The Book of Jonah is more a short story about the prophet than a collection of his prophecies. Jonah is commanded by God to warn the forty thousand inhabitants of Nineveh, a people hostile to the Israelites, that their evil actions will have dire consequences. Worried that the people of Nineveh will indeed repent and, in so doing, make the unrepentant Jews look bad, Jonah seeks to avoid God’s command by fleeing from Jaffa to Tarshish. He reasons that the God of the Jews is restricted to the land of the Jews, and cannot exert power outside that land. The Jonah story, a tale about a prophet rather than the teachings of a prophet, makes this one point: There is only one God and that God is God of all creation. Jonah is tossed into the sea to save the ship from destruction and is carried off to Nineveh inside a great fish. Jonah preaches the word of God to the people of Nineveh and they do repent and earn God’s forgiveness, thus proving the point that God is the God of all peoples.
