Jonah 4:5

These verses follow directly on Jonah’s angry prayer in Jonah 4:1–4. God had seen the city repent and had spared it, and Jonah was displeased. Nineveh was the capital of Assyria, a powerful and cruel empire and a serious threat to Israel, and for a Hebrew prophet the thought of God showing mercy to such an enemy was deeply unsettling, even offensive. Jonah had asked the LORD to take his life, and the LORD had answered him with a question.

“So Jonah went out of the city.” The verb is yâtsâʼ, to go or come out. He leaves the city where God has just shown mercy and sits down on its east side. The word for sat, yâshab, means to sit down and also to dwell or remain, and Jonah settles in one fixed place. He makes himself a booth, a çukkâh, which is a hut or temporary shelter of the kind people put together for shade in hot country, and he sits “under it in the shadow”. Then the verse gives his reason: he sat there “till he might see what would become of the city.” The verb râʼâh is the ordinary word for seeing, and it is also used of watching to observe how something turns out. Jonah means to watch.

Three times in these verses God “prepared” something: a gourd in verse 6, a worm in verse 7, and a vehement east wind in verse 8. The verb is mânâh, which in this form means to appoint. It is the same verb used when the LORD prepared a great fish for Jonah (Jonah 1:17). So the great fish near the start of the story and the small worm near its end both come by God’s appointment, at the time he chooses, to do what he gives them to do.

The God who rules the nations rules a plant, a grub and the weather just as surely. The psalmist calls on the “stormy wind fulfilling his word” to praise him (Psalm 148:8) and marvels at the wisdom in which God made all his works (Psalm 104:24), and Job says that the life of every living thing is in his hand (Job 12:10). Everything that happens to Jonah outside Nineveh comes from God’s hand and serves God’s purpose.

The names of God in these verses carry the same point. Verse 6 says “the LORD God”, Yᵉhôvâh Elohim, joining the name of the LORD who keeps covenant with his people to the name of God in his power over all things. Verses 7 and 8 say simply “God”, ʼĕlôhîym, the supreme God over all. The one God gives the shade and takes it away, and both the gift and the loss belong to his patient dealing with Jonah.

The LORD God “made it to come up over Jonah”, and the gourd grew quickly and directly over him. Its purpose is given twice over: “that it might be a shadow over his head, to deliver him from his grief.” The word for grief, ra, is the common word for evil or harm, and here it is Jonah’s misery: the heat of the sun on him, and with it his distress and anger. God cares for his prophet’s body and his troubled heart at once, at the very time Jonah is sulking against God’s will. The LORD is the shade of his people (Psalm 121:5), and he shows it here to a man who has given him little reason.

“So Jonah was exceeding glad of the gourd.” The verb sâmach means to rejoice or be glad, and the word behind “exceeding” is gâdôwl, great, so Jonah’s gladness was great. The man who was furious that a great city was spared is greatly glad of a plant that shades his own head. Heaven rejoices over one sinner who repents (Luke 15:7), and Jonah’s joy runs the other way, toward his own comfort. This sets up all that follows, because God is about to take the plant away and ask Jonah about his feelings for it.

“But God prepared a worm when the morning rose the next day.” The “But” turns the story. Jonah’s gladness lasts only until the next dawn: the word for morning is shachar and for the next day mochŏrâth, and the comfort God gave on one day is gone early on the next. The word for worm, tôwlâʻ, means a worm, maggot or grub, and the same word can name the crimson grub from which scarlet dye was made. God uses one of the smallest creatures he has made to carry out his purpose.

The worm “smote the gourd that it withered.” To smite, nâkâh, is to strike or attack, and to wither, yâbêsh, is to dry up the way grass and plants do. The same verb is used elsewhere of becoming weak or being ashamed, and here it is the plant that dries up and its shade that is lost. The dawn also brings the sun, and the next verse shows what that means for a man whose shade is gone.

“And it came to pass, when the sun did arise, that God prepared a vehement east wind.” The new day brings Jonah fresh suffering. The word for vehement, chărîyshîy, comes from a root meaning silence, and Strong’s explains it as a quiet, that is a sultry, wind. The phrase ruach qadim charishit describes the hot, dry wind that blows in from the desert to the east, known as the sirocco or khamsin. Such winds intensify the heat, dry out plants and wear people down to exhaustion and faintness. “And the sun beat upon the head of Jonah”, the very head the gourd had shaded, “that he fainted.”

“Wished in himself to die” is in Hebrew shâʼal nephesh mûwth, words for asking, for the soul or self, and for dying, so Jonah asks with his whole self for death. The plain verb to die is mûwth, and in “better for me to die” the word is mâveth, death. “Better” is ṭôwb, good in its widest sense, and “to live” is from chay, alive or life. So Jonah weighs life against death and judges death the good one. He says almost exactly what he said in verse 3, and the repeated words show how deep and stubborn his despair has become.

Others in Scripture have asked to die. Elijah asked the LORD to take his life (1 Kings 19:4), and Job asked why life is given to the bitter in soul who long for death (Job 3:20–21). Jonah’s grief has its own cause: he is angry over a dead plant and over a city that God has spared.

God gave Jonah the gourd and then took it away to teach him, through something he could feel, how small his own pity was beside God’s. Jonah had great joy over a plant God had grown for him, and then grief when it died. In the verses that follow God asks him, “Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd?” and then sets the two side by side: “Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow … 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?” (Jonah 4:9–11). Sixscore thousand is a hundred and twenty thousand people. If Jonah could grieve for a plant that lasted a night, God has far greater reason to care for a great city full of people.

The heat and the wind were real hardship, and they came from the God who is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy” (Psalm 103:8). They were teaching, given with patience, to bring Jonah’s misplaced priorities into the light and to widen his understanding of God’s mercy. God uses comfort and discomfort alike in the lives of his servants, and Paul says that God works all things together for good to those who love him (Romans 8:28).

The gourd also shows how quickly a comfort of this life can come and go. Jesus teaches his disciples to trust their Father for food and clothing and to seek his kingdom first (Matthew 6:25–34), and Paul says that the things we see are temporary while the things unseen are eternal (2 Corinthians 4:18). Jonah was greatly glad of a plant and furious over a city, and God’s question brings to light how wrongly his heart had weighed the two.

Jonah sat outside the city waiting to watch judgment fall. God sent his Son into the world so that the world through him might be saved (John 3:17). Jesus came to seek and to save the lost (Luke 19:10), and he lamented over Jerusalem when it refused him (Matthew 23:37), a heart grieved by their rejection where Jonah’s was angered by Nineveh’s salvation. After his resurrection he sent his disciples to preach repentance and forgiveness of sins among all nations (Luke 24:47), the very mercy to the nations that Jonah resisted.

Jonah made himself a booth for his own shade. The Son of Man had nowhere to lay his head (Matthew 8:20), and yet in him the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14), God’s own dwelling with his people. The gourd gave shade for a day and then withered. Christ gives rest to all who labour and are heavy laden and come to him (Matthew 11:28–30), and he is the true vine (John 15:1), whose life lasts.

God’s patience with his sulking prophet is the patience Jesus showed his own disciples in their failures, even through Peter’s denial (Luke 22:54–62). Jesus called them to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them (Matthew 5:43–48), the very lesson Jonah found hardest.

The God who appointed the worm and the wind made all things through Christ, and in him all things hold together (Colossians 1:16–17). Christ uses that rule over creation for the salvation of sinners, as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29). Jonah asked to die out of anger and self-pity. Jesus gave his life willingly, in obedience to his Father and in compassion for us, bearing God’s wrath against our sin on the cross, and he gave his flesh for the life of the world (John 6:51). Jonah himself, who ran from his first call (Jonah 1) and was saved in the belly of the fish, had already received the mercy he begrudged Nineveh.

These four verses show God tending a prophet who is angry with him. He gives Jonah shade before he speaks to him, and when he takes it away he does it to bring Jonah to the question that ends the book. The God who appoints fish, plants, worms and winds is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and he cares for a city of a hundred and twenty thousand people and its cattle.

In Jonah we see how easily a heart can be greatly glad over its own comfort and angry at God’s kindness to others. In God we see a patience that reaches even a heart like that, and a mercy wide enough for Nineveh. God’s question about the gourd and the great city still stands at the end of the book, for every one of us who has been glad of a gourd.