Suggest an Edit — Jonah

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Jonah (Hebrew: Yonah, meaning dove), son of Amittai, is the Israelite prophet who stands at the center of the Book of Jonah among the Twelve Minor Prophets and who is also named in 2 Kings. The notice in 2 Kings 14:25 identifies him as a prophet from Gath-hepher, a town in the territory of Zebulun in Galilee, and places his activity in the reign of Jeroboam II of the northern Kingdom of Israel in the eighth century BCE. According to that verse he announced the restoration of Israel's borders from Lebo-hamath as far as the Sea of the Arabah, a saying associated with Jeroboam's territorial successes. This is the only biblical reference to Jonah outside the book that bears his name, and it is the principal reason he is treated as a figure of the eighth-century northern kingdom rather than as a purely literary invention. No contemporary extra-biblical inscription confirms his life, and no reliable source records a year of birth or death.

The Book of Jonah tells a self-contained story that differs in tone and purpose from the brief political oracle in Kings. God commands Jonah to go to Nineveh, the great Assyrian city, and cry out against its wickedness. Jonah instead flees in the opposite direction, taking ship for Tarshish. A storm rises; the sailors cast lots, identify Jonah as the cause, and at his urging throw him into the sea. A great fish swallows him, and he remains in its belly three days and three nights, offering a psalm of thanksgiving before the fish vomits him onto dry land. Commanded a second time, Jonah goes to Nineveh, proclaims that the city will be overthrown in forty days, and the Ninevites, from the king to the least, repent in sackcloth and fasting. God relents and does not destroy the city. Jonah is angry that mercy has been shown to Israel's enemy and that his word of doom has not come to pass. He waits outside the city; God appoints a plant to shade him and then a worm to wither it. When Jonah pities the plant, God contrasts that pity with Jonah's lack of compassion for Nineveh's many inhabitants who do not know their right hand from their left, and much cattle.

Critical scholarship generally regards the Book of Jonah as a later literary composition, often placed in the Persian period (fifth or fourth century BCE) or afterward, rather than as an eighth-century report of a mission to Assyria. Its genre has been described as didactic narrative, parable, or satire: it uses a remembered prophetic name to explore divine mercy toward the nations, the limits of nationalist prophecy, and the prophet's own resistance to God's compassion. Assyrian sources do not corroborate a mass repentance of Nineveh of the kind the book describes, and the story's irony, its focus on a foreign city, and its concluding divine speech all point to theological teaching rather than chronicle. Whether a historical Jonah ever traveled to Assyria cannot be verified. The work remains, however, a canonical text in Judaism and Christianity and a major prophetic narrative in Islam, where the prophet is known as Yunus.

Later tradition developed the figure well beyond the biblical text. Rabbinic literature discusses Jonah's motives for flight, often linking them to fear that Nineveh's repentance would put unrepentant Israel to shame or that an unfulfilled threat would brand him a false prophet. In the New Testament, Jesus cites the sign of Jonah: as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the fish, so the Son of Man would be three days in the heart of the earth, and the repentance of Nineveh is held up against contemporary unbelief. Jonah thus became in Christian interpretation a type of Christ's death and resurrection and of the call to repentance. He is venerated as a prophet and saint in the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and related churches. In Islam, Yunus is a prophet after whom a surah of the Quran is named; Quranic passages emphasize his prayer from the darkness and God's deliverance of him. No burial place is historically verified. Competing shrines have been claimed at Gath-hepher (associated with Mashhad near Nazareth), at the Nebi Yunus shrine in Mosul (destroyed in 2014), and at other Near Eastern sites. Christian calendars commemorate him on 21 September in the Roman Martyrology and on 22 September in the Eastern Orthodox Church. His story has had a long afterlife in art, preaching, and popular retelling, especially the episode of the great fish, while remaining a central text for reflection on prophecy, repentance, and the scope of divine compassion.

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