Jonah 1:3

Jonah sets out upon his journey; not to Nineveh, however, but to flee to Tarshish, i.e., Tartessus, a Phoenician port in Spain (see at Gen 10:4 and Isa 23:1), "from the face of Jehovah," i.e., away from the presence of the Lord, out of the land of Israel, where Jehovah dwelt in the temple, and manifested His presence (cf. Gen 4:16); not to hide himself from the omnipresent God, but to withdraw from the service of Jehovah, the God-King of Israel. (Note: Marck has already correctly observed, that "this must not be understood as flight from the being and knowledge of God, lest we should attribute to the great prophet gross ignorance of the omnipresence and omniscience of God; but as departure from the land of Canaan, the gracious seat of God, outside which he thought, that possibly, at any rate at that time, the gift and office of a prophet would not be conferred upon him.") The motive for this flight was not fear of the difficulty of carrying out the command of God, but, as Jonah himself says in Jon 4:2, anxiety lest the compassion of God should spare the sinful city in the event of its repenting. He had no wish to co-operate in this; and that not merely because "he knew, by inspiration of the Holy Spirit, that the repentance of the Gentiles would be the ruin of the Jews, and, as a lover of his country, was actuated not so much by envy of the salvation of Nineveh, as by unwillingness that his own people should perish," as Jerome supposes, but also because he really grudged salvation to the Gentiles, and feared lest their conversion to the living God should infringe upon the privileges of Israel above the Gentile world, and put an end to its election as the nation of God. (Note: Luther has already deduced this, the only true reason, from Jon 4:1-11, in his Commentary on th…

In this chapter we have, I. A command given to Jonah to preach at Nineveh (Jon 1:1, Jon 1:2). II. Jonah's disobedience to that command (Jon 1:3). III. The pursuit and arrest of him for that disobedience by a storm, in which he was asleep (Jon 1:4-6). IV. The discovery of him, and his disobedience, to be the cause of the storm (Jon 1:7-10). V. The casting of him into the sea, for the stilling of the storm (Jon 1:11-16). VI. The miraculous preservation of his life there in the belly of a fish (Jon 1:17), which was his reservation for further services.

1:3 Jonah’s attempt to get away from the Lord was futile. One cannot escape God (Ps 139:7-10) or disobey his will without consequence (Deut 8:5). Jonah’s reluctance to go to Nineveh is understandable, however. Assyria was an enemy of Israel known for its violence (Jon 3:8; see also Nah 3:1-4). Jonah did not want these non-Israelites to have the opportunity to repent and be saved (Jon 4:2). • Joppa was a key port city on the Mediterranean coast (2 Chr 2:16; Ezra 3:7); it is now a suburb of modern Tel-Aviv. • Tarshish was possibly the port city of Tartessos in Spain, in which case Jonah was attempting to flee as far as imaginable in the opposite direction from Nineveh. Tarsus in Asia Minor is another possibility. Some think Tarshish is a general reference to the sea or to any destination accessible by sea.