In the Ryrie Study Bible (NASB, and thank you so much, sister Laurie!), the intro notes say that one view of Jonah's story is that it's an allegory for:
- Jonah = disobedient Israel
- The sea = gentiles
- Great fish/whale = Babylon
It also foreshadows the 3 days that Jesus/Yeshua's body lay in the grave. (With thanks to Rabbi David Hall of Zion in Austin, Texas.)
(Additionally, the Lord has laid it on my heart at that point in the Bible study that the USA is under divine judgment. Yes, the weather WILL get worse...)
Jonah tried to flee to Tarshish, which is very intriguing to me because my Ryrie footnotes say that Tarshish is in southern Spain, which is where the first Christians or any kind of believers in YHWH/God came from to discover America (i.e., Christopher Columbus in 1492.)(Yes, there were already native Americans here already, but they were not believers in the one true God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.)
(The Lord is laying it on my heart that Jonah is about America.)
Jonah was sent to evangelize Nineveh, a wealthy city chock-full of idolatry and sin. Additionally, according to Rabbi Hall, Nineveh was attacking Israel. To say the least, Jonah wasn't happy about that. He was about as happy as a modern American Messianic Jew or Christian would be if we were sent straight to Baghdad to evangelize, or perhaps Tehran.
more later...gotta go...
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