In my list of books of the Bible for atheist bible appreciators, I put Jonah first, which is maybe a somewhat unusual choice. But after my cover-to-cover read through of the Bible, I think Jonah is the funniest book of the Bible.

In summary, Jonah is commanded by God to go up to Nineveh and prophesy doom there. Instead, he attempts to flee to Tarshish, but finds himself caught in a storm on a ship crewed by Gentile mariners. With the ship about to sink, the mariners wake and question a sleeping Jonah, who lets slip that he is the cause of the storm and tells them to throw him into the sea, but they instead try to reach shore. Failing that, the pious mariners pray to the Lord, toss the troublesome prophet overboard, and convert. Jonah is swallowed by the "great fish" or whale, prays a somewhat odd and patchwork prayer of thanksgiving inside it, and after three days and three nights is spit up alive.

After entering the city of Nineveh - the later capital of the hegemonic Assyrian empire that would go on to destroy the Northern Kingdom of Israel - Jonah prophesies a single line of doom, "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown." The city immediately believes him and repents. The king of Nineveh declares that everyone in the city, from him down to the animals, will fast, wear sackcloth, and beg God for forgiveness:

But let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and cry mightily unto God: yea, let them turn every one from his evil way, and from the violence that [is] in their hands.

God therefore decides to spare the city, which makes Jonah exceedingly angry. He goes and sits outside the city, telling God he knew this would happen because God is so gracious and merciful, and wishes for death. The sun beats down on him, so God grows a gourd to shade him, which Jonah takes some pleasure in. God then makes a worm to kill the gourd, and blasts Jonah with wind and sun, angering him again. Finally, God delivers the last lines of the book:

Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night: And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and [also] much cattle?

We don't usually think of the Bible as being funny, but Jonah really seems to be something of a satire on the prophetic genre, using contrast.

In Jeremiah, which Jonah references heavily via borrowed phrases, the prophet fights to save the kingdom of Judah over the course of years. He speaks eloquently and forcefully. He forgoes the prestige and wealth earned by false prophets who prophesy good times. He wears a wooden yoke as a sign of Judah's need to submit to Babylon or suffer destruction, until the false prophet Hananiah (no relation) rips it off him. He is mocked and thrown down a cistern for his troubles. Jeremiah is the exemplar of a great prophet, and the kingdom of Judah completely ignores him, to its doom and his reduction to a miserable exile in Egypt after the Babylonian conquest. If the test of a truthful prophet is not just that their predictions come true, but that they don't benefit at all from the telling, Jeremiah passes with flying colors.

Meanwhile, Jonah is called to prophesy and immediately runs away. He sleeps through the storm like a fool while the far more pious Gentile mariners try to figure out what's going on without him. He trudges to Nineveh, says a single stock line... and the entire city immediately converts in exaggerated fashion. Even the animals put on sackcloth and beg God for forgiveness!

Jonah's response to this is to petulantly pout outside the city that God was too merciful, so Jonah's preaching of doom was false. One way to read this is in light of Deuteronomy 18:21-22:

And if thou say in thine heart, How shall we know the word which the LORD hath not spoken? When a prophet speaketh in the name of the LORD, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him.

The test of a prophet is whether what the prophet says comes true. This is something of a bind for the enterprising prophet: if you're too good at your job, what you warned about won't happen! By the Deuteronomy standard, God made Jonah a false prophet, and he's not happy about it:

1 But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry. 2 And he prayed unto the LORD, and said, I pray thee, O LORD, [was] not this my saying, when I was yet in my country? Therefore I fled before unto Tarshish: for I knew that thou [art] a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil.

One must imagine a modern Jonah reluctantly warning about Y2K.

Traditionally, Jonah has been read a few ways. 2 Kings briefly mentions a prophet Jonah but no Nineveh. Classical Jews might have been a bit uncomfortable with the book and its reversals, as Josephus retells Jonah for a Hellenistic audience without the Ninevites' repentance, the sparing of the city, or the gourd: Jonah runs from his assignment, is thrown into the sea and swallowed by a whale, survives and repents of his sins, travels to Nineveh, proclaims their doom, and returns home.

In the Babylonian Talmud, Nineveh is a model of repentance; meanwhile in the Jerusalem Talmud (a divergent interpretive tradition), Nineveh's repentance was performative: they gave back publicly some of what they had stolen, but held back their private ill-gotten wealth. The first view won out in modern Judaism: Jonah is traditionally read on Yom Kippur.

Christians have traditionally linked Jonah to Christ. In Matthew 12:38-41 (paralleled in Luke 11:29-32) Jesus tells the scribes and Pharisees:

38 Then certain of the scribes and of the Pharisees answered, saying, Master, we would see a sign from thee.

39 But he answered and said unto them, An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas [Jonah]: 40 For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. 41 The men of Nineveh shall rise in judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: because they repented at the preaching of Jonas; and, behold, a greater than Jonas is here.

Jonah, with its seeming universalism in the pious Gentile mariners and the Ninevites' repentance, is a natural book for Christians looking to find precedent for Gentile worship of one God. It's somewhat complicated by Jonah's less-than-sterling morals (probably why Matthew has Jesus call himself "greater than Jonas"), by the fact that God describes the repentant Ninevites as unable to "discern between their right hand and their left hand," and by the implicit comparison in God ending the book by saying the city also contains "much cattle."

One interesting read of this is in Halpern and Friedman's Composition and Paronomasia in the Book of Jonah. Jonah is chock-full of puns and homophones, and one of them is between Jonah and Nineveh: ywnh/nynwh. They also speculate a link to fish, nun, so perhaps the whole story is just a comedy of errors: a stupid and malign prophet is brought in an absurd way to save an ignorant people. Thomas Paine reads the book like this, as a Gentile satire against Jewish particularism:

Here is both the winding up of the satire and the moral of the fable. As a satire, it strikes against the character of all the Bible prophets, and against all the indiscriminate judgments upon men, women, and children, with which this lying book, the Bible, is crowded; such as Noah's flood, the destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, the extirpation of the Canaanites, even to the sucking infants, and women with child, because the same reflection, that there are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand, meaning young children, applies to all their cases. It satirizes also the supposed partiality of the Creator for one nation more than for another.

(Young children is one interpretation of people unable to "discern between their right hand and their left." Another is that they lack divine law: left and right are common metaphors for morality in Deuteronomy.)

I think Paine has a point, but I'm not so sure about this entirely cynical reading. Despite the satire, Jonah feels a little too familiar, a little too sympathetic to be nothing but the butt of a joke about the prophetic vice.

Who among us hasn't taken the path of Jonah - fearing the future and running from duty, turning to face it, timidly embracing the risk and warning of it, and then feeling foolish and angry when the future doesn't turn out the way we thought? Who hasn't, out of pride, clung to their vision of what's to come?

Jonah is funny because he feels like what we would do, embedded in the midst of much braver prophets, like a regular guy being included in the Olympics for reference. Like Jonah, inside every prepper and survivalist there's a touch of hoping for the disaster to prove that planning valuable, and half the fun of zombie movies is gaming out how we'd be far more prepared than these dumb shmucks on screen who can't seem to tell their right hand from their infected left or notice the man groaning "brains" in the supermarket has something wrong with him.

Who hasn't gotten more worked up and angry at a houseplant dying than about what's going on in their city? Perhaps more than sixscore thousand of us, who don't know our right hands from our left. Yet Jonah did save Nineveh.