On Friday morning, my family and I visited the Jerusalem Aquarium. We walked through the dark, glowing tunnels where fish glide past in flashes of silver and neon. My kids pressed their faces to the glass, completely taken in by the slow sway of coral and the quiet, otherworldly world beneath the surface.
And then, at the entrance to the aquarium, I saw a verse from the Psalms stretched across the wall, illuminated against a backdrop of deep blue water. It is something I will never tire of about living in Israel. Every place, even an aquarium full of tropical fish and coral tunnels, somehow connects you back to the Bible.
Pslam 107 describes people facing danger, crying out to God, and discovering that He meets them at their lowest point.
Standing there, surrounded by real creatures of the sea, the verse felt strikingly literal, and it pushed a question to the surface that I could not ignore. Why does The Bible reveal some of its clearest messages about God’s presence in the depths, underwater, in storms, in fear, through the story of a prophet who tries to run the other way?
This question pulls us straight into the Book of Jonah.
Before Jonah ever meets a storm or a fish, The Bible gives us one essential piece of information. Who he is, when he lived, and what kind of world shaped him. In Melachim Bet, 2 Kings, Jonah appears during the reign of Yerovam ben Yoash, king of the northern Kingdom of Israel. It is a time of outward success but inward decay. Territorial expansion. Wealth. A stable political situation. But the prophets of the era, like Amos, describe a society sliding morally, full of corruption, arrogance, and injustice.
This is the environment Jonah knows. A nation prospering in all the ways that make headlines, while quietly hollowing out its own foundations.
Then God gives Jonah a mission unlike any other prophet’s.
He sends him not to his own people, not to Jerusalem, not to Judea, but to Nineveh, capital of Assyria. The same Assyria that will one day destroy the northern kingdom and exile its ten tribes. God tells a Jewish prophet to warn Israel’s future enemy.
The assignment is shocking. It offends every patriotic and theological instinct Jonah has. Why should Assyria be given a chance to change? Why should the nation that will soon crush Israel receive a divine warning?
Jonah does what many of us might do if we are honest. He runs. And the moment he runs, the Book of Jonah becomes a living commentary on Psalm 107.
The storm breaks over the ship.
The sailors panic and pray.
The sea tosses them like a toy.
And then, the moment Jonah is thrown overboard, the waters still.
Inside the fish, Jonah finally prays. And in that prayer is a line that sounds like it was lifted straight from the aquarium wall.
The same word, metzulah, the depths.
The same imagery, water crashing, life out of control.
The same theme, God meeting a person in the exact place they feared most.
Pslam 107 teaches that God’s wonders are visible in the deep.
Jonah shows what that looks like in real time.
But the Book of Jonah goes further. It is not only about Jonah’s crisis. It is about the crisis of Nineveh, a violent, imperial city God still cares about enough to warn. Jonah confronts us with a truth believers rarely admit out loud. God’s compassion reaches places we would never choose. God cares about people we might write off. And God may ask us to confront that truth even when it cuts against every instinct we have.
That is what makes Jonah one of the most unusual and demanding books in the Hebrew Bible. It is not long. It is not complicated on the surface. But it wrestles with questions that cut directly through human nature, politics, justice, and the limits we place on divine mercy.
And this is exactly why Shira Schechter’s new Bible Plus course on Jonah is so compelling. Shira does not reduce Jonah to a children’s tale. She sets him back into his real biblical context, the fractured northern kingdom, the golden calves, the political power, the spiritual decline, the looming Assyrian threat. Once you see that backdrop, the story changes. Jonah becomes sharper. The stakes become higher. And the entire book reads not as a fable, but as a confrontation with some of the most important theological questions in The Bible.
As I watched my kids hold their breath in front of the shark tank, I kept thinking about that verse on the wall. God’s wonders in the deep. Jonah discovered those wonders the hard way. We have the privilege of learning them by opening the text.
If you want to understand Jonah as more than a story about a fish, take the dive. Shira’s course brings the book to life with clarity, history, and depth. The kind that makes you reread the entire story with new eyes.
When you sign up for Bible Plus, you get access to over 200 courses taught by expert teachers based in Israel. Each course features multiple video sessions that build progressively, allowing you to dive deep into the Hebrew Bible, biblical characters, Jewish holidays, and theological concepts—all at your own pace. New courses are added every month, so there’s always something fresh to explore. Whether you’re studying Genesis, learning about Rachel and Leah, or understanding the significance of the Sabbath, Bible Plus brings the context of the Land of Israel directly to you. Think of it like your own Biblical Netflix—accessible, affordable, and designed to enrich your understanding of Scripture from wherever you are.
