Bible Study for Amateurs #80 – Jonah 1:1b

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

We are continuing our series on the book of Jonah, using the tools from our Amateur Toolbox.² (As a reminder, if you’re interested in digging deeper, the script for each episode can be found at my website – amateurexegete.com – and they include endnotes that offer citations and further discussion.) In the last episode, covering the first half of Jonah 1:1, we noted that the opening of the book looks rather abrupt, as if we are joining the story as it’s already underway. In this episode, we will look at the second half of Jonah 1:1, specifically the identity of the story’s main character. Here again is Jonah 1:1 as it appears in the NRSVue: “Now the word of the LORD came to Jonah son of Amittai, saying….”³

Jonah Who?

We don’t know much about Jonah but we do know this: he’s the son of Amittai. Unfortunately, we don’t know anything about Amittai. Unless, of course, you think there is some hidden meaning in the names themselves. “Jonah” means “dove” in Hebrew,⁴ and Amittai means “of truth.”⁵ Together we have “dove, son of truth,” and thus, opines Yair Zakovitch in The New Oxford Annotated Bible (fourth edition), Jonah’s name “may be symbolic.”⁶ Personally, I don’t put much stock into this⁷ but it is an interesting proposal, nonetheless. But if there isn’t something symbolic in Jonah’s monicker, what else might be going on? I think it may have something to do with another appearance of Jonah son of Amittai, this time in the Deuteronomistic History.

At the beginning of 2 Kgs 14, a 25-year-old Amaziah ascends the throne of Judah, and he begins to clean house. He starts by executing those servants that had murdered the previous king, his father Joash. Per 2 Kgs 12:20-21, it was Jozacar and Jehozabad who had conspired to assassinate Joash. And now, here in ch. 14, Amaziah returns the favor. He also successfully takes an Edomite stronghold in the otherwise unknown Valley of Salt, changing the name of the city of Sela to Joktheel. But whatever success Amaziah enjoyed both in domestic and international affairs was about to be put to the test. 

Amaziah sends messengers to Jehoash, king of Israel. He wants to meet face-to-face with his counterpart in the north. But Israel’s king recognizes haughtiness when he sees it, delivering to Amaziah a parable: “A thornbush on Lebanon sent to a cedar on Lebanon, saying, ‘Give your daughter to my son for a wife,’ but a wild animal of Lebanon passed by and trampled down the thornbush” (2 Kgs 14:9).⁸ In his notes on this verse for The SBL Study Bible, Shuichi Hasegawa explains the parable: “The thornbush (Amaziah), an irritating and worthless plant, is seeking to become the equal of the majestic cedar (Jehoash), but the wild animal (also Jehoash) is capable of destroying the thornbush” (568).⁹ And destroy it he does. Amaziah refuses to listen, his veritable deafness attributed to the activity of God per the Chronicler because of purported idolatry (2 Chr 25:20; cf. 2 Chr 25:14-16). He defeats Amaziah and sacks Jerusalem. Though he still rules Judah, Amaziah’s power wanes considerably. 

Jonah the Prophet

In the fifteenth year of Amaziah’s reign, Jehoash dies and his son Jeroboam takes his place. According to 2 Kgs 14:24, he wasn’t exactly an upright devotee of the god of Israel. Despite this, in vv. 25-27 we get some interesting information: 

He restored the border of Israel from Lebo-hamath as far as the Sea of the Arabah, according to the word of the LORD, the God of Israel, which he spoke by his servant Jonah son of Amittai, the prophet who was from Gath-hepher. For the LORD saw that the distress of Israel was very bitter; there was no one left, bond or free, and no one to help Israel. But the LORD had not said that he would blot out the name of Israel from under heaven, so he saved them by the hand of Jeroboam son of Joash.

There he is: Jonah son of Amittai. We here learn that he was from the city of Gath-hepher, located in southern Galilee. Additionally, he is described as a prophet who spoke the words of Yahweh. In fact, it seems that he had prophesied to Jeroboam such that the Israelite king acted on the words, restoring boundary markers that dated to the reign of Solomon (cf. 1 Kgs 8:65) and, per v. 28, recovering territory in Damascus and Hamath. Writes Hasegawa, “Jeroboam thus reconstituted the northern part of the old Solomonic empire.”¹⁰

Apart from the book that bears his name and this passage in 2 Kings, there are no other references to Jonah in the Hebrew Bible. He was just not a major character. But that may be precisely why Jonah was chosen. Yair Zakovitch, writing in his introduction to the book of Jonah for The New Oxford Annotated Bible, opines that Jonah, obscure as he is, is nevertheless tethered to a historical moment in Israel’s past, thus granting the prophetic book some measure of authenticity.¹¹ Additionally, there is a shared theme between what we find in 2 Kings and what we find in the book of Jonah, specifically that of God’s mercy. Jeroboam may have been a wicked king, but God’s mercy trumps human evil. The Assyrians may have been Israel’s enemies, but God’s mercy covers even his people’s worst foes. 

This would, of course, not be the first time an ancient author took a somewhat obscure person and create an entire narrative around him. The book of 1 Enoch, for example, is built around a figure that appears in Gen 5 and nowhere else in all of the Hebrew Bible.¹² Additionally, the apocryphal book of Baruch takes a character from the latter half of the book of Jeremiah and creates a story around him. Jonah, then, is one of many relatively minor characters who get their own spin-offs. 

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. You can find the episodes on that toolbox here. ↩︎
3. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations of biblical texts are from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition. ↩︎
4.  יוֹנָה (yônâ). ↩︎
5. אֲמִתַּי (ʾămittay).  ↩︎
6. Yair Zakovitch, “Jonah,” in The New Oxford Annotated Bible, fourth edition, edited by Michael D. Coogan (Oxford University Press, 2010), 1301. See further Susan Niditch, Jonah: A Commentary, Hermeneia. (Fortress Press, 2023), 29. In his work on Jonah, Rabbi Steven Bob (Jonah and the Meaning of Our Lives: A Verse-by-Verse Contemporary Commentary [University of Nebraska Press, 2016], 1-2) emphasizes the meaning behind Jonah’s name and offers a comparison of Yonah the prophet with yonah the dove from the flood narrative of Genesis. See also Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (W.W. Norton & Co., 2019), 2:1285-1286.  ↩︎
7. I agree with James Limburg (Jonah: A Commentary, OTL [Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993], 38) who, with regards to Jonah, writes, “Since names taken from animals are not unusual in Hebrew, there need not be any specific significance to the name.” ↩︎
8. On the use of parables and analogies in political contexts in the ANE, see further Mordechai Cogan and Hayim Tadmor, II Kings: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AYB 11 (Doubleday, 1988), 156; Marvin A. Sweeney, I & II Kings, OTL (Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 365. ↩︎
9. Shuichi Hasegawa, “2 Kings,” in The SBL Study Bible, edited by Steven L. McKenzie, Kristin De Troyer, and F. Scott Spencer(HarperOne, 2023), 568. ↩︎
10. Hasegawa, “2 Kings,” 568. See also Walter Brueggemann, 1 & 2 Kings, SHBC (Smyth & Helwys Publishing, Inc.,) 443. ↩︎
11. Zakovitch, “Jonah,” 1301. Cf. Philip Peter Jenson, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah: A Theological Commentary, LHBOTS 496 (T&T Clark, 2008), 30: “It would make sense for a later author to choose a relatively obscure pre-exili prophet as a vehicle for a story with purposes other than historiographic.”  ↩︎
12. See further Phillip J. Long, The Book of Enoch for Beginners: A Guide to Expand Your Understanding of the Biblical World (Rockridge Press, 2022), 6-7.  ↩︎
13. Richard Elliot Friedman, The Exodus: How It Happened and Why It Matters (HarperOne, 2017), 214. ↩︎