits of the white shark correspond better to the representations given of Jonah's being swallowed.[1] In Jonah 2:1 (1:17 in English translation), the original Hebrew text reads dag gadol (דג גדול), which literally means "great fish."

The LXX translates this phrase into Greek as ketos megas (κητος μεγας). The term ketos alone means "huge fish," and in Greek mythology the term was closely associated with sea monsters. (See the Theoi Project "Ketea" for more information regarding Greek mythology and the Ketos.) Jerome later translated this phrase as piscis granda in his Latin Vulgate. However, he translated ketos as cetus in Matthew 12:40.

At some point, cetus became synonymous with "whale" (the study of whales is now called cetology). In his 1534 translation, William Tyndale translated the phrase in Jonah 2:1 as "greate fyshe," and he translated the word ketos (Greek) or cetus (Latin) in Matthew 12:40 as "whale." Tyndale's translation was, of course, later incorporated into the Authorized Version of 1611. Since, the "great fish" in Jonah 2 has been most often interpreted as a whale.

The throats of many large whales (as well as that of a large whale shark specimen, which could be found in the Mediterranean) can accommodate passage of an adult human. There are some 19th century accounts of whalers being swallowed by sperm whales and living to tell about it, but these stories remain unverified.

Jonah and Jason

In 1995 the classicist Gildas Hamel revived a long-forgotten theory connecting the story of Jonah with that of the Greek hero Jason ("Taking the Argo to Nineveh: Jonah and Jason in a Mediterranean context," Judaism Summer, 1995; online). Drawing on the Book of Jonah and Greco-Roman sources—including Greek vases and the accounts of Apollonius of Rhodes, Valerius Flaccus and Orphic Argonautica—Hamel identifies a number of shared motifs, including the names of the heroes, the presence of a dove, the idea of "fleeing" like the wind and causing a storm, the attitude of the sailors, the presence of a sea-monster or dragon threatening the hero or swallowing him, and the form and the word used for the "gourd" (kikayon, a hapax legomenon within the Hebrew Bible). Hamel argues the Hebrew author was reacting to and adapting this mythological material to communicate his own, quite different message.

References to Jonah in the Qur'an


Public Domain This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Easton, Matthew George (1897). Easton's Bible Dictionary (New and revised ed.). T. Nelson and Sons. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)

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