Jonah Week 1
Jonah is a very familiar story, and that may benefit us or it may hurt us. When reading familiar things you tend to walk down familiar paths and miss stuff. It’s kind of like after driving the same road a hundred times to work, you fail to notice things along the way and just go noseblind to them. So we’re going to walk through it carefully to see what’s here.
You’ll also notice that I printed the entire book for you on your handouts. Joel only had 3 chapters and Jonah has 4, but nonetheless Jonah is about half the size. So, I’m going to give you the entire book every week. If you want to save your handout from week to week that’s fine, you won’t need to get a new one, but I’ll keep making them available up here.
JONAH ON TIMELINE
I know I told you that you wouldn’t see this timeline again, but I at least want to show you where Jonah is. To do that, I’m going to need you to open your Bibles to 2 Kings 14:23-25.
Here, Jonah lives during the reign of Jeroboam, commonly called Jeroboam II, king of Israel. Notice that Amaziah is the king of Judah. So Jonah is a prophet to the northern kingdom at this time. So without any scholars telling you a date that is basically a number with zero meaning. We can look at our timeline and place Jonah in this area.
But with our friends, the scholars, we can narrow it down to the reign of Jeroboam II which took place from 782 - 753 BC (763)? Who is the world power at this time? Assyria.Who is going to destroy Israel in a few decades? Assyria. Where is Jonah going to be sent? To Nineveh a major city of Assyria.
CONTEXT OF ISRAEL
You can see how our timeline is extremely helpful in understanding the background of the book and why the events that take place in it are significant. A few other significant things to notice in 2 Kings 14:25-27. We notice that Jeroboam II is the king of Israel. And he is EVIL. He’s a bad king. Continuing in the sins that Israel had been guilty of - idolatry and the like. And yet, God chooses to show compassion on him in a special way. So during Jeroboam II’s reign. The northern kingdom of Israel prospers more than it ever had before. The kingdom is twice the size it had been and Jeroboam II reigns 41 years. The longest of any Israelite king, where the average length of reigning was about 11 years. So they don’t deserve it. Yet, God is being incredibly gracious to them.
SATIRE
One more thing I want to point out before we dive into the actual text. And that is the type of genre that Jonah is. Jonah is unique from every other prophetic book because it is primarily narrative, a story. He only prophesies 8 words in 3:4. The major prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel have lots of narrative sprinkled throughout, but they are majority prophetic utterances. And almost none of the minor prophets have any narrative in them. So Jonah is unique in that way. It’s important to say here that I believe Jonah to be a historical book describing actual events in history and this is confirmed by Jesus in Matt. 12:39-40 when he refers to Jonah being in the belly of the fish as an actual historical event. So this is a historical narrative.
And the type of narrative is interesting too, because Jonah is written as satire. Now again, satire doesn’t mean fiction, it simply means that it’s written with a style and with a purpose. Satire is when you write in a way to intentionally expose absurdity to make a point. So let’s look at the first few verses of Jonah to see how it is written as satire.
Chapter 1:2-3a
God says “Arise… evil has come before me”
Jonah arises… to flee from before the Lord.
So the absurdity is that evil is coming before the Lord, but the prophet he called is not coming before the Lord. There’s clearly a problem going on here. Things are backwards. Evil should flee from the Lord and his prophets should come up before him. We’re going to see a lot of backwards things in Jonah. But let’s jump in.
STRUCTURE
First, let’s take a look at the overall structure of the book. This is largely based on the ESV study Bible. The book can be divided into 7 sections. I tried to make spaces on your page so that you can see where the sections are. Whenever there’s a blank line that’s where one section ends and a new one begins.
So what are these 7 sections?
The first is 1:1-3 - God calls, Jonah runs
Read 1:1-13
The second is 1:4-16 - Jonah with pagan sailors
Summarize
The third is 1:17-2:10 - Jonah’s grateful prayer to live
Summarize
Now this is where the book gets interesting, because we’re going to see that the next 3 sections are paired up with the first three sections.
Section 4 is 3:1-3a - God calls again, Jonah obeys. (cf. God calls, Jonah runs)
Do you see how it parallels the first section. We’re going to see lots of similarities in the paired sections as we walk through.
Read 3:1-3a
Section 5 is 3:3b-10 - Jonah with pagan Ninevites (cf. Jonah with pagan sailors)
Summarize
Section 6 is 4:1-4 - Jonah’s angry prayer to die (cf. Jonah’s grateful prayer to live)
Read 4:1-4
Section 7 is unique. It doesn’t have any pairing. And it’s going to be the climax of our story that points out the absurdity and hopefully drives home the point of the book.
THEMES
Now the way we handle this book is going to be different than the way we handled Joel. Joel was prophetic utterances and we went one verse at a time and highlighted the meaning as it unfolded.
This book again is narrative. So we’re going to look at the whole story and then understand how it is told to gather the meaning. What themes keep showing up and what do they point out?
The book of Jonah very helpfully shows us what all the themes are going to be in 1:2.
Read 1:2
Theme 1 - Arise - underline that word
Theme 2 - great - put a box around that word
Theme 3 - call out - circle that word
Theme 4 - evil - put parenthesis around that word
Now these are 4 words that will show up all throughout this book over and over again. Let’s take them 1 at a time.
ARISE - Jonah is told to rise, but instead of arising he begins to go down.
Verse 3 - “Rose” to flee underline
Another important word is he “went down” underline
He goes DOWN to Joppa
He’s going to keep going down before ultimately descending to death
Verse 3 - He WENT DOWN into the ship
Verse 5 - He WENT DOWN deeper into the bottom of the ship
Verse 6 - ARISE! He gets another call this time from the pagans, telling him to arise
He gets thrown into the sea and what does he say?
2:5-6 - I WENT DOWN to the bottom - he can’t go down any further. He’s gone as far as
possible
Did Jonah die? It’s possible. Scholars are pretty split. “Out of the belly of Sheol” “bars closed on me forever”
2:6b - Yet you BROUGHT ME UP
3:2 - ARISE - the same call comes to him
3:3 - Jonah AROSE and went to Nineveh
3:6 - Lastly, we see the pagan king AROSE to repent. He does immediately, what Jonah
did not
GREAT - So many things are called great. But it is mostly pagans or disasters. Until the last chapter.
1:2 - Great City
1:4 - Great Wind
1:10 - “Exceedingly” Great fear of storm
1:12 - Great Tempest
1:16 - “Exceedingly” Great fear of Lord
1:17 - Great Fish
3:2 - Great City
3:3 - Exceedingly Great city
3:5 - Greatest of them
3:7 - Nobles
4:1 - Jonah Exceedingly displeased
4:6 - Jonah Exceedingly glad
4:11 - Great City
CALL OUT - Who is calling out and for what?
1:2 - God commands Jonah to call out
1:6 - The pagans command Jonah to call out for their salvation
1:14 - The pagans call out to God for their salvation
2:2 - Jonah calls out to God for his salvation
3:2 - God commands Jonah to call out
3:4 - Jonah calls out to God for judgment
3:5 - The pagans call out for their salvation
3:8 - The pagans call out for their salvation
EVIL - This word has a variety of meanings. It can be morally evil or it can be an undesirable but amoral thing like a disaster
1:2 - Evil has come up to God
1:7 - Who has done the evil?
1:8 - Who has done the evil?
3:8 - Let’s turn from evil!
3:10 - They turned from evil and God relent of DISASTER (evil)
4:1 - but it was EVIL (displeased) to Jonah
4:2 - God always relents from DISASTER (evil)
4:6 - Jonah says God save me from DISCOMFORT (evil)
Jonah should arise, but he descends. And it’s not until God saves him from his descent and makes him arise that he obeys.
God sends Jonah great things to get him to go to a great people and Jonah is greatly mad when he should have been greatly glad.
The pagans are all calling out for salvation, but Jonah only calls out for judgment.
Pagans are concerned about what is evil to God, Jonah is concerned about what is evil to him