Jonah and the fish: one prophet in three books

Jonah is the prophet who ran from his mission and was swallowed by a fish. Jews read his book aloud every Yom Kippur. Jesus called his own coming “the sign of Jonah”. The Qur’an names a sūrah after him and calls him the man of the fish, and each of the three tells of a city that turned back to God in time.

Jonah in the Hebrew Bible

The Book of Jonah has four short chapters. God tells Jonah son of Amittai to go to Nineveh, the Assyrian capital, and cry out against its wickedness. Jonah boards a ship for Tarshish, in the other direction. A storm rises, the sailors cast lots, and Jonah tells them to throw him into the sea. A great fish swallows him, and he prays from its belly for three days and three nights before it spits him onto dry land.¹

Sent a second time, he goes. He walks into Nineveh with one sentence: in 40 days the city will be overthrown. The people believe, the king puts on sackcloth, and God relents from the disaster He had threatened.²

The prophet is angry. He had fled, he says, because he knew God was gracious and would spare them. God makes a plant grow to shade him, then withers it, and the book ends on God’s question: should He not have pity on Nineveh, with its 120,000 people who do not know their right hand from their left?³

That is why the synagogue reads the book in the afternoon service of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. A whole city repents with fasting and sackcloth, and God accepts it. God answers repentance wherever it comes from (see Prayer in the Abrahamic traditions).

The sign of Jonah

When some scribes and Pharisees ask Jesus for a sign, he answers that none will be given except the sign of the prophet Jonah: “For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth.”⁴

The same passage says the people of Nineveh will rise at the judgement and condemn that generation, because they repented at Jonah’s preaching. Luke gives the saying without the three days and makes Jonah himself the sign to the Ninevites.⁵ In Luke the sign is the preacher and his call to repent. Matthew ties it to the burial of Jesus, and Christian readers took it from there as a figure of the cross and the resurrection.

Read that way, the prophet points beyond himself to a saviour. The Ninevites in the story hear one sentence from a reluctant man, turn, and are forgiven, with no other figure standing between them and God.

Jonah in the Qur’an

The Qur’an calls him Yūnus (يونس), and Sūrat Yūnus, the 10th sūrah, bears his name. It also calls him Dhū al-Nūn (ذو النون), “the one of the fish”, and ṣāḥib al-ḥūt (صاحب الحوت), “the companion of the fish”.⁶ His prayer from inside the fish is the best known line of his story.

وَذَا ٱلنُّونِ إِذ ذَّهَبَ مُغَٰضِبًۭا فَظَنَّ أَن لَّن نَّقۡدِرَ عَلَيۡهِ فَنَادَىٰ فِى ٱلظُّلُمَٰتِ أَن لَّآ إِلَٰهَ إِلَّآ أَنتَ سُبۡحَٰنَكَ إِنِّى كُنتُ مِنَ ٱلظَّٰلِمِينَ ٨٧

And [mention] the man of the fish, when he went off in anger and thought that We would not decree [anything] upon him. And he called out within the darknesses, “There is no deity except You; exalted are You. Indeed, I have been of the wrongdoers.”

Qur’an 21:87⁷

Sūrat al-Ṣāffāt gives the sequence. He was among the messengers. He ran away to the laden ship, the fish swallowed him while he was blameworthy, and had he not been of those who glorify God he would have stayed in its belly until the Day of Resurrection. He was cast onto the shore, sick, a gourd vine was made to grow over him, and he was sent to a hundred thousand or more. “And they believed, so We gave them enjoyment [of life] for a time.”⁸

Sūrat Yūnus makes Jonah’s people the one exception in the Qur’an’s long list of warned nations: theirs was the city whose faith benefited it, and the punishment was lifted from them.⁹

Muslims hold him in high regard despite his flight. The Prophet Muhammad said, “One should not say that I am better than Jonah (i.e. Yunus) bin Matta.”¹⁰ They still recite his prayer in distress, and a hadith in al-Tirmidhī says that no Muslim calls on God with it for anything without being answered.¹¹

Jonah and the city that repented

Put the three books together and the shape is clear. A prophet is sent to a people outside Israel. He resists, he is disciplined, he prays from the darkness and is saved. The people hear the warning, believe, and are spared.

Al-Fārūqī held that man begins sound, with no original sin laid on him, and is called to felicity by doing the will of God. Nineveh shows that principle at the scale of a city. The Ninevites stand outside Israel’s covenant and its temple, with a single warning to go on, and they act on it.

For Christian readers he became a figure of something greater, the one in the earth for three days whose death saves others. The Qur’an and the Jewish reading on the Day of Atonement both keep the story at the size the book gives it: one prophet, one call, and a whole city forgiven because it turned. How each tradition handles such figures is the theme of The Messiah in three traditions and Jesus across the traditions.

Further reading: Jesus across the traditions, Prayer in the Abrahamic traditions, The Messiah in three traditions.

Notes

1. Jonah 1-2; on the reading at Yom Kippur, Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 31a. ↩
2. Jonah 3. ↩
3. Jonah 4. ↩
4. Matthew 12:38-41, NRSVUE. ↩
5. Luke 11:29-32. ↩
6. Qur’an 21:87; Qur’an 68:48. ↩
7. Qur’an 21:87, trans. Saheeh International; Arabic text from Quran.com. ↩
8. Qur’an 37:139-148, trans. Saheeh International. ↩
9. Qur’an 10:98. ↩
10. Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 3395, trans. Muhsin Khan. ↩
11. Jāmiʿ al-Tirmidhī 3505. ↩