The story opens with God commissioning His prophet and Jonah rebelling against His will.
1:1 The book and verse open with a conjunction (Heb. wa, Eng. "Now"). Several versions leave this word untranslated because it makes no substantial difference in the story. Its presence in the Hebrew Bible may suggest that this book was part of a larger collection of stories. The books of Judges, 1 Samuel, and Ruth begin the same way and obviously connect with the books that immediately precedes them. However what Jonah might have continued is unknown.
The writer did not record how Jonah received the following message from the Lord. That is inconsequential here though often in other prophetic books the method of revelation that God used appears. Likewise the time of this revelation is a mystery and unessential to the interpretation and application of this story. God's actions are the most important feature in this prophecy.
We do not have any knowledge of Amittai (truthful) other than that he was Jonah's father. The recording of the name of an important person's father was common in Jewish writings, and the presence of Amittai's name in the text argues for the historical reality of Jonah.
There were several unbiblical Jewish traditions about Jonah's origin.20One held that he was the widow's son whom Elijah restored to life (1 Kings 17:17-24). Another held that he had some connection with the Jerusalem temple even though he was from the North. Another credited him with a successful mission to Jerusalem similar to the one to Nineveh. None of these has any biblical support. They were apparently attempts to fit Jonah into other inspired stories and to glorify the prophet.
1:2 Nineveh was indeed a great city whose history stretched back as far as Nimrod who built it as well as Babel and several other cities in Mesopotamia (Gen. 10:11-12).21
Jonah was to "cry against it"(NASB) or "preach against it"(NIV) in the sense of informing its inhabitants that God had taken note of their wickedness. He was not to identify their sins as much as to announce that judgment was imminent. God apparently intended that Jonah's condition as an outsider would have made the Ninevites regard him as a divine messenger. The Lord did not send him to be merely a foreign critic of that culture.
1:3 Tarshish was the name of a great-grandson of Noah through Noah's son Japheth and Japheth's son Javan (Gen. 10:1-4). From then on in the Old Testament the name describes both the descendents of this man and the territory where they settled (cf. 1 Kings 10:22; 22:48; 1 Chron. 7:10). The territory was evidently a long distance from Israel and on the Mediterranean coast (cf. 4:2; Isa. 46:19). It also contained mineral deposits that its residents mined and exported to Tyre and probably other places (Jer. 10:9; Ezek. 27:12). Since the Hebrew word tarshishumeans smelting place or refinery, several such places on the Mediterranean coast bore this name.22Therefore it is impossible to locate the exact spot that Jonah proposed to visit. The identification of Tarshish with Spain is very old going back to Herodotus, the Greek historian, who referred to a Tartessus in Spain.23In any case, Jonah sought to flee by ship from Joppa on Israel's Mediterranean coast and to go to some remote destination that lay in the opposite direction from Nineveh. Joppa lay about 35 miles southwest of Samaria, the capital of the Northern Kingdom.
Why did Jonah leave Israel? He evidently concluded that if he ran away God would select another prophet rather than tracking him down and making him go to Nineveh. By going in the opposite direction from Nineveh Jonah seems to have been trying to get as far away from the judgment he thought the Lord would bring on that city as possible. In short, he seems to have been trying to run away from the Lord's calling and to preserve his own safety at the same time.
However it was "the presence of the Lord"localized in the Promised Land, mentioned twice in this verse for emphasis, that Jonah sought to escape more than anything. Specifically it was God's influence over him. He knew that he could not remove himself from the literal presence of the omnipresent God.
There is a chiasm in this verse. It begins and ends with references to going to Tarshish from the Lord's presence. In the center is another reference to going to Tarshish. This structure stresses the fact that Jonah defiantly repudiated God's call.
Perhaps we can appreciate how Jonah felt about his commission if we compare a similar case. Suppose God called some Jew living during the Hitler regime to go to Berlin and prophesy publicly that God was going to destroy Nazi Germany unless the Germans repented. The possibility of the Germans repenting and God withholding judgment on them would have been totally repugnant to such a Jew. His racial patriotism would have conflicted with his fidelity to God just as Jonah's did.24
Many servants of the Lord throughout history have mistakenly thought that they could get away from the Lord and escape the consequences of His actions by changing their location. This book teaches us that that is not possible (cf. Ps. 139:7, 9).
"An officer in an army may resign the commission of his president or king, but an ambassador of the Lord is on a different basis. His service is for life, and he may not repudiate it without the danger of incurring God's discipline."25
