Is Jonah in the Bible? Yes, the Prophet Sent to Nineveh

Yes. Jonah is the prophet of the Old Testament book that bears his name. God sent him to warn the city of Nineveh; he fled by sea instead and was swallowed by a great fish. He is also named in 2 Kings 14:25, and Jesus spoke of “the sign of Jonah.” The name means “dove” in Hebrew.

What does the name Jonah mean?

Jonah is the English form of the Hebrew Yonah, the ordinary Hebrew word for a dove. It is the same word Genesis uses for the dove Noah sent out from the ark (Genesis 8:8–12). The prophet’s father, Amittai, has a name formed from the Hebrew emet, “truth.” Although yonah is a feminine noun, Jonah and its forms in other languages are men’s names, including the Italian Giona.

The Greek form is Ionas, which gives Jonas, the spelling of the King James New Testament and of Portuguese and French Bibles, and a common name in German, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages. Spanish uses Jonás, and Arabic and Turkish use Yunus. In England, Jonas was occasionally used in the Middle Ages, and Jonah became common only after the Protestant Reformation. In the United States Jonah has ranked among the 200 most popular names for boys every year since 1999, reaching 124th in 2023.

Who was Jonah in the Bible?

Outside his own book, the Hebrew Bible mentions Jonah once. 2 Kings 14:25 says that King Jeroboam II of Israel, in the eighth century BC, “restored the border of Israel from Lebo-hamath as far as the Sea of the Arabah, according to the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, which he spoke by his servant Jonah the son of Amittai, the prophet, who was from Gath-hepher.” Gath-hepher was a town in the territory of Zebulun, in Galilee (Joshua 19:13).

The Book of Jonah, one of the twelve Minor Prophets, is told as a narrative, unlike most prophetic books, which collect oracles. The Lord tells Jonah, “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.” Jonah instead goes down to Joppa and takes a ship for Tarshish, “away from the presence of the Lord” (Jonah 1:2–3). A storm threatens the ship, and Jonah tells the sailors that it has come because of him and that they should throw him into the sea. They row hard for land first, then throw him overboard, and “the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights” (Jonah 1:12–17). After Jonah prays from inside the fish, it vomits him out on dry land (Jonah 2:10).

Sent a second time, Jonah goes into Nineveh and calls out, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” The people believe God, fast and put on sackcloth, the king among them, and God relents from the disaster he had threatened (Jonah 3:4–10). Jonah is angry, and he explains why he ran: “I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster” (Jonah 4:2). God makes a plant grow to shade him and then sends a worm that makes it wither. The book ends with God’s question to Jonah: “should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?” (Jonah 4:11).

The Hebrew calls the creature a “great fish.” The whale of “Jonah and the whale” comes from the Greek of Matthew 12:40, which uses kētos, a word for a huge sea creature. William Tyndale translated it “whale” in 1534, and the King James Version followed: “as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly.”

Is Jonah in the New Testament?

Yes. When some scribes and Pharisees asked Jesus for a sign, he answered, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here” (Matthew 12:39–41). Luke’s version says, “as Jonah became a sign to the people of Nineveh, so will the Son of Man be to this generation” (Luke 11:29–32), and Matthew repeats the saying in 16:4. Christians have read this sign of Jonah, the prophet’s three days in the fish, as a figure of the death and resurrection of Jesus.

The name also belongs to the father of the apostle Peter. Jesus calls him “Simon Bar-Jonah” (Matthew 16:17), Aramaic for “son of Jonah,” which Portuguese Bibles render Barjonas. In John’s Gospel, where Jesus calls him “Simon the son of John” (John 1:42; 21:15), the Greek manuscripts differ: modern critical editions read John, and the Greek text used for the King James Version reads Jona.

Was Jonah a real person?

2 Kings 14:25 presents Jonah son of Amittai as a prophet active under Jeroboam II, and many Christians read the book as history, some pointing to Jesus’ references to it. Most modern biblical scholars regard the book as fiction, often at least partly satirical, written centuries after Jonah’s time, in the Persian period or later. They point among other things to the strong influence of Aramaic on its Hebrew.

Is Jonah a Jewish or a Christian name?

Both. Jonah is a Hebrew name, and the book is part of the Jewish Bible and of every Christian Old Testament. Jews read the whole book in Hebrew at the afternoon service of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, for its picture of God forgiving those who repent. The Qur’an also honors him as a prophet, under the name Yunus and the title Dhul-Nun, “the one of the fish,” and its tenth chapter is named after him.

Christians honor Jonah as a saint. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on 21 September, and the Orthodox Church and the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod on 22 September. He was also the most popular biblical subject in early Christian funerary art. The scholar Amy Erickson writes that his image appears “some one hundred times by the middle to late Constantinian period,” in the fourth century, on the walls of the Roman catacombs and on sarcophagi. A shrine on the hill of Nabi Yunus in Mosul, on the site of ancient Nineveh, was revered by Muslims and Christians as his tomb until the Islamic State destroyed it on 24 July 2014.

Related reading

• What Is the “Sign of Jonah” as Mentioned in the Bible?
• How Many Times Is Jonah Mentioned in the Bible?
• Is Your Name in the Bible? A Directory of 231 Names