Anonymous · 700 BCE · sea

The Book of Jonah, four chapters long. A prophet is told to go east to Nineveh and instead buys a passage to the far end of the known world in the opposite direction. The route is a fifteen-hundred-mile mistake, and the whole point of the book is that it does not work.

1. 1
   Joppa

   Told to go and preach to Nineveh, Jonah goes down to the port, finds a ship going to Tarshish and pays the fare - the text repeating the word down each time, as though the whole thing is a descent.

2. 2
   Tarshish

   The far coast of Spain, as far west as ships went - and he never gets there. A storm comes, the sailors cast lots, and he tells them to throw him over, which they do only after trying everything else.

3. 3
   Nineveh

   Three days in the fish and he arrives where he was sent in the first place. The city repents, God relents, and Jonah sits outside the walls furious about it - which is the actual subject of the book.