Jonah is not asking for information. He is saying "I told You so." Gill explains that "my saying" was Jonah's expectation that the Ninevites would repent and God would forgive them. Jonah now gives that as the reason he ran to Tarshish (Jonah 1:3). Gill calls this "a very disorderly prayer" made in the heat of passion, in which Jonah seems to reproach God for His mercy as though it were a weakness. Some might think Jonah was worried about his own reputation, but Keil & Delitzsch deny that he feared being thought a liar. That matters, because it puts the problem in Jonah's attitude toward Nineveh rather than in his pride. They trace his anger to vexation that the threat against Nineveh was not carried out. They also quote Luther, the Reformation leader, that Jonah was hostile to Nineveh and "still held a Jewish and carnal view of God." Carnal here means earthly or unspiritual: a view of God too small to want His mercy for other nations.

Jonah went further and asked God to take his life: "it is better for me to die than to live" (Jonah 4:3). God did not argue or grant that request. He answered with a question of His own: "Doest thou well to be angry?" (Jonah 4:4). The rest of the chapter is God's patient follow-up through the gourd, the worm, and the east wind (Jonah 4:5-11).

Jonah was not inventing a new description of God. He was quoting how God had described Himself in Exodus 34:6, as both Gill and Keil & Delitzsch note. Barnes observes that Jonah repeats "to the letter" the words of Joel 2:13. "Great kindness" is the Hebrew chesed, a word for loyal love and mercy that runs through the Old Testament. "I fled before" translates qiddamti, "I acted beforehand": Jonah ran ahead to keep this outcome from happening, as Keil & Delitzsch put it.

Jonah's prayer is one of the clearest statements of God's character in the Old Testament: "a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness." The irony is that Jonah says it as a complaint. Matthew Henry writes that what the saints make "matter of joy and praise, Jonah makes the subject of reflection upon God." In other words, Jonah turns a reason for praise into a criticism of God.

The whole book turns on this verse. It finally explains why Jonah ran in Jonah 1:3. He was not afraid God would fail. He was afraid God would forgive. Jonah himself had just been rescued from the deep (Jonah 2:10), yet he resented the same mercy reaching Nineveh. God's response in the rest of the chapter shows that He would not shrink His mercy to fit His prophet's anger.