Why did Jonah run away from God?

The wrong direction

The order is short: “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and preach against it” (Jonah 1:2). Nineveh lay more than 800 kilometers northeast of Jonah’s village, on the Tigris. Jonah goes down to the port of Joppa and pays the fare for Tarshish, most likely Tartessos in Spain, the far western end of the known sea. Twice in one verse the text says he is fleeing “from the presence of Yahweh” (Jonah 1:3).

Chapter 1 never says why. The sailors learn only that he is running, “because he had told them” (Jonah 1:10), and when the storm breaks he would rather be thrown into the sea than turn around (Jonah 1:12). Readers have to wait three chapters for the answer.

The reason he gives

Jonah finally goes, preaches five Hebrew words of doom, and Nineveh repents in sackcloth. God relents. Then the prophet explodes in prayer.

Please, Yahweh, wasn’t this what I said when I was still in my own country? Therefore I hurried to flee to Tarshish, for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness, and you relent of doing harm.

So it was not fear of the Assyrians, nor the length of the road. Jonah ran because he was afraid the mission would work. He quotes back to God the creed of Exodus 34:6, mercy and patience, and he wants none of it spent on Nineveh. In the next breath he asks to die (Jonah 4:3).

Why Nineveh, of all places

Outside his book, the Bible knows Jonah as the prophet who promised King Jeroboam II that Israel would win back its old borders, a word that came true (2 Kings 14:25). He was a prophet of good news for his own people. Nineveh belonged to Assyria, whose kings boasted in stone of burned cities and flayed rebels. Within a few decades of Jeroboam’s reign, Assyria would take Samaria and carry Israel into exile (2 Kings 17:6). The prophet Nahum later rejoiced at Nineveh’s fall: “who hasn’t felt your endless cruelty?” (Nahum 3:19). Many readers think Jonah simply did not want his nation’s future destroyer spared.

What the rabbis and Jerome heard

Ancient interpreters found sharper motives.

• Israel’s honor. The Mekhilta, an early rabbinic commentary on Exodus, says Jonah knew “the gentiles are close to repentance.” If Nineveh turned at once, Israel, which ignored its own prophets, would look guilty beside it. Jonah, the rabbis said, defended the honor of the son, Israel, but not of the Father. Another teacher in the same passage, Rabbi Yochanan, says he boarded the ship meaning to give his life for his people, as Moses had offered his.
• His name as a prophet. Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer says Jonah had already been called a lying prophet once, when he foretold Jerusalem’s destruction and God spared it. By the Torah’s test, a prophet whose word does not happen “has spoken it presumptuously” (Deuteronomy 18:22). If Nineveh was spared, his doom would never come.
• A patriot’s grief. Jerome, in his commentary on Jonah, says the prophet knew that the repentance of the nations would mean the ruin of his own people, and ran as a lover of his country.

The Mekhilta adds that Jonah thought he could escape prophecy by leaving the land of Israel. The psalm had already answered him.

Where could I go from your Spirit? Or where could I flee from your presence? If I ascend up into heaven, you are there. If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, you are there! If I take the wings of the dawn, and settle in the uttermost parts of the sea,

The Quran remembers him too, as the man of the fish who “went off in anger” (Quran 21:87). The book itself never settles his heart. It ends on God’s question, as told in why Jonah is read on Yom Kippur.