This seems to have been quite unexpected by the ship’s crew, who had counted on a calm passage. In the course of the voyage, a violent storm arose. So he ran away, and hoped to escape God’s notice by crossing the sea to a foreign land. Jonah knew all about Nineveh he hated the place and the people who lived in it, and he saw no reason for God to care about them at all. God had asked him to go to a very wicked city called Nineveh, to try to persuade its inhabitants to give up their evil ways. The first thing to be noticed is that Jonah was running away from something which God wanted him to do. What the story is trying to teach is much more important than whether or not a great fish could in fact swallow a man, or whether a man could survive for three days inside such a creature. Some people believe that it is an account of something which actually happened others look on it as a story made up to teach people a lesson – in other words, a parable. It was written by a Hebrew writer whose name we do not know, three or four centuries before the birth of Christ. The Book of the Old Testament which bears Jonah’s name was not written by him, but is a story in which someone called Jonah is the chief character. Poor Jonah! His name has become one of the most often-quoted of any in the Bible.Īpart from this idea of a “Jonah” as a bringer of bad luck, it is almost impossible to mention Jonah without referring also to “the whale.” People often make jokes about “Jonah and the whale,” even though the Book of Jonah speaks not of a whale, but of “a great fish” (chapter one, verse 17 the mention of a whale comes in St. If one of your school sports teams has had a long run of lost matches, and if these seem to be due to sheer bad luck rather than to poor play, someone may say, “I wonder who’s the Jonah?”
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