Jonah son of Amittai יונה בן אמיתי

The same Jonah son of Amittai is named in the book of Kings: it was by his word that Jeroboam II restored Israel's border from Lebo-hamath to the sea of the Arabah. So before the Nineveh affair he was a prophet whose word came true in his own people's favour.

The assignment was the opposite: go to Nineveh, capital of Assyria, and announce its overthrow. Jonah rose—and went the other way, to Tarshish. The rest is known: the storm, the lots, "take me and throw me into the sea," three days in the belly of the fish and the prayer from inside it, read as a chapter of its own.

In Nineveh he does go, and speaks five words: "forty days more, and Nineveh is overturned." The city fasts from the king down to the cattle, and the evil is averted. And here the book turns: the prophet is distressed. He says aloud what he fled from: I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God—that is, I knew You would forgive, and I would be the man whose word did not come true.

The last scene is the kikayon, a plant that grew overnight and withered overnight. Jonah pities a plant he did not labour over. And the question the book ends on, and gives no answer to: "and should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left, and much cattle?"

The book is read at the afternoon service of Yom Kippur—a reminder that repentance is accepted from strangers too, and that one's own assignment cannot be outrun.