The book opens without preliminaries: the word comes to Jonah to go to Nineveh and cry out against it, and he gets up to flee to Tarshish, which is in the opposite direction and is as far west as the writer's geography reaches. A storm comes up. The sailors, each praying to his own god, throw the cargo overboard and find the prophet asleep below; the lot falls on him, and he tells them to throw him into the sea, which they try hard to avoid doing before they finally do. The sea goes calm at once, and the sailors, who are the only characters in the book who behave well without prompting, offer sacrifices and vows. A great fish appointed for the purpose swallows him, and from inside it he prays a psalm of thanksgiving in the past tense, as if the rescue has already happened, before being vomited onto dry land.
Sent a second time with the same instruction, he walks into the city and delivers a single line: forty days more, and Nineveh is overthrown. The response is immediate and total, from the people to the king, who comes down from his throne, sits in ashes, and decrees a fast that includes the animals. God relents. The prophet is not relieved but angry, and says that this is exactly why he ran in the first place, because he knew God to be gracious and merciful and ready to relent from punishment, and asks to die.