Bible Study for Amateurs #79 – Jonah 1:1a

Hey, everyone! I’m Ben – the Amateur Exegete, and this is episode seventy-nine of Bible Study for Amateurs. Today’s episode is, “Jonah 1:1a.”¹

Perhaps you’ve seen a nursery painted with murals of stories from the Bible. On one wall stands a rosy-cheeked Noah, his wife by his side, and a boat full of elephants, bears, giraffes, and – if the nursery was painted by Young Earth Creationists – a few dinosaurs.² On another wall sits Adam and Eve, strategically covered by leaves, hanging out in the Garden of Eden, obviously before their fall. On another you see Jesus of Nazareth, stepping along the waves of the Sea of Galilee, his face beaming as he approaches his disciples who are far less panicked than they should be. And on the fourth wall, you spot a bearded Jonah, wading in the ocean, with a smiling whale frolicking nearby. Each wall reflects an interpretation of these stories, sanitized and made palatable for little hearts and minds. But interpretations are only as good as the data that stands behind them, and any interpretation that sacrifices context for cutesiness is doing a disservice.³

This is especially true of the story of Jonah. Sure, he’s famous for being swallowed by a large fish.⁴ But the fish is only one part of that story, and it isn’t even the most interesting part! There is a lot more to the book of Jonah that many readers either miss entirely or simply do not know about.⁵ For that reason, we are going to explore the book of Jonah using the tools from my Amateur Toolbox.⁶ Supplementing these tools will be various academic commentaries and other secondary sources. For inquisitive listeners, I recommend visiting my website and reading the script for each episode as you will find endnotes that either provide more insight or point you to sources that you can peruse on your own. 

For now, let’s begin with the opening verse of the book of Jonah. Here is Jonah 1:1 as it appears in the NRSVue: “Now the word of the LORD came to Jonah son of Amittai, saying….”⁷

Beginning in the Middle

The book of Jonah does not begin like any other book found in the Minor Prophets, that section of the Hebrew Bible that includes prophetic texts like Hosea, Amos, Nahum, and the like that are shorter in length than the works of Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Ezekiel.⁸ Also known as the Book of the Twelve, this section of the Hebrew Bible is comprised entirely of prophetic words and oracles with virtually no narrative content, that is except for the book of Jonah. That work tells a story about a prophet and contains very little by way of prophetic utterance. And it begins rather abruptly. 

Compare the opening of the book of Jonah with these other members of the Book of the Twelve: 

• Hos 1:1 – “The word of the LORD that came to Hosea son of Beeri….”
• Joel 1:1 – “The word of the LORD that came to Joel son of Pethuel.”
• Amos 1:1 – “The words of Amos…which he saw concerning Israel….”
• Obad 1:1 – “The vision of Obadiah.”
• Mic 1:1 – “The word of the LORD that came to Micah of Moresheth….”

At first glance, perhaps you detect no difference. But stop for just a moment and think about how Jonah begins by comparison. The opening line does not read, “The word of the LORD that came to Jonah son of Amittai.” It reads, “Now the word of the LORD came to Jonah son of Amittai.”⁹ Ehud Ben Zvi in his notes for The Jewish Study Bible observes, 

The opening of the book…is a common one for a prophetic narrative that is embedded in a book, but it does not occur elsewhere as the opening of a book, so from the start Jonah is different. The opening suggests to the reader that the book begins, as it were, “in the middle,” and that much of the background of the story is not told in the book.¹⁰

To further illustrate the point, the opening of Jonah is closer to language found in texts by the Deuteronomistic Historian. Here are a couple of examples:¹¹

• 1 Kgs 17:2 – “The word of the LORD came to [Elijah], saying….”
• 1 Kgs 17:8 – “Then the word of the LORD came to [Elijah], saying….”
• 1 Kgs 21:17 – “Then the word of the LORD came to Elijah the Tishbite, saying….”

Particularly apt for comparison is 1 Kgs 17:2. In v. 1 of that ch. we are introduced to Elijah the Tishbite but, like Jonah, we are given no background for more context. He is already a prophet, but we do not know when he was called, what his life has been like to this point, or much of anything else. 

This, of course, isn’t all that unique. Plenty of stories begin with fully developed characters whose backstory we have yet to uncover. One of my favorite book series, The Dark Tower by Stephen King, opens in its first volume with the words, “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”¹² Who the man in black or the gunslinger are, why they are crossing a desert, and so much more is unpacked later. In fact, so much about the gunslinger’s story isn’t revealed until entire books later! Like King, the author of the book of Jonah doesn’t begin with the beginning but with the story already underway. 

Yet we aren’t left entirely in the lurch concerning Jonah’s background. In the next episode, we will look at how the book identifies its protagonist and what, if anything, we can glean by cross referencing his sole identity marker with what we find elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. 

That’s it for this episode of Bible Study for Amateurs.  I’ll see you next time! If you’d like to support this podcast, share it on social media, subscribe to it on the listening platform of your choice, or head over to amateurexegete.com and click on the support button. Or do all three! And, most importantly, remember, in the words of Richard Elliot Friedman, “One does not need to deny what is troubling [about the Bible] in order to pay respect to what is heartening.”¹³

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1. Throughout the endnotes readers will find various abbreviations. For a list of what abbreviations I use and the works to which they refer, please see the page “Commonly Used Abbreviations.”  ↩︎
2. YECs are more than happy to confess that dinosaurs were on the ark. See, e.g., John Woodmorappe, Noah’s Ark: A Feasibility Study (Institute for Creation Research, 1996), 4; Ken Ham, Dinosaurs for Kids (Master Books, 2009), 38-40. ↩︎
3. Dan McClellan (The Bible Tells Me So: What We Get Right [and Wrong] About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues [St. Martin’s, 2025], 7-8) helpfully compares biblical interpretation to the construction of LEGOs. If we have multiple sets all mixed together, it’s still possible to reconstruct what a particular set is supposed to look like, albeit imperfectly. Pieces from one set will invariably be attached to pieces from another, but unless there is some incontrovertible problem (e.g., putting Han Solo into the captain’s chair of the USS Enterprise-D) we should still be able to “squint at it” and see something that resembles “what the tradition demands.” It would be best to have the original instructions or even the box the set came in; without them, we are limited but the task isn’t necessarily impossible. The fundamental issue, as McClellan points out, is the quality of our data: “Sometimes the problem isn’t that we’re being incentivized to construct inaccurate meanings; it’s that we don’t have enough data to construct the ‘right’ meaning” (p. 9). ↩︎
4. דָּ֣ג גָּד֔וֹל (dāg gādôl). ↩︎
5. As James Kugel (How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture Then and Now [Free Press, 2007], 628) observes, “The basic question addressed by the book of Jonah tends to be lost nowadays. The only thing most readers remember about this book is that Jonah was swallowed by a big fish at the beginning of the story as he tried to flee from God’s summon to prophesy.” ↩︎
6. If you’re interested in that toolbox, the full playlist of episodes covering them can be found over at my YouTube channel. ↩︎
7. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations of biblical texts are from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition. ↩︎
8. David M. Carr, An Introduction to the Old Testament: Sacred Texts and Imperial Contexts of the Hebrew Bible (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 112. ↩︎
9. The Hebrew reads וַֽיְהִי֙ דְּבַר־יְהוָ֔ה אֶל־יוֹנָ֥ה בֶן־אֲמִתַּ֖י לֵאמֹֽר (wayəhî dəbar-yhwh ʾel-yônâ ben-ʾămittay lēʾmōr) = “And there was a word of Yahweh to Jonah son of Amittai, saying.” ↩︎
10. Ehud Ben Zvi, “Jonah,” in The Jewish Study Bible, second edition, edited by Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford University Press, 2014), 1188. See further W. Dennis Tucker Jr., Jonah: A Handbook on the Hebrew Text (Baylor University Press, 2006), 11. ↩︎
11. See James Limburg, Jonah: A Commentary, OTL (Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), 23. Limburg notes that just as Jonah begins with the Hebrew construction וַֽיְהִי (wayəhî) – that is ו + הָיָה in the Qal – so too do narratives like 1 Sam, 2 Sam, and others begin with the same construction, suggesting their broadly generic affinity. He writes, “The way^ehî at the beginning of the Jonah book thus suggests to a reader or hearer that a narrative – or story – is to follow.” See further Bill T. Arnold and John C. Choi, A Guide to Biblical Hebrew Syntax (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 86. ↩︎
12. Stephen King, The Gunslinger, The Dark Tower 1 (Scribner, 2003 [originally published 1982]), Chapter 1. ↩︎
13. Richard Elliot Friedman, The Exodus: How It Happened and Why It Matters (HarperOne, 2017), 214. ↩︎