Why is the book of Jonah read on Yom Kippur?

When Jonah is read

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, falls in September or October: about twenty-five hours of fasting, confession and prayer, from sunset to sunset. Leviticus gives its promise: “You shall be clean from all your sins before Yahweh” (Leviticus 16:30).

The morning service reads Leviticus 16, the old ritual of the high priest. In the afternoon service, Minchah, comes the whole book of Jonah, read aloud from the first verse to the last. The Babylonian Talmud already names it as the afternoon reading (Megillah 31a). Most communities close with three verses from Micah that sound almost like a reply:

Who is a God like you, who pardons iniquity, and passes over the disobedience of the remnant of his heritage? He doesn’t retain his anger forever, because he delights in loving kindness.

A verse later Micah adds: “You will cast all their sins into the depths of the sea.” After a book in which a prophet goes down into those depths and comes back, the line is hard to miss.

A city that turned around

Nineveh was a great city of Assyria, the empire Israel feared most. Jonah walks a day into it and preaches five Hebrew words: “In forty days, Nineveh will be overthrown!” No call to repent, no hope offered. Yet the people believe God, fast and put on sackcloth. The king sits in ashes and orders everyone to turn “from the violence that is in his hands.”

God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way. God relented of the disaster which he said he would do to them, and he didn’t do it.

That verse is the heart of the custom. The Mishnah describes the public fasts of ancient Israel, when an elder stood before the people and pointed out what the verse leaves out: God did not see the sackcloth and the fasting of Nineveh, but its works. A fast with no change of life misses the point.

Mercy in Jonah’s own mouth

When God spares the city, Jonah is furious, and finally says why he ran: “I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness, and you relent of doing harm” (Jonah 4:2). These are nearly the words God proclaimed to Moses on Sinai (Exodus 34:6–7), which Jewish tradition calls the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy. On Yom Kippur they are chanted again and again, through the penitential prayers and into Neilah, the closing service at dusk.

Tradition also remembers Yom Kippur as the day Moses came down with the second tablets, after the golden calf (Talmud, Taanit 30b), so the day is tied to that first forgiveness; see the Ten Commandments. Jonah throws the same creed back at God as a complaint. He wanted mercy for himself and judgment for Nineveh. Commentators have long noticed the irony: on the day Jews ask for that mercy, they read about a prophet who resented it for others.

No place to run, and no last word

The book opens with a man trying to flee “from the presence of Yahweh” (Jonah 1:3), and every step down, to Joppa, into the ship, into the sea, shows there is nowhere to go. It ends with a question God asks and Jonah never answers (Jonah 4:11). At Rosh Hashanah, which opens the ten days that end on Yom Kippur, synagogues read of Abraham and the binding of Isaac. Jonah closes the season by handing its question to everyone listening. Most people know the story for the great fish (was it a whale?). In the synagogue on Yom Kippur, the fish is the least of it.