Jonah and the Sign

Jonah (feast 22 September) is the prophet the Church reads at the very heart of Pascha, for Christ Himself made Jonah’s three days in the fish the one “sign” of His own three days in the tomb. This file treats the sign of Jonah as the paschal type, Jonah’s prayer as the sixth of the Nine Biblical Odes, and the question of the book’s historicity, reported soberly per METHODOLOGY §4.2.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Reluctant Prophet

Jonah the son of Amittai (feast 22 September in the Byzantine calendar; Prophet Jonah, OrthodoxWiki; Jonah, 22 September) is unique among the Twelve: his short book tells a story about the prophet rather than collecting his oracles. Commanded to preach against the great pagan city of Nineveh, Jonah flees in the opposite direction by sea; a storm arises, the sailors cast lots and then, at his own word, cast Jonah into the sea; “the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights” (Jonah 1:17). From the fish’s belly he prays, is vomited onto dry land, goes to Nineveh, and preaches; the city repents in sackcloth, and God spares it — to Jonah’s petulant displeasure, which the book gently rebukes with the lesson of the withered gourd and God’s compassion “for that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand” (Jonah 4:11). The book is, at one level, a parable of the reach of God’s mercy beyond Israel to the nations — a theme the Church reads as a foreshadowing of the calling of the Gentiles.

The Sign of Jonah: The Paschal Type

What makes Jonah central to the Church is that Christ Himself made him a sign of His own death and resurrection. Asked for a sign, Jesus answered: “An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas: for as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:39–40; cf. Luke 11:29–32). Jonah’s three days in the belly of the fish and his emergence alive are thus, on Christ’s own authority, the great Old Testament type of the three days of Christ in the tomb and His Resurrection — the descent into the “belly of hell” (Jonah 2:2) and the rising on the third day. This is why Jonah stands at the center of the paschal season. His prayer from the fish’s belly — “I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the Lord… out of the belly of hell cried I” (Jonah 2:1–9) — supplies the sixth of the Nine Biblical Odes, sung in the canon; and the book of Jonah is read in full as one of the Old Testament lessons at the Vesperal Liturgy of Holy Saturday, the eve of Pascha, precisely because his three days prefigure the Lord’s (the reading is appointed among the fifteen Holy Saturday paremias; see The Lenten Triodion cycle in The Twelve Great Feasts, and the treatment of the Odes in The Prophets in Orthodox Worship). In the paschal hymnography the descent into Hades is repeatedly keyed to Jonah: as Jonah went down into the deep and was brought up, so Christ went down into death and rose. Jonah is, in this sense, the most “paschal” of all the prophets — the one whose whole story the Church reads as an icon of the Resurrection.

The Historicity Question — Reported Soberly

Few Old Testament books have been so debated in the modern period as to their literary character: is the book of Jonah a record of events, or a didactic tale — a parable or “prophetic parable” — teaching the breadth of God’s mercy? Per METHODOLOGY §4.2 this is reported, not adjudicated here.

• Much modern scholarship, and some ancient and modern Christian readers, take the book as a didactic narrative or parable: its features — the un-oracular story-form, the satirical portrait of the prophet, the deliberately universal lesson, the great fish and the rapidly withering gourd — are read as marks of a theological tale designed to teach rather than a chronicle (a widely represented view in critical introductions; see John J. Collins, Introduction to the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed., Fortress, 2018, on Jonah as a didactic story).
• Others, including much of the traditional reading, take the events as historical, on the ground (among others) that Christ speaks of “the men of Nineveh” who “repented at the preaching of Jonas” as real and appeals to Jonah’s three days as a real precedent for His own Resurrection (Matthew 12:40–41).

The Orthodox tradition has not dogmatized the literary question, and it need not: the point on which everything turns — the sign of Jonah as the type of Christ’s three days in the tomb — stands on Christ’s own word regardless of how one weighs the genre of the book. Whether one reads Jonah as history or as inspired parable, the Church reads it christologically and paschally, and venerates Jonah as a prophet and saint (the same posture the tradition takes toward the literary questions generally; see The Historical-Critical Method). What the Church confesses is not a theory of the book’s composition but the mystery to which the book, on the Lord’s own reading, points: the three days, the descent, the rising.

Jonah Among the Twelve

Jonah stands among the twelve “minor” prophets — minor only in the brevity of their books, not in their standing — whom the Church venerates each with a feast and reads in her services (surveyed in the companion file, The Minor Prophets). But Jonah has a place apart, given him by the Gospel: alone among the Twelve, his whole story became, in Christ’s mouth, the sign of the Resurrection, so that the Church cannot keep Pascha without keeping Jonah. The reluctant prophet who fled from God and was swallowed by the deep is remembered wherever the paschal canon is sung and wherever the Holy Saturday lessons are read — a prophet whose disobedience God turned into the clearest of all the prophetic figures of the death and rising of His Son.

See Also

• The Minor Prophets — the rest of the Twelve, surveyed by weight
• The Prophets in Orthodox Worship — Jonah’s prayer as Ode 6, and the Holy Saturday readings
• Daniel and the Three Youths — the furnace and the descent-into-Hades typology
• The Twelve Great Feasts — the paschal cycle in which Jonah is read
• The Historical-Critical Method — the genre question, deferred

References

• The Holy Bible, KJV (Jonah 1–4; Matthew 12:39–41; Luke 11:29–32).
• “Jonah,” OrthodoxWiki (the feast on 22 September in the Byzantine calendar; the life).
• Collins, John J. Introduction to the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2018. (The reading of Jonah as a didactic narrative.)
• The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware (London: Faber, 1978), for the Holy Saturday reading of Jonah and the paschal use of the sign.
• Biblical Odes, OrthodoxWiki (the Prayer of Jonah as the sixth ode).