JONAH - INTRODUCTION
A
Bible Study - Commentary by Jim Melough
Copyright
2002 James Melough
A casual reading of this
little book is likely to evoke the question, Why is it commonly regarded as a
prophetic book when there isn’t a word of prophecy in it?
It is the Lord Himself,
however, who has declared Jonah to be a prophet, “An evil and adulterous
generation seeketh after a sign, and there shall no sign be given to it, but
the sign of the prophet, Jonah; for as Jonah was three days and three nights
in the belly of the great fish, so shall the Son of man be three days and
three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh shall rise in
judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it; because they repented at
the preaching of Jonah; and, behold, a greater than Jonah is here,” Mt
12:39-41.
(Many have had a problem with
the “three days and three nights” of the Lord’s entombment, but the
explanation is that with the Jews, any part of a day was considered as a whole
day, so that the term “three days and three nights” is not necessarily to be
understood as the equivalent of three twenty-four days and nights, in relation
either to the Lord or to Jonah).
The assurance that Jonah’s
experience is also a symbolic or typological foreshadowing of the Lord’s Own
death, burial, and resurrection, declares in addition that the book of Jonah
is prophetically unique: it foretells more than the experience of peoples and
nations: it sets forth in graphic figure the experience of none other than the
Lord Jesus Christ Himself.
The Lord’s revelation of the
symbolic and typological character of the book has furnished the key that has
enabled us to see the still further scope of the prophecy: it is also the
revelation of the experience of the nation Israel, not at the hand of the
Gentiles, but of God Himself directly. Scofield, for example, writes,
“Jonah’s character and God’s dealing with him foreshadow the subsequent
history of the nation of Israel: outside the land, a trouble to the Gentiles,
yet witnessing to them; cast out, but miraculously preserved; in future
deepest distress calling upon the Lord as Savior, finding deliverance and then
becoming missionaries to the Gentiles (Zech.8:7-23).”
Nothing is known of the
prophet other than what is recorded in the book itself and in 2 Ki 14:25, from
which we learn that he ministered either before or during the reign of
Jeroboam 11 (793-753 BC), and that he was, “... the son of Amittai, meaning
my faithfulness ... who was of Gath-hepher, Gath meaning a wine-press,
and hepher, a pit: shame,” the two names combining to mean
wine-press of a pit or wine-press of shame. Since Gath-hepher was
a Zebulunite town we may conclude that Jonah was also a Zebulunite. His own
name, incidentally, means a dove.
Relative to Gath-hepher, the
late Dr Harry Ironside has made the following instructive comment, ”... the
fact that he was born in Gath-hepher is of moment, refuting, as it
does, the self-confident words of the Jewish doctors, ‘Search and look, for
out of Galilee ariseth no prophet.’ Gath-hepher was in Galilee....”
Because virtually all of the
book is in the third person, some have concluded that Jonah was not the
author; but most scholars accept the work as being his, not that the
authorship in any way affects the validity of the prophecy, it being clear
that the words are those of the living God, and not of the amanuensis He
choose to use.
Others have drawn attention to
the interesting fact that Nineveh may have been prepared to receive the
prophet’s words because of two devastating famines, one in 765, the other in
759 BC, and a total eclipse of the sun on June 15, 763 BC, such phenomena
being viewed by the ancients as expressions of the anger of the gods.
[Jonah 1]