The story of Jonah is fairly odd in that it actually one of the few stories from the
Old Testament that preaches
tolerance rather than ardent
xenophobia.
To make a short story shorter, there is this bloke named Jonah who is called upon by
God to be a
prophet.
God tells Jonah to go to the city of
Nineveh and tell them that they will be destroyed because they are
wicked. Jonah doesn't really want to be a
prophet (
prophets tend to meet rather bleak fates), and in this case, his reluctance to go to
Nineveh specifically is quite understandable:
Nineveh was the capital of
Assyria, a country that had long been an enemy of the
Israelites (see, there were these bits about invading
Israel, capitivities, exiles, and so on). To get out of this,
Jonah takes an ocean voyage.
Of course, he can't escape
God: great winds and great waves came that threatened to break the ship. Knowing that something supernatural was responsible, the shipmaster asked who was causing this tempest. Jonah admitted that he was responsible, and pleaded with them to cast him off of the ship so that they would be saved. Jonah was then thrown into the water, where he was swallowed by a
whale. Inside the whale, Jonah begged for
forgiveness and said he would do the
Lord's will, and therefore
God caused the
whale to vomit him up.
So Jonah then went to
Nineveh, where he told the
Assyrian king that
God was going to wreck the place because of their wickedness. To the great surprise of Jonah (and the reader), the
Assyrians believe Jonah, and proceed to sincerely
repent and mourn. The city is spared (well, at least the destruction is postponed), and Jonah is very dissapointed because of this (being an Israelite, he was kind of looking forward to (one) of his people's blood enemy's destruction). He asked
God why He spared the horrible
Assyrians, and
God's reply went something like, "Even if they are stupid
gentiles, they don't really know any better, and if they act nice, they deserve mercy."
The other famous book of the bible that taught tolerance to xenophobia was the
Book of Ruth. Your
Bible may not have that last, since it is sometimes counted among the
Apocrypha.