For one thing, it contains almost no prophecy. Although it is nestled among the 12 short works known as the “Minor Prophets,” Jonah is uniquely a plot-driven narrative mostly remembered for the episode in which the protagonist is swallowed by an enormous fish. The only words of God shared by Jonah are, “Forty days more, and Nineveh is overthrown.”
That statement represents another oddity: Jonah delivers his prophecy not to the people of Israel or Judah, but to their sworn and feared enemy, the Assyrians, conquerors of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Nineveh was the Assyrian capitol. Jonah is the only biblical prophecy delivered to a non-Jewish audience. Other prophets wrote of the fate of the Hebrews’ non-Jewish neighbors -- the book of Nahum, indeed, prophesies the destruction of Nineveh – but the pagans are not the audience for those words
We are not told what language Jonah was speaking when he uttered those scant prophetic words while making his way through the streets of Nineveh. He is a self-described Hebrew, commanded by God to deliver his prophecy to the great city’s residents. But whatever language he spoke, The Ninevens must have understood him, because he was remarkably effective. Unlike the stubborn and recalcitrant Jews who received the other prophecies, the people of Nineveh immediately donned sackcloth and repented their evil ways. When their king decided to hop on the bandwagon, he added the city’s animals to the penitents required to put on sackcloth. Seeing their repentence from unnamed “evil,” God abandons his plan to destroy Nineveh and saves the heathens. Notably, their salvation does not involve religious conversion, simply their repentance.
Similarly, in the first chapter of Jonah, the episode detailing the storm at sea, God saves the ship full of religiously diverse – and presumably polyglot – sailors who reluctantly follow Jonah’s instructions and throw him overboard as appeasement of the God that Jonah had tried to flee. When the storm immediately stops, the sailors pray and make sacrifices to the Hebrew God, but there is no suggestion that they have converted.
One of the key messages of Jonah may be, indeed, that belief in the god of the Hebrews is not a requirement for God’s mercy, but abstaining from evil is.
Those casually acquainted with the story of Jonah often think of it as a tale for children, the story of a man who disobeyed God, was swallowed by a fish in whose belly he spent three days and three nights, repented and was saved. But that is a seriously understated depiction of this book. Jonah may be brief, but it is far from simple or straightforward.
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| Jan Brueghel the Elder: Jonah Leaving the Whale |
Jonah is by convention divided into four chapters that play out as follows:
• God commands Jonah to go to Nineveh to deliver a prophecy, which at this point is not defined. Jonah, in fear of confronting that city’s populace, instead decides to flee from God, traveling to the port of Joppa (Jaffa) and purchasing a fare on a ship bound for the distant city of Tarshish. When the ship sets sail, a fierce storm develops. The crew prays to their various gods for salvation, to no avail. Jonah, who has gone down into the vessel to sleep, is confronted by the ship’s captain who asks him about his god. Jonah acknowledges that he is a Hebrew and, evidently having previously told the sailors he was fleeing from God, says that in order to save themselves they must throw him overboard. Although the sailors are reluctant to do so, they eventually see that as their only option and cast Jonah into the sea, which immediately calms, leading to the sailors’ prayers and sacrifices.
• God instructs a gigantic fish to swallow Jonah, who then spends three days and nights in its belly. While in there, he recites a prayer, a psalm about salvation and deliverance. Hearing this, God instructs the fish to “vomit” Jonah out onto shore.
• God again commands Jonah to travel to Nineveh and deliver his prophecy, which this time Jonah does, inspiring the city’s population – and eventually their king and their animals – to don sackcloth, fast, and repent. Hearing their repentance, God changes his mind about destroying the city.
• Jonah is incensed by God’s change of mind, and goes east of the city to sit and sulk. He builds a small shelter. God causes a shade tree to grow to protect him from the sun, but after the first night, God sends a worm to destroy the tree and a wind to make conditions unbearable for Jonah. God confronts Jonah about why he is angry, to which Jonah responded that the reason he ran away in the first place was that he knew that God was compassionate and was likely to save the Ninevens. He tells God he wants to die. The story ends with a questioning retort from God to Jonah: “You – you had pity over the qiqayon (tree), for which you did not toil and which you did not grow, which overnight came and overnight was gone. And I, shall I not have pity for Nineveh the great city, in which there are many more thousand human beings who do not know between their right hand and their left, and many beasts?”
That final question, which gets no answer, is a radical one in biblical terms, making it clear that despite the fact that God is worshipped by the Hebrews, he is God of the entire world, and sees care for all of humanity as his obligation. This from the God who so often in the Bible has protected the Israelites from their enemies, dispatching Egyptians, Phoenicians, and assorted pagans.
Although the residents of Nineveh are said to have been condemned for their evil ways and are saved by repentence, it is never made clear what evil they have perpetrated to deserve the destruction God has proposed. Whatever the moral of this story is, it does not have to do with specific, named acts. Instead, it suggests that we know evil when we see it; it doesn’t have to be spelled out to us.
One thing that is clear is that Jonah’s God likes to be recognized and communicated with. The sailors in Chapter 1 do it and the storm is quelled; the Ninevites in Chapter 3 do it and their city is spared from destruction; and Jonah does it in his psalm in Chapter 2, after which God engineers his release from the belly of the beast. It has been widely noted that neither the sailors nor the citizens of Nineveh are said to convert to Judaism; however, they recognize the Hebrew god as a powerful agent whose wishes need to be obeyed.
So, what is the Book of Jonah, exactly? That’s a question that continues to stump both scholars and the faithful. As the Yale Anchor Bible series volume on Jonah puts it:
“The question of the genre of the book of Jonah is a thorny one. It has been described as history, satire, parody, allegory, midrash, parable, biography, prophetic narrative, novella, tragedy, myth, and folklore, among others. Almost as common as the assigning of Jonah to a specific literary genre is the insistence that the book defies genre categories … The matter is further complicated by the fact that many of the genres that appear in discussion are foreign to the ancient biblical world.”
If Jonah is satire, or parody of the other writing prophets, how did his jab at them end up in the Bible? Well, the Bible is an anthology – even an anthology of anthologies when you consider how many of its books appear to have had multiple authors whose work was stitched together by editors who have come to be known as redactors. Like many anthologies, its point of view is not consistent. The so-called Wisdom Books of Job, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes are similarly off-the-main-stream message.
It’s very hard to know when the books of the Hebrew Bible were written much less accepted into the canon. Guesses about Jonah’s authorship and era are all over the board. The prophet is mentioned in 2 Kings as having lived during the reign of Jeroboam II in the northern kingdom, a 41-year span lasting from approximately 790 to 750 BCE. But his association in Kings with reestablishment of an eastern border bears no relation to the Book of Jonah.
The Anchor Bible commentary posits that the book we read today as Jonah is a blending of at least three distinct components:
• A straightforward original story in which God commands Jonah to travel to Nineveh to deliver his prophecy and Jonah obeys – in other words, the opening of chapter 1, followed immediately by chapter 3.
• An interpolated story about Jonah’s attempt to flee from God by boarding a ship to Tarshish, the storm at sea and the swallowing by the fish – most of chapters 1 and 2
• The psalm in chapter 2, which virtually everyone agrees was an independent, pre-existing work absorbed into Jonah’s story.
If this theory is correct, each of these pieces likely was written at a different time, and their redaction into one narrative may have occurred quite late in the compositional stream of the Hebrew Bible. That would make sense if Jonah is indeed a satirical commentary on other prophetic works (Nahum and Joel are likely candidates). The author(s) of the fish story and God’s final interaction with Jonah in Chapter 4 may well have had a more universalist view than the often fiercely national pre-exilic prophets.
Remember, too, that the Priestly writer (P) credited with the first, universalist creation story in Genesis 1 is believed to have lived long after the Yahwist writer (J) who composed the domestically scaled creation story in Genesis 2. Adam and Eve can be seen as the beginning of the story of the Jewish people; the Priestly creation story covers all of us.
But is that all that we are seeing at play here? I think there is more, and that something more may be more subversive expected in a book of the Bible. Let’s take another look at the sailors, the citizens of Nineveh and Jonah. What do they have in common? It’s clear that they all changed their behavior to attain God’s mercy. They prayed, they fasted, they repented their past behaviors. But did they really change?
As mentioned before, there is no suggestion that either the sailors or the Ninevites converted to the worship of the Hebrew God. Jonah seems to fully accept God’s rule in the Chapter 2 psalm, but since he appears to be reciting a pre-existing prayer, is that really evidence that the man who tried to escape and hide from God has truly changed? Chapter 4 tells us that the answer is a resounding no. It reveals Jonah as headstrong and petulant, incensed that God showed mercy on the people of Nineveh. Moreover, it reveals that this mercy is just what Jonah expected and was rebelling against when he decided to run away. In his eyes, he has been proven right. It seems Jonah has learned little, despite his time in the belly of the fish.
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| Antonius Wierix: Jonah Under the Gourd |
No wonder the book ends with that challenging question from God. How can Jonah, it asks, waste his sympathies on a triviality – a tree that provided temporary shade – while criticizing God for saving an entire population of his creatures? Have the Hebrews, including their prophets, learned nothing from their experiences, the loss of their kingdoms and the destruction of their temple? Why are they wasting their time mourning over trivialities? Staying alive is relatively easy, the stories show. Pray, fast, repent, repeat.
But if that doesn’t translate into care for all of God’s creation – including our perceived enemies – we’ve missed the point.
