Jonah son of Amittai יונה בן אמיתי

The same Jonah son of Amittai is named in the book of Kings: it was by his word that Jeroboam II restored Israel's border from Lebo-hamath to the sea of the Arabah. So before the Nineveh affair he was a prophet whose word came true in his own people's favour.

The assignment was the opposite: go to Nineveh, capital of Assyria, and announce its overthrow. Jonah rose — and went the other way, to Tarshish. The rest is known: the storm, the lots, "take me and throw me into the sea," three days in the belly of the fish and the prayer from inside it, read as a chapter of its own.

In Nineveh he does go, and speaks five words: "forty days more, and Nineveh is overturned." The city fasts from the king down to the cattle, and the evil is averted. And here the book turns: the prophet is distressed. He says aloud what he fled from: I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God — that is, I knew You would forgive, and I would be the man whose word did not come true.

The last scene is the kikayon, a plant that grew overnight and withered overnight. Jonah pities a plant he did not labour over. And the question the book ends on, and gives no answer to: "and should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left, and much cattle?"

The book is read at the afternoon service of Yom Kippur — a reminder that repentance is accepted from strangers too, and that one's own assignment cannot be outrun.