The Prophet's Complaint
1 But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. 2 He prayed to Yahweh, and said, “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. 3 Therefore now, Yahweh, take, I beg you, my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” 4 Yahweh said, “Is it right for you to be angry?”
Nineveh's rescue strikes Jonah as a catastrophe, and he finally says why he ran.
The Hebrew of verse one is blunter than it reads in English: it was evil to Jonah, a great evil. The word is the same one the book has used for Nineveh's wickedness, for the disaster God threatened, and for the evil ways the city turned from. Everyone else in the story has been moving away from that word. Jonah moves into it. The city's rescue registers with him as the very thing the city was guilty of.
And now, four chapters late, he explains the flight. He ran because he knew — gracious, merciful, slow to anger, abundant in love, relenting from harm. It is the creed God spoke of himself to Moses Exodus 34:6–7, the line Israel prayed back to God in worship for centuries Psalms 103:8 Joel 2:13. Jonah quotes it as a charge.
So his objection is not that God broke a promise. It is that God kept his character. He would rather die than live in a world where that character extends past Israel's border, and he says so. God's reply is a question, not a rebuke, and it is the first of three: is it right for you to be angry? The prophet does not answer it.
settled What this mark means