Jonah 4

The fourth chapter discloses what the book had withheld: Jonah's reason for running. He had not run because he was afraid of Nineveh or overwhelmed by the commission. He had run because he knew God was gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster — the exact language of the Sinai self-revelation in Exodus 34 — and he had not wanted Nineveh spared. His prayer in chapter 4 is a confession disguised as a complaint. He wanted the city destroyed. The sermon was the necessary prelude to the destruction he was hoping to watch. The city's repentance, the most successful outcome any prophet could have wanted, is for Jonah the worst news the chapter could bring. He asks to die. He has been right about everything and gotten the outcome he most feared.

The plant episode that closes the book is the compressed argument that God could not make in the abstract. A plant grows overnight; Jonah is happy with the plant. A worm kills the plant; Jonah is angry enough to die over the plant. God's question is exact: you pity the plant, for which you did not labour, which you did not make grow, which came and went in a single night. Should I not pity Nineveh, that great city — and the line lists the inhabitants, the moral innocents, the hundred and twenty thousand who do not know their right hand from their left, and then adds, in the book's final six Hebrew words: and also much cattle? The cattle who wore sackcloth in chapter 3 appear again here as the last item in God's mercy. The argument is that the scope of God's pity — responsive, portable, extended to animals who had done nothing except exist in the city — is the corrective to Jonah's proportionality, which reserves feeling for the small things close at hand. The book ends with the question. Jonah does not answer. The reader, holding the question, is the audience the book was written for.