Jonah

Jonah is four chapters long and it is not really a book about a fish. The fish gets two verses. The rest is about a prophet who is asked to go to the worst people he can think of and decides he would rather drown.

Jonah son of Amittai is a real name from Israel's history. He turns up in 2 Kings 14:25 as a prophet who served during the reign of Jeroboam II, which puts him in the eighth century before Christ. Nineveh was the great city of Assyria, the empire that would eventually destroy the northern kingdom of Israel, and Assyria's reputation for cruelty toward the people it conquered was well earned. When God tells Jonah to go and preach there, the request is not a travel inconvenience. It is a request to warn the people who are going to burn your country down.

So Jonah runs, in the opposite direction, and the story follows him down: down to the port, down into the ship, down into the hold, down into the sea. He is thrown overboard by sailors who do not want to do it, swallowed, and delivered back to the beginning of the assignment. He goes. He preaches what may be the shortest and least enthusiastic sermon in the Bible, eight words in the translation used here, and the entire city repents.

And Jonah is furious. That is the part most retellings leave out. The last chapter is a grown man sulking under a plant because God forgave the people he wanted destroyed, and the book ends with a question God asks him that he never answers. The reader is left holding it instead.

Jesus referred to Jonah more than once, and treated the story as pointing to something beyond itself.

For a family, this one is unusually direct. Children get the adventure straight away. The harder question, the one about whether we actually want mercy for people we do not like, sits right there on the surface where everyone can see it.