"Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time, saying, 2 “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you.” 3 So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city,[a] three days' journey in breadth."
Jonah, Jesus, and the God of Second Chances
by Jonah
When people learn my name is Jonah, they usually smile and make a joke about big fish or running from God. But for me, the Book of Jonah is not a children’s story. It has become a lens through which I see Israel, the nations, Jesus, and even myself. In this essay I want to trace how Jonah—prophet and book—sits at the crossroads of Jewish and Christian faith, repentance, and atonement, and how his story reaches from Nineveh all the way to Yom Kippur and the words of Jesus.
Jonah, The Reluctant Prophet Of Mercy
Jonah didn’t run away because he doubted God’s power. He ran because he knew God’s character. And make no mistake, God knew Jonah when he chose him!
After Nineveh repents, Jonah finally spills the real reason for his flight: “I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster” (Jonah 4:2). He wasn’t afraid that God would fail to judge; he was afraid God would succeed in showing mercy. Jonah understood that the covenant formula from Exodus 34—gracious, merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love—could be applied to Gentiles too, even to Israel’s brutal enemies.
In other words, Jonah knew that if the Ninevites repented, the God of Israel would forgive them.
That knowledge infuriated him. Jonah wanted God for Israel, not for Assyria. He embodies an Israel that is happy to receive covenant mercy, but deeply reluctant to see that mercy poured out on the nations—especially Israel’s enemies.
The Final Question: Jonah And Israel
The Book of Jonah ends on a question and then goes silent:
“Should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left…?”
We never hear Jonah’s response. That silence is intentional. The question is addressed to Jonah’s heart, but it is aimed over his shoulder at Israel. Jonah is a mirror held up to God’s people. The closing question forces Israel—and later, the church—to ask: Do we begrudge God’s mercy to those we count as enemies? Are we offended that God loves those we fear or despise?
The phrase “do not know their right hand from their left” is an image of moral and spiritual ignorance. In Israel’s frame, it is precisely what it means *not* to know Torah, not to know the way of the Lord. Nineveh is pictured as a people without covenant instruction, morally disoriented, and therefore objects of pity rather than mere targets of wrath. Jonah wants them destroyed; God wants them restored.
Asleep In The Ship: Israel Asleep To Its Calling
Before Jonah ever reaches Nineveh, the pattern is staged on a smaller scale in the boat.
The pagan sailors are crying out to their gods while Jonah is “fast asleep” in the hold as they are about to perish. The captain’s rebuke—“What do you mean, sleeper? Arise, call on your God!”—is almost prophetic. Jonah, appointed to be a messenger of the living God, literally sleeps through Gentile distress.
It is not hard to hear the theological message: Jonah’s sleep is Israel’s sleep. Israel, called to be a light to the nations, a kingdom of priests, is spiritually asleep to its vocation. Surrounded by perishing Gentiles, the bearer of revelation is unconscious, uninterested, even when his own disobedience has contributed to their danger.
And yet, God still uses Jonah. The sailors end up fearing YHWH, offering sacrifice, and making vows. This “conversion of the pagan sailors” foreshadows the repentance of Nineveh. The irony is sharp: the Gentiles are responsive; the prophet is resistant. The nations are awake; Israel is asleep.
Jonah In The Fish: Idols, Salvation, And Vows
In the belly of the fish, Jonah’s prayer crystallizes the theology of the book:
But I, with the voice of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you;
what I have vowed I will pay.
Salvation belongs to the LORD.”
Here Jonah recognizes that idol‑worship is self‑destruction. To cling to idols is to let go of your own welfare; to hold onto false gods is to abandon the very mercy that could be yours. Praying to idols is not a path to salvation. “Salvation belongs to the LORD” is one of the clearest statements in Scripture that all true deliverance—physical and spiritual—is God’s work alone.
His line, “what I have vowed I will pay,” is modest next to what comes later in the canon, but it still matters. Jonah emerges from symbolic “death” with renewed resolve to fulfill his commission. In that sense, his descent, “death,” deliverance, and return to obedience form a faint, imperfect pattern that will be fulfilled and magnified in the obedience of Jesus.
Dagon, The Fish God, And Jonah’s Sign To Nineveh
Jonah’s story resonates with earlier biblical confrontations between the God of Israel and the gods of the nations—especially Dagon.
Dagon is remembered in tradition as a fish‑associated deity. Assyrian and Mesopotamian iconography includes fish‑man figures, and there is at least a strong symbolic connection between fish imagery and some of the gods venerated around the region of Nineveh. Against that backdrop, the idea that a man vomited out of a great fish would carry particular weight to a fish‑fixated culture is not far‑fetched. To Ninevites surrounded by fish‑god imagery, Jonah’s emergence from the depths in the belly of a great fish would mark him as a man stamped, in their idiom, with divine significance.
In that sense, God takes the cultural “language” of Nineveh—their fish symbol—and uses it against their idolatry. Jonah does not belong to the fish‑god; his story proves that the Lord of heaven and earth commands the sea and its great creatures. Jonah comes out of the fish not as a priest of Dagon, but as a prophet of YHWH. The true God wields the “fish” to assert His supremacy over the fish god.
No wonder the Ninevites listen. Jonah himself becomes a living contradiction of their idolatry and a sign of a greater power.
Samson Between The Pillars: Arms Outstretched
Samson was seduced to give up his Nazarite vow. Blind, betrayed and humiliated, is brought into Dagon’s temple, where the Philistines praise their god for delivering him into their hands. Samson asks to be placed between the two central pillars. With his arms outstretched—right hand on one pillar, left hand on the other—he pushes, the temple collapses, and the house of Dagon falls with its worshipers.
Samson was set apart as a Nazarite from birth. In the Scriptures we see this same pattern of lifelong consecration in two other key figures: Samuel, whose mother vowed that no razor would ever touch his head (echoing the Nazarite law), and John the Baptist, who was set apart from the womb and forbidden wine or strong drink in a way that clearly recalls the Nazarite pattern. Together, these Nazarite—and Nazarite‑like—lives form a line of men specially dedicated from birth whose ministries prepare the way for God’s anointed king, culminating in Jesus Himself.
Judges 16:28—Then Samson prayed to the Lord, “Sovereign Lord, remember me. Please, God, strengthen me just once more, and let me with one blow get revenge on the Philistines for my two eyes.”
We see the silhouette of a figure with arms outstretched, dying among enemies, and in his death overthrowing the powers behind the idols. Samson’s death is deeply flawed and violent, but ultimately Samson brings down the house of false gods. Samson’s posture between the pillars foreshadows the cross, where the greater one with outstretched arms breaks the power of the principalities and powers behind all idols.
When I line up Dagon in 1 Samuel 5, Samson in Dagon’s temple, Jonah from the fish in Nineveh, and Jesus on the cross, I see a consistent theme: the God of Israel humiliates idols and wins Gentiles through self‑giving acts that look like defeat but are actually victory.
Jonah, Yom Kippur, And The Shared Grammar Of Repentance
Jonah is not marginal in Judaism; he stands at the heart of the holiest day of the year.
Every Yom Kippur afternoon, the Book of Jonah is read in synagogues. The story is the liturgical climax to a day devoted to confession, repentance (teshuvah), and atonement. Jonah reminds the congregation that:
- No one is beyond judgment.
- No one is beyond mercy.
- Even a violent Gentile city can be given mercy if it turns.
- Even a reluctant prophet is pursued by God’s grace.
The logic is simple and profound: if God accepted the repentance of the Ninevites, how much more will He accept the repentance of Israel? Jonah becomes a didactic lesson in God’s readiness to forgive, His compassion for those “who do not know their right hand from their left,” and His patience even with His own sullen prophet.
Christians read Jonah through the lens of Jesus, but the grammar is the same: sin, judgment, repentance, forgiveness, and a God who is “gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” Jonah is a shared text. Jew and Christian may articulate atonement differently—especially in relation to the cross—but we kneel under the same words: “salvation belongs to the LORD.”
Jonah, Jesus, And The Sign
Jesus does not “replace” Jonah; He interprets and fulfills him.
When the religious leaders demand a sign, Jesus replies that no sign will be given except “the sign of the prophet Jonah.” As Jonah was three days and nights in the belly of the great fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and nights in the heart of the earth. Jonah’s descent into the depths and return to the land of the living becomes a prophetic sketch of death and resurrection.
But Jesus presses the comparison further. The men of Nineveh will rise at the judgment and condemn “this generation,” because they repented at Jonah’s preaching, and now One greater than Jonah is here. The contrast is devastating: Gentile Nineveh, steeped in violence and idolatry, hears one reluctant prophet and repents; many of Israel’s leaders, saturated in Torah, hear and see the Messiah Himself and refuse.
Jonah was a sign to Nineveh, to Israel and the nations: the living embodiment of God’s mercy and the crossroads of judgment and grace.
Tradition, Evidence, And Faith
There is a long tradition—Jewish, Christian, and Muslim—that Jonah ended his days in or near Nineveh, in what is today Mosul. A shrine on the ancient mound has been venerated for centuries as his tomb. Archaeology has uncovered an Assyrian palace under that site, situating the tradition in authentic Assyrian soil.
Can I prove, historically, that Jonah stayed there and continued teaching Torah to the Assyrians? No. The text of Scripture is silent after the book ends, and archaeology can’t yet trace the prophet’s last steps.
Perhaps that is precisely where faith enters—not as blind belief in any pious legend, but as trust that the God who really spoke through Jonah, really turned Nineveh, and really raised Jesus has woven more into His story than I can document. Jonah himself becomes a sign at this point: a man whose narrative ends with an open question, inviting me to respond in my own life rather than demanding a tidy epilogue to *his*.
My Name Is Jonah
All of this lands a little differently when your own name is Jonah.
I hear God’s question—“Should I not have compassion on Nineveh?”—as addressed to me. Do I want God to be generous only to people like me, or am I willing for Him to lavish mercy on those I might secretly prefer He judge? Am I asleep in the hold while the world around me is in a storm, clinging to idols that cannot save? Am I clinging to my own “empty follies,” forfeiting the mercy that could be mine? Do I really believe that “salvation belongs to the LORD,” or am I still trying to manage who gets it?
The ancient prophet Jonah stands at the intersection of Judaism and Christianity, of Israel and the nations, of idols and the living God, of death and resurrection. His story confronts me with all my reluctance and resentment, but it also comforts me with the same truth he finally confessed from the depths:
"Those who cling to empty folly forsake their own welfare. Salvation (Yeshua) belongs to the LORD."
Epilogue:
Did you know that in the fish jonah prayed the psalms?
