Bible Study for Amateurs #81 – Jonah 1:2

Hey, everyone! I’m Ben – the Amateur Exegete, and this is episode eighty-one of Bible Study for Amateurs. Today’s episode is, “Jonah 1:2.”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 include endnotes that offer citations and further discussion.) In the last episode, we finished looking at the opening verse of the book. In this episode, we move on to the next verse of Jonah 1.

Yahweh’s Message for Nineveh

Here is Jonah 1:1-2 as it appears in the NRSVue:³

1 Now the word of the LORD came to Jonah son of Amittai, saying, 2 “Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it, for their wickedness has come up before me.” 

If you’ve read the other so-called Minor Prophets, Nineveh should be a familiar name. The city itself was situated on the Tigris River in what is modern day Iraq. During the reign of Sennacherib in the late 8^th and early 7^th centuries BCE, decades after the time period in which Jonah purportedly lived,⁴ it became the capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. In his introduction to the Old Testament, Michael Coogan notes that the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, one of the empire’s last monarch’s, created an impressive library that consisted of thousands of tablets containing myths, prayers, mathematical texts, and so much more.⁵ Nineveh was a cultural center for the region, a symbol of Assyrian power and prestige.⁶

For biblical authors, however, Nineveh was a symbol of Assyrian wickedness. The book of Nahum, which begins with the words “An oracle concerning Nineveh” (Nah 1:1), predicts doom and gloom for the city, a metonym for the Neo-Assyrian Empire.⁷ Per Nah 1:13, Assyria had placed Judah under a yoke and the deity intended to break it off. He says to the Ninevites, “I will prepare your grave, for you are worthless” (v. 14). The impression one gets from reading Nahum’s oracle is that the city’s demise is inevitable, her destruction a done deal. Or, as Yahweh puts it to the Assyrians in Nah 3:19, “[Y]our wound is mortal.”⁸

The book of Jonah, on the other hand, feels like a different take on Nineveh and the Assyrians. Writes Ehud Ben Zvi in his notes on Jonah for The Jewish Study Bible, “Numerous prophetic texts characterize the Assyrians as extremely cruel and savage. Although this unflattering characterization pervaded much of biblical literature, the book of Jonah, which calls them Ninevites, never Assyrians, describes them as sinners who fully repented.”⁹ Certainly, as Jon 1:2 reports, they had committed wickedness¹⁰ so great that it had made its way to Yahweh. But this highlights all the more the juxtaposition of a book like Jonah with that of Nahum. In Nahum, the wickedness of Assyria seals their fate. The god of Judah sets himself against the empire as if he is a warrior in battle and from him there is no escape. But in Jonah, as we will discover in a later episode, the message the prophet delivers results in repentance and the city is saved. 

Yahweh’s Attentiveness 

As already noted, at the end of v. 2 the deity tells Jonah that the city’s wickedness had “come up before” him. This idea of wickedness catching Yahweh’s attention is nothing new in the Hebrew Bible. For example: 

• In Gen 4:11, after Cain murders his brother Abel, Yahweh tells him that “your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!”
• In Gen 6:5, the deity “saw the wickedness of humans was great in the earth and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually.”
• In Lam 1:22, the author prays, concerning his enemies, that “all their evildoing come before you, and deal with them as you have dealt with me because of all my transgressions.”

To these we might add other places where Yahweh is depicted as one who hears and responds.

• In Exod 2:23-24, the enslaved Israelites “groaned under their slavery and cried out. Their cry for help rose up to God from their slavery. 24 God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”
• In Exod 22:22-24, the deity tells Israel, “22 You shall not abuse any widow or orphan. 23 If you do abuse them, when they cry out to me, I will surely heed their cry; 24 my wrath will burn, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children orphans.”
• In 1 Sam 5:12, after the Philistines capture the ark of God and bring it to the city of Ashdod, a plague of tumors breaks out “and the cry of the city went up to heaven.”

Much of this is, no doubt, background for the character of Jonah. He knows that the god of Israel is active, not only rescuing the oppressed but delivering judgment to sinners.¹¹ And this makes Jonah’s response in the next verse all the more perplexing, a subject we will look at in the next episode.

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.”¹²

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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. Cf. 2 Kgs 14:25. If Jonah lived during the time of Jeroboam II, then that places him in the early to mid-eighth century BCE. ↩︎
5. Michael D. Coogan, The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures, third edition (Oxford University Press, 2014), 353. See also Amanda H. Podany, The Ancient Near East: A Very Short Introduction, VSI 374 (Oxford University Press, 2014), 105-108. ↩︎
6. See further Susan Niditch, Jonah: A Commentary, Hermeneia (Fortress Press, 2023), 30. ↩︎
7. Much in the same way that “Washington” is a metonym for the United States. For more on Nineveh, see A. Kirk Grayson, “Nineveh,” in ABD: 4:1118-1119. ↩︎
8. See also Zeph 2:13 – “And he will stretch out his hand against the north and destroy Assyria, and he will make Nineveh a desolation, a dry waste in the desert.” ↩︎
9. Ehud Ben Zvi, “Jonah,” in The Jewish Study Bible, edited by Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler, second edition (Oxford University Press, 2014), 1188. See further Jack M. Sasson, Jonah: A New Translation with Introduction, Commentary, and Interpretation, AYB 24B (Doubleday, 1990), 70. ↩︎
10. “Their wickedness” = רָעָתָ֖ם (rāʿātām). Niditch (Jonah, 31-32) prefers the gloss “their evil.” ↩︎
11. Thus Niditch, Jonah, 33: “The small phrase in Jonah 1:2 concerning evil rising up before the deity thus suggests much about worldview and ethos; the implicit message about divine attention helps to make sense of the world, providing hope for the oppressed and a warning to oppressors.” ↩︎
12. Richard Elliot Friedman, The Exodus: How It Happened and Why It Matters (HarperOne, 2017), 214. ↩︎