The Lord said, “Are you really so very angry?”

The Lord said to Jonah son of Amittai,

Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the stomach of the fish

The Lord said to Jonah a second time,

So they cried out to the Lord, “Oh, please, Lord, don’t let us die on account of this man! Don’t hold us guilty of shedding innocent blood. After all, you, Lord, have done just as you pleased.”

The men feared the Lord greatly, and earnestly vowed to offer lavish sacrifices to the Lord.

Then the Lord commanded the fish and it disgorged Jonah on dry land.

So now, Lord, kill me instead, because I would rather die than live!”

Instead, Jonah immediately headed off to Tarshish to escape from the commission of the Lord. He traveled to Joppa and found a merchant ship heading to Tarshish. So he paid the fare and went aboard it to go with them to Tarshish far away from the Lord.

He said to them, “I am a Hebrew! And I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.”

(2:1)The Lord sent a huge fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the stomach of the fish three days and three nights.

and said, “I called out to the Lord from my distress, and he answered me; from the belly of Sheol I cried out for help, and you heard my prayer.

I went down to the very bottoms of the mountains; the gates of the netherworld barred me in forever; but you brought me up from the Pit, O Lord, my God.

When my life was ebbing away, I called out to the Lord, and my prayer came to your holy temple.

So Jonah went immediately to Nineveh, as the Lord had said. (Now Nineveh was an enormous city – it required three days to walk through it!)

The Lord said, “You were upset about this little plant, something for which you have not worked nor did you do anything to make it grow. It grew up overnight and died the next day.

He prayed to the Lord and said, “Oh, Lord, this is just what I thought would happen when I was in my own country. This is what I tried to prevent by attempting to escape to Tarshish! – because I knew that you are gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in mercy, and one who relents concerning threatened judgment.

Hearing this, the men became even more afraid and said to him, “What have you done?” (The men said this because they knew that he was trying to escape from the Lord, because he had previously told them.)

The Lord God appointed a little plant and caused it to grow up over Jonah to be a shade over his head to rescue him from his misery. Now Jonah was very delighted about the little plant.