Jonah: the prophet Jonah son of Amittai, from Gath-hepher in the northern kingdom, the only person in the Hebrew Bible to carry this name, which is also the everyday Hebrew word for a dove
This word names exactly one person. Jonah son of Amittai first appears as a prophet in the days of King Jeroboam the Second, whose message promised that Israel's northern borders would be restored, and he appears again as the runaway prophet of the short book that carries his name. No other Israelite in the Hebrew Bible is called Jonah, and there is no town or region named after the word either.
The name is not a coined one. It is spelled and said exactly like the common Hebrew word for a dove (יוֹנָה), so a Hebrew listener heard "Dove" every time the prophet was named. The father's name, Amittai, is built on the Hebrew word for truth or faithfulness, which means the opening line of the book introduces the main character as something like "Dove, son of Faithfulness."
Elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible the dove stands for very different things:
- a messenger sent out who brings back news that the danger has passed
- a bird whose low call sounds like a person moaning in grief
- a creature that flutters off in a panic with no sense of where it is going
- the modest offering that a poor worshipper could afford to bring
Many readers hear all of that behind a prophet who runs from his assignment, sits and sulks, and asks to die. Others answer that the writer simply took the name from the older record in Kings, and that squeezing it too hard turns a name into a theory about the whole book. What no one questions is who the word points to: every occurrence names this one man.
Disputed
Whether the naming of the prophet as "Dove, son of Faithfulness" is deliberate irony that programs the reading of the book, or an inherited name whose wordplay should not be made load-bearing.
- majorityThe name is programmatic irony: the dove-name and the patronymic built on emet ("truth, faithfulness") are undercut at every turn by the prophet's flight, his protest against divine mercy in 4:2, and his wish to die.; Phyllis Trible, Rhetorical Criticism: Context, Method, and the Book of Jonah (Fortress, 1994); Hans Walter Wolff, Obadiah and Jonah (Hermeneia, ET 1986), 99, 109, 123; Uriel Simon, Jonah (JPS Bible Commentary, 1999); Alan Jon Hauser, "Jonah: In Pursuit of the Dove," JBL 104 (1985): 21-37
- minorityThe paronomasia is present but limited: the name is inherited from 2 Kings 14:25, animal-based personal names are well attested with unknown significance, and the name does not decode the book.; Thomas M. Bolin, Freedom beyond Forgiveness: The Book of Jonah Re-Examined (JSOTSup 236, 1997), 72-73; Kevin J. Youngblood, Jonah: God's Scandalous Mercy (ZECOT, 2013); Ehud Ben Zvi, Signs of Jonah: Reading and Rereading in Ancient Yehud (JSOTSup 367, 2003); Jack M. Sasson, Jonah (Anchor Bible, 1990), 5, 68-70