Jonah became a byword for a bringer of bad luck

Posted in Bible, Disasters, Language, Religion, Superstition on Friday, 16 August 2013

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This edited article about the language of the Bible originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 374 published on 15 March 1969.

Jonah, picture, image, illustration

Jonah is thrown overboard

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?”

Poor Jonah! His name has become one of the most often-quoted of any in the Bible.

Apart 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. Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 12, verse 40).

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. It was written by a Hebrew writer whose name we do not know, three or four centuries before the birth of Christ. 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.

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.

The first thing to be noticed is that Jonah was running away from something which God wanted him to do. 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. 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. So he ran away, and hoped to escape God’s notice by crossing the sea to a foreign land.

In the course of the voyage, a violent storm arose. This seems to have been quite unexpected by the ship’s crew, who had counted on a calm passage. They could not imagine what had gone wrong, so they began to question the passengers. When Jonah told them, that he had disobeyed God and was running away from Him, the sailors felt that here was the cause of all their troubles.

By now Jonah was so depressed and ashamed that he no longer cared what happened to him, so he let them throw him overboard into the raging sea. It was then, according to the story, that the storm ceased, and Jonah was saved from drowning by the “great fish,” which swallowed him whole and three days later vomited him up on dry land!

The next thing to notice is that God gave Jonah a second chance to obey Him. Again He asked Jonah to go to Nineveh and warn its people to mend their ways. And this time Jonah obeyed. To his surprise, the people listened to him, and the king ordered everyone in his kingdom to give up their evil practices and to obey the laws of the one true God of whom Jonah had spoken to them.

So Jonah was really a missionary, one of the first about whom we read in the Bible. This book about him was intended to teach the people of Jerusalem that they must not keep their knowledge of God to themselves, but must be willing to share it, even with people whom they did not like.

Such a message is just as important for us today, and it would be a pity to forget it by thinking of a “Jonah” only as a bringer of bad luck!

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