Line #20 Literature/BookOfJonah


1	[[WMG:[[center:[-'''Literature/TheBible'''\
2	'''Old Testament/Tanakh'''\
3	[[Literature/BookOfGenesis Genesis]] \| [[Literature/BookOfExodus Exodus]] \| [[Literature/BookOfJoshua Joshua]] \| [[Literature/BookOfJudges Judges]] \| [[Literature/BookOfRuth Ruth]] \| [[Literature/BooksOfSamuel Samuel]] \| [[Literature/BooksOfKings Kings]] \| [[Literature/BookOfEzra Ezra]] \| [[Literature/BookOfNehemiah Nehemiah]] \| [[Literature/BookOfEsther Esther]] \| [[Literature/BookOfJob Job]] \| [[Literature/BookOfPsalms Psalms]] \| [[Literature/BookOfProverbs Proverbs]] \| [[Literature/BookOfEcclesiastes Ecclesiastes]] \| [[Literature/SongOfSongs Songs]] \| [[Literature/BookOfIsaiah Isaiah]] \| [[Literature/BookOfJeremiah Jeremiah]] \| [[Literature/BookOfEzekiel Ezekiel]] \| [[Literature/BookOfDaniel Daniel]] \| [[Literature/BookOfHosea Hosea]] \| [[Literature/BookOfJoel Joel]] \| [[Literature/BookOfAmos Amos]] \| [[Literature/BookOfObadiah Obadiah]] \| '''Jonah''' \| [[Literature/BookOfMicah Micah]] \| [[Literature/BookOfNahum Nahum]] \| [[Literature/BookOfHabakkuk Habakkuk]] \| [[Literature/BookOfZephaniah Zephania]] \| [[Literature/BookOfHaggai Haggai]] \| [[Literature/BookOfZechariah Zechariah]] \| [[Literature/BookOfMalachi Malachi]]\
4	'''Apocrypha/Deuterocanonical'''\
5	[[Literature/BookOfTobit Tobit]] \| [[Literature/BookOfJudith Judith]] \| [[Literature/BooksOfMaccabees Maccabees]]\
6	'''New Testament'''\
7	[[Literature/TheFourGospels Gospels]] \| [[Literature/ActsOfTheApostles Acts]] \| [[Literature/BookOfRomans Romans]] \| [[Literature/BookOfCorinthians Corinthians]] \| [[Literature/BookOfGalatians Galatians]] \| [[Literature/BookOfEphesians Ephesians]] \| [[Literature/BookOfPhilippians Philippians]] \| [[Literature/BookOfColossians Colossians]] \| [[Literature/BooksOfThessalonians Thessalonians]] \| [[Literature/EpistlesToTimothy Timothy]] \| [[Literature/EpistleToTitus Titus]] \| [[Literature/EpistleToPhilemon Philemon]] \| [[Literature/BookOfHebrews Hebrews]] \| [[Literature/EpistleOfJames James]] \| [[Literature/EpistlesOfPeter Peter]] \| [[Literature/EpistlesOfJohn John]] \| [[Literature/EpistleOfJude Jude]] \| [[Literature/BookOfRevelation Revelation]]-]]]]]
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9	[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/1102016064_univ_lsr_xl.jpg]]
10	[[caption-width-right:350:[[TemptingFate Why, what a lovely day for a swim!]]]]
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12	The Book of Jonah comes from the Old Testament and is grouped with the Minor Prophets. You probably know it from the SignatureScene where our hero gets swallowed by a giant fish. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves…
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14	[[Literature/BooksOfKings In the reign of Jeroboam II]], the Lord speaks to His prophet Jonah ben Ammitai, telling him to go to the capital of the Assyrian Empire, Nineveh. The city's wickedness will be punished with destruction if they persist, but God wants Jonah to give them a warning so they have a chance to repent. However, Jonah doesn't want to go to Nineveh, as they had a reputation for being extremely cruel, and instead flees his mission on a voyage to Tarshish in modern-day Spain, which is in the exact opposite direction.
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16	The Lord strikes the ship with a storm, and the sailors cast lots to find out why it's happening. When the lot falls on Jonah, he admits that he's a prophet who's abandoning his mission. He urges the sailors to throw him overboard so that the storm will cease upon his death. Though the sailors try to avoid this by attempting to row back to land, the storm proves too great and they toss Jonah into the sea. Immediately the storm ends.
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18	Jonah doesn't drown, though, because God provides a great fish to swallow him and take him to Nineveh. For three days Jonah prays inside the beast, thanking God for giving him a second chance. The beast then vomits Jonah onto dry land and the prophet treks away to the city.
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20	At Nineveh, Jonah preaches to the people that the entire city will be destroyed in forty days. The Ninevites are struck with fear and spend those days in fasting and mourning, thus convincing God to spare them. The Ninevites rejoice at being given mercy, but Jonah does not celebrate with them. He exits the city soon after and watches it from the plains in hope of God still smiting them anyway.
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22	The Lord provides a vine to grow and give His prophet shade. The next day, though, Jonah wakes up to find the vine dead. He curses God for killing the plant, and the Lord responds to Jonah with a WhatTheHellHero for being more concerned about a plant than for a city filled with thousands of people.
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24	Jonah is also mentioned in 2 Kings 14:25.
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26	Basis of ''WesternAnimation/JonahAVeggieTalesMovie''.
27	-----
28	!!Structure of the book:
29	* Jonah's call, his attempt to flee, and his sacrifice (Jonah chapter 1)
30	* Jonah's song in the belly of the great fish (Jonah chapter 2)
31	* Jonah preaches to Nineveh (Jonah chapter 3)
32	* Jonah is taught a lesson by God (Jonah chapter 4)
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34	-----
35	!!Tropes:
36	* AnAesop:
37	** You can't RefuseTheCall of {{God}}.
38	** It’s wrong to be EgocentricallyReligious, because GodIsGood and has compassion on everybody.
39	** God gives everybody a second chance to make a HeelFaithTurn.
40	* ArtisticLicenseBiology: If the "great fish" is indeed a whale, though obviously this book was written before it was discovered whales are mammals. There's also how Jonah survived inside it without being digested or suffocating, but divine intervention is already a factor here. Then again, ancient cultures like the Hebrews categorized animals based on their habitat rather than their evolutionary line.
41	* TheCallKnowsWhereYouLive: God wants Jonah to deliver a warning to Nineveh. Jonah tries to shirk the mission, but God's intervention prevents him from getting away till he agrees to fulfill the mission.
42	* DeadpanSnarker: When Jonah (post-fish) sits on a hillside overlooking the Nineveh he hates and is angry that his preaching has led to the citizens' repenting and the city not being destroyed, God causes a vine with a gourd on it to grow over Jonah to shade him from the sun. God then causes the vine to die, and when Jonah is angry over the gourd's absence, He replies "You cared about the plant, which you did not work for and which you did not grow, which appeared overnight and perished overnight. And should not I care about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not yet know their right hand from their left, and many beasts as well!"
43	* EasilyForgiven: Jonah thinks Nineveh still deserves to be punished despite repenting, but God lectures him about forgiveness.
44	* EasyEvangelism: Jonah's bare-bones message, "[[TheEndIsNigh Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown]]," causes every person in Nineveh to turn to God and repent.
45	* EatenAlive: Jonah winds up swallowed by the Great Fish when he's thrown overboard. However, this was more a form of rescue via DivineIntervention than with the fish getting a meal, and it vomits him back onto dry land three days later.
46	* EgocentricallyReligious: {{Deconstructed}}. The message of the story is that Jonah is wrong to be more concerned about God providing for his personal comfort than about the fate of the tens of thousands of people in Nineveh.
47	* EitherOrProphecy: The people of Nineveh are clever enough to hear "God will smite you for your evil" as "Repent or be destroyed". The prophet himself didn't catch it, and complains.
48	* TheEndIsNigh: The message Jonah preaches in Nineveh. Turns out, though, God cancels the planned destruction of the city because the people make a HeelFaithTurn.
49	* GettingEatenIsHarmless: Jonah comes out not much the worse for wear after spending three days inside the fish's stomach. DivineIntervention is a factor.
50	* GodIsGood: Far from being eager to smite evildoers, the Almighty gives Jonah a second chance when he definitely didn't deserve it, then spares the entire city of Nineveh when they repent. He even takes the time to teach Jonah AnAesop about mercy and compassion.
51	* HappilyEverBefore: Nineveh may have repented now, but eventually the city becomes wicked again, as God declares in the Book of Isaiah that now He ''will'' destroy it. (The prophetic [[Literature/BookOfNahum book of Nahum]] also spells doom for Nineveh.) Plus, Assyria became the conqueror of the northern kingdom of Israel.
52	* HeelFaceTown: The city of Nineveh is so wicked that when God tells the prophet Jonah to go and preach to it, Jonah tries to run away. When he eventually turns around and preaches to Nineveh, the [[HeelFaithTurn city repents]]. '''Jonah 3:8-10''':
53	--> "They shall be covered with sackcloth—man and beast—and shall cry mightily to God. Let everyone turn back from his evil ways and from the injustice of which he is guilty. Who knows but that God may turn and relent? He may turn back from His wrath, so that we do not perish." God saw what they did, how they were turning back from their evil ways. And God renounced the punishment He had planned to bring upon them, and did not carry it out.
54	* HeelFaithTurn:
55	** Jonah's prayer in Chapter 2 is a widely cited example of repentance, used in the [[UsefulNotes/{{Judaism}} Jewish liturgy]] for [[UsefulNotes/JewishHolidays Yom Kippur]]. However, in-story Jonah had a few more lessons to learn about compassion for others even after he repented for himself.
56	** Every single person in the city of [[HeelFaceTown Nineveh]] starts repenting when they hear Jonah's message, and the king decrees that everyone should fast and wear sackcloth--even the animals.
57	* HeroicSacrifice: Jonah probably didn't expect to survive being thrown overboard. It's a more literal sacrifice than usual because his life is actually being offered to appease a God.
58	* AMillionIsAStatistic: Defied. [[GodIsGood God]] calls [[EgocentricallyReligious Jonah]] out on showing no concern as to whether 120,000 people in Nineveh repent or not. To be specific, Jonah tried running away to Tarshish when he was told to go to Nineveh. Then, after spending three days in the belly of a whale, he warns Nineveh of its imminent destruction, only for the Ninevites to, surprise-surprise, ''repent''! Jonah is furious and [[{{Manchild}} throws a temper tantrum about it]], but God reminds him that He created all 120,000 of these people, including little children, and as many cattle.
59	* NoEnding: The story abruptly ends after God's WhatTheHellHero speech. We never see if Jonah learned his lesson, if he did anything else, or if he just died there in the desert. On the other hand, [[UndeadAuthor who else would have written such a frank and unflattering portrayal of Jonah, other than Jonah himself]]?
60	* NoOntologicalInertia: After Jonah is thrown in the sea, the storm suddenly ends and the ocean becomes as calm as can be.
61	* PetTheDog: Compared to the wrathful God associated with most of the Old Testament, God here is incredibly benevolent to Nineveh despite their evil, even defying AMillionIsAStatistic by saying He cares for everyone in the city, up to and including the cows.
62	* PrayerIsALastResort: Inside the fish, Jonah prays in repentance, noting that it took him going to the bottom of the ocean before he realized he needed to change his ways. God gives him a second chance anyway.
63	* RefusingTheCall: Jonah tried doing this with his voyage. [[YouCantFightFate It didn't work]]. But you do have to give the guy credit for attempting to run to the literal end of the Earth (for people in the 8th Century BC).
64	* SeaMonster: This would be a more accurate translation of the Hebrew ''dag gadol'', "great fish," which can mean any type of giant sea creature in general. It ''could'' mean "whale," [[CommonKnowledge but not exclusively]].
65	* SelfDefeatingProphecy: Jonah's prophecy that Nineveh will be destroyed frightens the Ninevites into repenting, and since they repent, God has mercy and decides not to destroy them. Significantly, Jonah reveals that he was GenreSavvy enough to know that this was God's plan all along, and he ran away because he didn't want the Ninevites to be spared. God calls him out for not wanting mercy for his enemies.
66	* SkewedPriorities: Called out by God in the closing words. Jonah is so angry about the plant's death that ''HE'' wants to die. Yet he cared nothing about letting thousands of Ninevites die. See YankTheDogsChain thought.
67	* SmiteMeOhMightySmiter: Jonah petulantly prays for God to take away his life.
68	* SwallowedWhole: Yep, you remember the part where Jonah meets the Great Fish...
69	* SymbolicHeroRebirth: "In the belly of a whale" is often used to refer to a period in a story where the protagonist is caught in a situation with no hope. However, in the story of Jonah the whale is actually ''not'' a punishment but God's way of saving Jonah from drowning. It also represented him giving Jonah a second chance by taking him back to land. Though the Bible itself compares being in the whale as a trial, when Christ compares the three days in the whale with his upcoming three days dead before resurrection. Jonah's three days in the whale were ultimately for a good purpose, since he was saved from death as well as allowed to continue living and preaching the message of God, but was nevertheless painful, unpleasant, and something no one in their right mind would want to go through.
70	* ThwartedEscape: Jonah, RefusingTheCall, books passage as far as possible in the opposite direction from Nineveh. Turns out, it's not that easy to escape from TheOmnipotent.
71	* TooSpicyForYogSothoth: After three days, the Great Fish pukes Jonah out onto dry land.
72	* WhatTheHellHero: One delivered by God has got to hurt. Specifically, God chews out Jonah for caring more about his shade plant than all the people of Nineveh, which God specially points out includes those who don't know right from left and much cattle. Essentially, thousands of innocent children and animals.
73	* WrongGenreSavvy: Jonah explains to God that he didn't want to preach in Nineveh because he hated the Ninevites and feared they might repent, meaning that since God is compassionate and merciful, He would cancel the destruction of the city. God replies that yes, that was kind of the whole ''point.''
74	* YankTheDogsChain: God provided a plant to give shade for Jonah, only to kill it the next day. Then caused a hot desert wind to give Jonah heatstroke. That'd get him quite mad. [[{{Jerkass}} He kind of deserves it, though]].

Context Literature / BookOfJonah