Jonah (Prophet living at the time of Divided Monarchy)

Jesus calls his own coming death and resurrection ‘the sign of Jonah’ (11:29-30) and rates Nineveh's repentance above his own generation's (11:32), both times treating the whale story as settled history, not metaphor. Josephus tells it the same way a century later, adding a detail Jonah itself never states: which sea he surfaced in.

Jonah was a prophet ordered to preach repentance to Nineveh, the capital of Israel's enemy Assyria, and he ran the opposite direction by ship instead, prompting the storm and the famous three days inside a great fish that eventually vomited him onto dry land. When he finally preached to Nineveh, the entire city repented and God spared it, which made Jonah furious rather than pleased, and the book ends with God gently confronting Jonah's anger rather than resolving it. A different man named Jonah is listed as the father of the apostle Peter in the Gospels.