Jonah — themes & analysis

Every other named prophet in the Hebrew Bible answers the call. Isaiah says, Here am I, send me. Jeremiah objects but goes. Ezekiel sees the chariot and obeys. Amos was no prophet but the LORD took him. Jonah, alone among them, hears the call and runs in the opposite direction. The verb in chapter 1 is precise: he rose to flee from the presence of the LORD. He is told to go east, to Nineveh on the Tigris. He goes to Joppa and buys passage to Tarshish — most likely Tartessos in southern Spain, the far end of the Phoenician trade routes, the western edge of the known world.

The narrator records the geography with deadpan precision. He went down to Joppa, found a ship going to Tarshish, paid the fare, and went down into it. The verbs of descent run through the chapter: down to Joppa, down into the ship, down into the inner part of the vessel where he falls into a deep sleep. Shortly he will be thrown down into the sea, and from there into the belly of the fish, and from there down to the roots of the mountains in the prayer of chapter 2. The flight is figured spatially as a descent — each stage of running taking him further down.

The theological joke embedded in the descent is that no depth is far enough. The prophet who is fleeing from the presence of the LORD discovers, in his prayer from the fish's belly, that even from the belly of Sheol the LORD has heard him. The flight has been not just foolish but based on a false premise — that one can put distance between oneself and the divine presence. The pagan sailors in chapter 1 know better than the prophet. When they discover whom Jonah has been fleeing from, their first response is: what is this you have done? The obviousness of their question is the book's first quiet correction of its protagonist.

What the running does, in the book's economy, is establish Jonah as a comic figure of a kind the prophetic literature does not elsewhere permit itself. He is not heroic. He is not even competent at his own rebellion. The flight fails within hours of leaving port; the great fish, appointed with the same matter-of-fact verb the book uses for the plant and the worm and the wind, is sent not as punishment but as transport. It takes him where he was supposed to go in the first place. The book is the only sustained comedy in the prophetic canon, and the comedy begins with the prophet on the wrong ship.

Where to follow it: Jonah 1 (the flight, the storm, the fish), Jonah 2 (the prayer from the belly).

When Jonah finally arrives at Nineveh in chapter 3, the sermon he delivers is the shortest in the prophetic literature. The Hebrew is five words; in standard English eight: Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown. There is no call to repentance, no promise of mercy on condition of change, no pastoral concern. It is a flat declaration of doom — and it is the most successful prophetic sermon in the Hebrew Bible.

The city believes God. The narrator records this in the next sentence, with no transition and no commentary. They proclaim a fast, put on sackcloth. The king rises from his throne, removes his royal robe, sits in ashes. The decree he issues is among the most comprehensive in scripture: man and beast, herd and flock, shall neither eat nor drink; man and beast shall be covered with sackcloth and cry mightily to God; let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands. The image of cattle in sackcloth is the book's most exposed comic note — the Assyrian livestock draped in burlap, lowing the repentance of an empire that had built its power on the cities it had levelled — and the comedy is at the same time entirely serious. When repentance comes, it is total.

God repents. The Hebrew verb — nicham, to relent, to change one's mind — is the same word used for the people's turning. God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it. This is the verse that has scandalized theologians who want a God whose decisions are immutable. The Jonah of this book has none of that worry. The God who appoints the fish and the worm and the east wind also relents when the city relents. The pronouncement reverses because it was meant to produce the change, not to record a predetermined outcome.

Jonah, who has watched the eight words work, walks east of the city in a fury. The most successful outcome any prophet could have wanted is the worst news the chapter could bring. The book has constructed its protagonist with precision: he is the prophet who preaches doom, watches it succeed at repentance, and finds both the success and the mercy unbearable. The reader holds all of this simultaneously, which is where the book intends the reader to be.

Where to follow it: Jonah 3 (the sermon and repentance).

Chapter 4 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.

The theological move is breathtaking. Jonah has run from his commission not out of fear or inadequacy — the standard prophetic objections — but because he is afraid that God's mercy will be wider than his own. He has run from Nineveh because he did not want Nineveh saved. He had counted on the city's destruction. The forty-day countdown was, for Jonah, the period he wanted to enjoy.

The rest of the chapter is the dialogue under the plant east of the city. God appoints the plant for shade; Jonah is happy with it. God appoints the worm; the plant withers. Then God appoints the sultry east wind; the sun beats on Jonah's head; he asks again to die. The plant episode is the book's most compressed piece of argument. Jonah pities the plant, for which he did not labour and which he did not grow. God pities the great city, for which he did labour and which he did make. The argument is left as a question — and the prophet, who has been right about everything, does not answer it.

Where to follow it: Jonah 4 (the plant, the worm, the question).

The last six words of the book in the Hebrew are weve-vehemah rabbah — and also much cattle. The closing question is: Should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle? The cattle are not an accident. They have been in the book since chapter 3, wearing their sackcloth. They are the book's last word, and they are doing several things at once.

What the cattle do structurally is keep the line from sentimentality. The argument the book is making extends past the human. God's pity, the line says, is for the city in its full population — the people, certainly, but also the animals whose lives have no moral dimension the book concerns itself with. The mercy that has just spared Nineveh is a mercy that takes account of cattle. The scope of God's pity is the corrective to Jonah's proportionality, which reserves feeling for the small things close at hand.

The cattle also balance the plant of chapter 4. Jonah pitied the plant; God pities the cattle. Both are creatures the pity-er did not labour for, did not grow, did not make. The plant is small; the cattle are many. The plant lasted a night; the cattle have lived their lives. The proportion God is asking Jonah to consider is between his sympathy for the small thing close to him and God's sympathy for the large thing far from him.

The book ends not with a moral but with the cattle, and the cattle are the book's final refusal to be resolved into a single line. Jonah does not answer. The reader holds the question. The cattle, in their many sackcloth, are the figure the reader is holding it with.

Where to follow it: Jonah 3 (the cattle in sackcloth), Jonah 4 (the closing question).

Most modern scholarship reads the Book of Jonah as a literary composition of the Persian or early Hellenistic period — 4th or 3rd century BCE — that takes the eighth-century prophet from 2 Kings as the protagonist of a parable about Israel and the nations after the exile. The reading does not depend on the historicity of the fish or the cattle's sackcloth; it depends on the book's craft. The narrative is too tightly composed, the symmetries too exact, the irony too sustained, for the book to be read as the kind of historical record that 2 Kings is.

The work the parable is doing is this. After the exile, Israel has come back to a small, vulnerable Yehud under Persian then Greek imperial rule; the great cities — Babylon, Susa, Alexandria — are full of the descendants of every empire that had ever crushed Israel. The question every post-exilic prophetic book has to handle is what God's relation to those cities is, and what Israel's relation to them ought to be. Jonah handles the question by writing a story in which a prophet is sent to one of those cities, runs from the assignment, is forced to deliver the message anyway, watches the city repent, and is left under a dying plant in a fury the reader can recognize.

The book is, in effect, the Hebrew Bible's quiet self-correction of its own prophetic tradition. Prophetic announcements of judgment on the nations had often been justified — the cruelties of Assyria and Babylon were not invented. Jonah does not retract the announcement. It places, alongside it, the possibility that the announcement was meant, all along, to produce repentance — and that when the repentance comes, the announcement reverses, and the prophet who wanted the destruction has to be argued with, gently, by God under a withered plant.

The figure has had an enormous afterlife. Jesus invokes the sign of Jonah in the Gospels; the medieval and modern Jewish reading on Yom Kippur turns on the same question the book leaves open. The reader who finishes the book holding the cattle is the reader the book was written for.

Where to follow it: Jonah 1 (the pagan sailors and their piety), Jonah 3 (the Assyrian city that repents), Jonah 4 (the unanswered question).