In the pantheon of great leaders, if we’re honest, we confront one disappointment after another. Our history books, despite the occasional fawning hagiography, mostly tell complex stories of culpability and struggle. Biblical characters have set the bar particularly low, giving us a long list of problematic figures. To name a few: a craven liar willing to trade his wife for safety (Abraham), a fugitive murderer (Moses), a conniving adulterer notorious for his violent abuse of power (David), and a prophet turned warrior who slays hundreds in a fit of righteous rage (Elijah).
On this ignominious list, Jonah stands out for his pettiness. He is a sniveling grumbler who tells God he is “angry enough to die” because God had mercy on the city of Nineveh. When God first gives Jonah his assignment to the great city, he boards a ship heading in the exact opposite direction, promptly goes below deck, and falls asleep. It’s hard not to admire his audacity.
Jonah is an inconvenient figure, ill-suited for moralizing lessons, a questionable prop for cautionary tales: Disobedience is pointless. There’s nowhere you can run from God, so don’t even try—unless you want to get swallowed up by a great big fish. But this moral logic doesn’t hold up in the rest of the story, where we see God going to great lengths to accommodate Jonah’s increasingly sour disposition.
