Jonah and the Great Fish

The word of the Lord came to Jonah, son of Amittai: get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and preach against it, because its wickedness had risen up before God. Jonah did exactly the opposite — he got up to flee from the presence of the Lord, went down to Joppa, and boarded a ship bound for Tarshish, as far from Nineveh as he could get.

At sea, the Lord sent out a great wind, and the storm grew so fierce that the ship was about to break apart. The terrified sailors cried out, each to his own god, and threw the cargo overboard — while Jonah lay fast asleep down in the hold. They cast lots to find out who was to blame for the disaster, and the lot fell on Jonah. At his own request, the men threw him into the sea, and it grew calm. That was when the Lord prepared a great fish to swallow Jonah, and he spent three days and three nights in its belly, praying.

The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time — and this time he went. He went through Nineveh preaching that in forty days the city would be destroyed, and the unthinkable happened: from the greatest to the least, the people believed God, proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, and even the king rose from his throne. God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, and he relented from the disaster he had said he would bring upon them.

This displeased Jonah greatly. He went out of the city, sat down in the shade of a plant the Lord himself made grow over his head — and then withered with a worm and a scorching east wind — and wished he could die from the heat and the anger. It was there that God asked him the question that closes the book: if Jonah pitied a plant he did not plant or make grow, should not the Lord have compassion on Nineveh, a city of more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who couldn't tell their right hand from their left?