The textual version of the short story begins with God calling Jonah as a prophet to go east and preach repentance to the Gentiles of the great city of Nineveh (ancient Assyria; modern Mosul, Iraq). On the left the men load a boat, which Jonah has disobediently boarded to sail westward, away from Israel and away from God’s prophetic commandment (Jonah 1). Moving to the right, the men throw Jonah into the sea, in an attempt to quell the raging storm, which they (rightly) interpret has been caused by Jonah’s disobedience to his god. In this artistic version, he dives straight into the mouth of the great fish—portrayed here, as elsewhere, like a sea monster—and prays to God for salvation over three days and three nights (Jonah 2). He is then spit out onto shore and commanded again by God to preach repentance to Nineveh (Jonah 3). He does so but then becomes disgruntled when the Ninevites do repent and God does not enact his planned punishment. Despite having been saved himself, Jonah doesn’t think these others are deserving of God’s mercy. So God teaches him a final lesson (Jonah 4). While Jonah pouts alone outside of the city, God provides a large new plant to grow over Jonah, to protect him from the desert sun. This scene dominates the upper-right register, with Jonah reclining nude under bountiful shade, as if in a blessed afterlife. But as quickly as the plant grew, God sends a worm to destroy it, so that Jonah is again near death—first from a tempest-tossed ocean, and now from a sun-scorched desert. The story concludes with God delivering a prophetic sermon to his reluctant prophet: if Jonah is concerned over the life and death of just one plant that emerged and vanished so quickly, how much more should God be concerned with the fate of the thousands of lives in Nineveh, at that time the largest city in the known world?

The textual version of the story ends, like many prophetic oracles of the Old Testament, with a question. The question hangs in the air for ancient listeners and modern readers, opening up to reflection and discussion about the tension between justice and mercy, about God’s commitment to a chosen people while offering salvation to others, and about the persistent self-centered ways of even God’s chosen messengers. The earliest Christian textual interpreters seized on two aspects of the story. First, as represented by the Gospel of Luke, Jesus interprets “the sign of Jonah” for his generation to be a call toward repentance (Luke 11:29-32). Just as he began his ministry with, “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand,” along with John’s baptismal ritual to enact such repentance, so, too, does he connect his preaching to the universalism of Jonah’s mission. Luke thus emphasizes chapters 3 and 4 of Jonah, but Matthew’s version of Jesus’ teaching draws from the action of chapter 2. Just as Jonah was in the belly of the great fish for three days, “so will the Son of Man be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights” (Matt 12:40). Matthew includes the same teaching of repentance as Luke but also adds the unique interpretation of Jonah’s “death” and “resurrection” as a foreshadowing of Jesus’ own. This second idea comes to dominate the subsequent reception history. Then, when the apostle Paul describes immersion baptism as a ritualized participation in death and resurrection (Rom 6:3-4), the resources are all present to close the loop on the Jonah cycle. The story of Jonah therefore portrays (for Christians) the necessity of repentance, the salvific role of immersion in water as a death and resurrection, and the universal message of the God of Israel for all people, whether Jews or Gentiles. No matter how wayward a son of Israel has been, no matter how wicked a king of the Gentiles has been, God’s mercy is available and boundless.

The artist of the sarcophagus surrounds the Jonah cycle with other stories to reinforce these meanings for the viewer. Looking closely at the water, between the sea monster and the reclining Jonah, one can see an inset Noah. Depicted in the “Jack-in-the-box” style typical of this era, Noah emerges from the ark to find the dove messenger returning with an olive branch (Gen 8:11), signifying the end of the flood and the salvation of those in the ark.- Early Christian artists often juxtapose various stories of salvation near or through water. One might even read the fisherman on the lower right, whose line casts near to where Jonah comes on shore, as a symbol of Jesus’ first metaphor for preaching and discipleship: “Come, follow me,” Jesus said to Simon Peter and Andrew while they were fishing, “and I will make you fishers of men” (Matt 5:19).
The upper left features Jesus’ raising of Lazarus, a “sign” performed in the Gospel of John that bears obvious connection to the “sign of Jonah” in the Gospel of Matthew. The center of the upper register shows two scenes that are open to multiple interpretations. One possibility is from the Old Testament: here depicts Moses drawing “water from the rock” to satisfy the thirst of the Israelites wandering the wilderness during the exodus (Exod 17 / Num 20); to its right might then be the rebellion of Israelites against Moses (perhaps Num 16).

Another possibility involves a different “water from the rock” miracle, that of Peter summoning a spring of water with which to baptize his repentant jailers. This is a non-canonical story about Peter’s life, but one apparently in very wide circulation, as there are at least 225 examples of it preserved from early Christian art. The scene to its right would thus be the arrest of Peter, another non-canonical but widely depicted story. Either option signifies God’s miraculous provision for salvation through water, whether through thirst-quenching or a new covenant with God. The upper right shows a shepherd guiding sheep out of a mausoleum-like structure, and this calls to mind various biblical images of a shepherd and flock as salvation from death: the “Lord is my shepherd” (Psalm 23), the parables of the lost sheep (Luke 15 / Matt 18), and the “good shepherd” and “gate” for the sheep (John 10), among others. Whoever “enters the gate” of death through Jesus will be saved, say the Gospel of John and the Jonah sarcophagus in unison. Both Jews and Gentiles will be “one flock” with “one shepherd” (John 10:16).

With these details in mind, we can zoom back out to see the big picture one final time. If you allow your eyes to be guided by the overall flow of the shapes and lines, you will see a curved arc of descent and ascent. Begin above the sail of the boat, where there stands in the sky what looks like a person peering through a circular portal in the heavens. In fact, this is the Roman sky god Caelus, who is often pictured this way during the Roman imperial era, with a billowing garment over his head. This personification of the sky or heaven (hence the word “celestial”) was adopted frequently in early Christian art as a way to communicate heavenly realms to the viewer (see also Figure 5.6 below). Some Roman writers even identified the God of Israel (as a sky god) with the Roman god Caelus, so we might imagine him here as a symbol of divine command over the drama below U His gaze looks down along the line of the sail and follows the halyard directly into the snout of the beast. The arc flattens at the center of the sarcophagus and then bends upward through the right-facing snout, upward along the reclining Jonah’s left arm, then his right arm, and above to the plant of his blessed afterlife. From its tiny details to its overall form, this artistic masterwork conjures a treasury of biblical stories and frames the hoped-for arc of salvation from death.