Jonah probably lived around 750 BCE, and that’s all we know of him. The book of Jonah was written by an anonymous author several centuries later. It is, of course, fiction, not history. It is a parable of sin and absolution.

1. God tells Jonah to go to the city of Ninevah and preach against its wickedness, but Jonah runs away in the opposite direction and boards a ship. God sends a violent storm, which threatens to break the ship apart, and the superstitious crew decide to interrogate the stranger in their midst. Jonah tells the crew that he is running away from his God, and they must throw him into the sea if they are to escape God’s wrath. They do this, somewhat reluctantly, and the sea becomes calm. A ‘great fish’ swallows Jonah and he remains inside the fish for three days and three nights.

2. Jonah prays. He says that God hurled him into the deep, and then God saved him, and that he now understands how great God is. God commands the fish to vomit Jonah up onto dry land, which the fish does.

3. God repeats his command to Jonah to go to the city of Ninevah and preach against its wickedness, and this time he does. On entering Ninevah he proclaims that the city will be ‘overturned’. The people believe Jonah, and so does the king of Ninevah, who declares a fast, and calls on everyone to give up their wicked ways. When God sees that the people have turned from evil he has compassion and doesn’t visit the destruction he promised.

4. Jonah is displeased with this and becomes angry with God, presumably because God just saved a city of Gentiles, and he asks God to kill him. God refuses to do so and tells Jonah that he cares for the people of Ninevah, as well as their cattle, and Jonah has no right to be angry.

A nice-enough story but the lesson it attempts to give is nonsense. The Old Testament God is a fiction. That people think they hear God is undoubtedly true, but the concept of 'God' is the least likely explanation for that phenomenon. The consequences of actions cannot be annulled by a fiction. If good and evil acts have consequences for their initiators, the mechanism is through an extrapolation of the laws of physics, specifically Newton’s Third Law: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The overthrow of cities and civilizations is not a result of the wrath of any deity.

Back to Obadiah. Forward to Micah.