The Prophet Jonah and the Repentance of Nineveh
A prophet was sent to the capital of Assyria and boarded a ship going the other way. The book of the man who fled his prophecy became the classic text on repentance, read on Yom Kippur.
Jonah son of Amittai prophesied in the days of Jeroboam son of Joash. He was told: rise, go to Nineveh and cry out against it. He rose—and went to Jaffa, boarding a ship for Tarshish, "away from before the Lord."
A storm nearly broke the ship. The sailors cried each to his own god; Jonah slept below. The lot fell on him. "I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord, God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land." He told them to throw him overboard; they did so only after failing to row ashore. The sea grew calm; a great fish swallowed him, and from its belly he prayed three days and three nights.
Cast ashore, he went to Nineveh and said five words: "Forty more days and Nineveh is overturned." The city believed. The king rose from his throne, sat in ashes and decreed a fast for all—and above all, "let each turn from his evil way and from the violence in his hands." The decree was annulled. Jonah sat outside, angry; God grew a plant over him and sent a worm to kill it, to ask: you pitied a plant you did not labor for—should I not pity a city of a hundred and twenty thousand people?
How we know
On the chronology
Academic history dates this event differently. In the age of the kings the divergence is not the one familiar from the Persian period, where Seder Olam runs about a hundred and sixty-five years short. Here academic chronology reckons some reigns as overlapping — father and son on the throne together — so its span from the division of the kingdom to the destruction of the Temple comes out nearly three decades shorter. The gap therefore grows: a hundred and thirty-five years at the division, a hundred and fifty-four at Sennacherib, a hundred and sixty-four at the destruction. The anchors of the academic count are external documents: the battle of Qarqar (853), Jehu's tribute on the Black Obelisk (841), the fall of Samaria (722), Sennacherib's campaign (701), Megiddo and Nebuchadnezzar's campaigns in the Babylonian Chronicles (609, 605, 597). Both dates appear on the timeline when the divergence layer is on.
Sources
Tanakh
- Melachim II 14:25 — Yonah ben Amitai — a prophet in the days of Yeravam ben Yoash
- Sefer Yonah — the book itself: the storm, the fish, Nineveh, and the argument over the gourd
Chazal: Mishnah, Talmud, midrash, Zohar
- Mishnah Taanit 2:1 — “and God saw their deeds” — Yonah’s verse as the definition of a true fast
- Pirkei deRabbi Eliezer 10 — the fish from inside: its eyes as windows, the deep, and the foundation of the Temple
- Sanhedrin 89b — Yonah as a prophet who suppressed his prophecy
Basis: stated in the Tanakh.
People and places
Elisha the Prophet · Assyria (Nineveh) · The Twelve Prophets · Yom Kippur · Teshuvah · Nahum the Elkoshite · Jeroboam II · Jonah son of Amittai · Nevuah—prophecy