Bible Study for Amateurs #82 – Jonah 1:3

Hey, everyone! I’m Ben – the Amateur Exegete, and this is episode eighty-two of Bible Study for Amateurs. Today’s episode is, “Jonah 1:3.”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 looked at Jonah 1:2 with its mention of the Assyrian city of Nineveh and the attentiveness of Yahweh. In this episode, we turn to Jonah’s reaction to Yahweh’s call found in v. 3. 

Runaway Prophet

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

But Jonah set out to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the LORD. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish; so he paid his fare and went on board, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the LORD.

Jonah’s response to Yahweh’s command is noteworthy. The deity had ordered Jonah in v. 2 to “[g]o at once to Nineveh,” but instead, as we see here, he “set out to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the LORD.” Tarshish was likely the city of Tartessus in Spain,⁴ to the extreme west of both Palestine where the prophet likely was and the city of Nineveh to which he was to go. In his notes for The Jewish Study Bible, Ehud Ben Zvi notes that the city was “from the perspective of the readers a faraway place…in the opposite direction from Nineveh.”⁵ As evidence for this, he cites Isa 66:19, a text wherein Yahweh says he will gather all the nations to see his glory before sending the “survivors” out to cities like Tarshish, described as “coastlands far away that have not heard of my fame or seen my glory.” Of course, Jonah’s decision to go to Tarshish has nothing to do with proclaiming his god’s glory. He’s on the run. 

Jonah’s reaction to Yahweh’s call is jarring. This is evident in two ways. First, while the NRSVue renders Yahweh’s call in v. 2 with the words “Go at once to Nineveh,” the underlying Hebrew might be better expressed with the command “Arise, go to Nineveh.”⁶ That English word “arise” renders the Hebrew verb qûm⁷ and appears again in v. 3 where we read in the NRSVue, “But Jonah set out to flee.” Better would be the translation, “And Jonah arose to flee.”⁸ At first glance, it appears the prophet will fulfill the deity’s call. But he arises only to flee.⁹

Second, if we set Jonah’s reaction in the broader context of prophetic literature and prophetic characters, his choice to run becomes all the more surprising. As Matthew Coomber writes in the Fortress Commentary on the Bible, “In the context of the prophetic genre, Jonah’s decision to abandon God and his prophetic call so resolutely is shocking, his reaction stands in contrast to the eagerness of most prophets to heed YHWH’s call.”¹⁰ One of the clearest examples of a willing prophet is that of Isaiah who, in the presence of a gigantic Yahweh in Isa 6, hears the call “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” and responds with, “Here am I; send me!” (Isa 6:8) Elijah the Tishbite too heeds Yahweh’s call time and again (e.g., 1 Kgs 17:1-7; 18:1-19; etc.). 

Down, Down, Down

With his choice to flee, the prophet begins a series of descents. Two of them appear here in v. 3, though one is obscured by the translators of the NRSVue. First, Jonah goes “down to Joppa,” a port city adjacent to modern-day Tel Aviv,¹¹ where he finds a vessel either headed for Tarshish, as many translations render the text, or coming from Tarshish, as Ehud Ben Zvi notes.¹² Second, per the NRSVue Jonah “paid his fare and went on board.” That phrase rendered “went on board” is more literally rendered “and he went down into it,”¹³ that is, the vessel.¹⁴ So Jonah, so far in his rejection of Yahweh’s call, has gone down to Joppa and now goes down into the hold of a ship. As the story progresses, the descent will continue, culminating in the prayer of Jonah in ch. 2.

As a sign of his desperation to escape his god, Jonah, per the NRSVue, “paid his fare” to board the ship. But Ehud Ben Zvi thinks this is probably not the best way to understand the underlying Hebrew text. He writes that “there is good reason to prefer ‘he paid its hire’ (that is, he hired the ship and its sailors) …. In other words, he was ‘lucky’ to find a ship just coming to port and hastened so much that he hired everyone so as to leave for the sea, on the spot.”¹⁵ Jonah is in a hurry, but not to do as the deity commands but to do all that he can to escape him. 

Whenever I read this passage, I cannot help but laugh. First, there is the irony of a prophet, commanded by a god who is upset that Nineveh fails to obey him, who himself fails to obey that god. And then there is the twice-repeated phrase “from the presence of the LORD.” Is Jonah truly convinced he can escape Yahweh? That by fleeing the land for the sea that somehow this deity cannot reach him? By his actions, Jonah becomes what John Kaltner, writing in The SBL Study Bible, deems “the antithesis of what a prophet should be.”¹⁶  And it gets worse. As we will soon discover, not only does Jonah’s descent continue, but even when he does finally follow through on what Yahweh commands, he turns into a petulant grumbler, upset for all the wrong reasons. 

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.”¹⁷

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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. On the identity of Tarshish, see Jack M. Sasson, Jonah: A New Translation with Introduction, Commentary, and Interpretations, AYB 24B (Doubleday, 1990), 78-79; David W. Baker, “Tarshish (Place”),” in ABD 6:332-333. ↩︎
5. Ehud Ben Zvi, “Jonah,” in The Jewish Study Bible, edited by Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler, second edition (Oxford University Press, 2014), 1188-1189. See also Sasson, Jonah, 79. ↩︎
6. ק֠וּם לֵ֧ךְ אֶל־נִֽינְוֵ֛ה (qûm lēk ʾel-nînəwēh). ↩︎
7. קוּם. ↩︎
8. יָּ֤קָם יוֹנָה֙ לִבְרֹ֣חַ (yāqām yônâ librōaḥ). ↩︎
9. As Robert Alter (The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary [W.W. Norton & Co., 2019], 2:1289) writes, “For a brief moment, he might seem to be heeding God’s command to get up and go to Nineveh, but this momentary illusion is broken down by the infinitive ‘to flee.’” ↩︎
10. Matthew J.M. Coomber, “Jonah,” in Fortress Commentary on the Bible: The Old Testament and Apocrypha, edited by Gale A. Yee, Hugh R. Page, Jr., and Matthew J. M. Coomber (Fortress Press, 2014), 862. ↩︎
11. For more on Joppa, see Susan Niditch, Jonah: A Commentary, Hermeneia (Fortress Press, 2023), 34. ↩︎
12. Ben Zvi, “Jonah,” 1189. See also Sasson, Jonah, 82-83; W. Dennis Tucker Jr., Jonah: A Handbook on the Hebrew Text (Baylor University Press, 2006), 16. ↩︎
13.  וַיֵּ֤רֶד בָּהּ֙ (wayyēred bāh). ↩︎
14. See Coomber, “Jonah,” 862; Niditch, Jonah, 34.  ↩︎
15. Ben Zvi, “Jonah,” 1189. See also Sasson, Jonah, 83-84; Tucker, Jonah, 17. ↩︎
16. John Kaltner, “Jonah,” in The SBL Study Bible, edited by Steven L. McKenzie, Kristin De Troyer, and F. Scott Spencer (HarperOne, 2023), 1259. ↩︎
17. Richard Elliot Friedman, The Exodus: How It Happened and Why It Matters (HarperOne, 2017), 214. ↩︎