Jonah 1

This is the name of the prophet in 2 Kings 14:25. He ministered in the northern Jewish nation of Israel, which kept its capital in Samaria. Jonah was from the city of Gath Hepher, further north, in southern Galilee. He ministered during the reign of Jeroboam II, who died in 742 BC. That was about 20 years before Assyria wiped Israel off the political map and deported the Israelite survivors. The deported Israelites became known as the Lost Tribes of Israel because they didn’t return. Jonah may have been among the dead or the deported survivors.

. Nineveh was the capital of Assyria, one of the most vicious empires in Bible times. Population 120,000 (4:11). Distance from Samaria by caravan trails, roughly 700 miles (1125 km). Traveling 20 miles (32 km) a day, that’s a month-long trip in each direction. Assyrian rulers would eventually display on their palace walls stone carvings that showed Assyrian soldiers impaling Israelite citizens of Lachish, a city south of Jerusalem. To understand why Jonah ran away, we might compare his assignment to that of a world leader in the 1940s sending a Jew to Nazi Germany to give Hitler and his enablers a good talking to. It sounded like a suicide mission.

Location of Tarshish is unknown. But wherever it was, it was west of the Jewish homeland. Nineveh was east. Scholars often guess that it was a city in Spain or somewhere else at the opposite end of the Mediterranean Sea from the Jewish homeland. Some say it was a Phoenician colony called Tartessus, in Spain. Phoenicians were native to what is now Lebanon, but their merchant ships sailed through the Mediterranean Sea.

Known today as the twin cities of Tel Aviv and Jaffa.

Some scholars say there’s a hint here that Jonah may have considered the LORD as the God of only Israel, not of the world. Many people in ancient times seemed to believe their local gods specialized in selected fields of interest and in selective locations. Some cities had their own gods dealing with matters such as health, prosperity, and victory in battle. One reason many of the first Israelites seemed to worship God as well as the local Canaanite gods is because the Canaanites may have been better farmers. The first-generation Israelite adults had just come from growing up in the desert south of Israel when Moses was still alive. They may have presumed that Canaanites were more prosperous because of their gods. Some Israelites also may have considered God as a specialist in war, since they had so much success fighting, especially in the Judean hills. Not so much in the coastal flatland, where Philistines and others had the military advantage of cavalries and chariot corps. Those were the ancient equivalents of today’s tanks, which have terrorized infantry and rolled right through them.

1:7. More literally, they were to throw or draw “lots.” The “lots” may have been stones or animal bones marked in a way that produced random outcomes for “yes” or “no” answers, or for determining who goes first in a group. The idea is like throwing dice, with the high number identifying the person on the ship who caused the storm by upsetting a god. Throwing lots is also a little like “heads” or “tails” from a coin toss.

Also known as Israelites and later as Jews. The word “Jew” came from the name of the tribe of Judah, which also became the name of the southern Jewish nation after the country split in two.

And the sailors figured Jonah did, too.

In the Jewish Bible, this is the first verse of chapter two. This verse is where Jonah’s story begins to sound incredibly unbelievable to many Christians—metaphor perhaps, but not history. It raises questions like: Why would God put sailors like that in the position of murdering a prophet? What fish could swallow a man whole and host him for three days? Who could survive three days in a fish when many can’t survive three days with their in-laws? Many Christians consider this story history. But others say it’s a kind of parable. That’s partly because of characteristics like the concise storytelling and the twisted conclusion. Parables of Jesus often ended with a zinger of a surprise.