Jonah 1:3

3. Jonah proceeds on his journey, but in the opposite direction.

Tarshish This city has been identified with Tarsus in Cilicia, the home of the apostle Paul; but it should be identified with Tartessus, a Phoenician colony in southwest Spain, not far from Gibraltar. Nineveh was in the far east, Tarshish appears to have been the most distant city toward the west then known. The author evidently desires to represent Jonah as attempting to get away from his mission as far as possible.

From the presence of Jehovah The prophet is anxious to get out of God’s sight, lest God, seeing him, might be reminded of the commission imposed. The motive leading to the flight is indicated in Jonah 4:2. The expression goes back to a time when it was actually thought that removal from the land of the Hebrews was removal from the presence of Jehovah (1 Samuel 26:19; compare Daniel 6:10). At the time when the Book of Jonah was written the phrase had lost its older, primitive significance, for the omnipresence of Jehovah had long been recognized (see Amos, p. 207). Nevertheless, it continued to be used in a figurative sense.

Joppa One of the harbors on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, which from ancient times has served as a seaport of Jerusalem (2 Chronicles 2:16; Ezra 3:7). It is still a flourishing town; Cheyne says ( Encyclopaedia Biblica) that its population was estimated in 1897 at over thirty-five thousand; but Mackie (Hastings’s Dictionary of the Bible) estimates its population at “about eight thousand.” The present name of the city is Yafa, Eng. Jaffa. The city is the western terminus of the Jaffa-Jerusalem railway. There Jonah found a ship which was ready to sail; he paid the fare and set out for Tarshish; but Jehovah overtook him.