Rethink.

for Joshua Rocks and Paul Drozdowski

1: 1–4 — Jonah is told by God to go to Nin­eveh and “cry out against it.” The wicked­ness of Nin­eveh has “come up before” the Lord.

So Jonah does what any­one would do if told by God to do some­thing. He pays for pas­sage on a boat to get away “from the pres­ence of the Lord.” He tries to head to Tarshish, which my Oxford Anno­tated NRSV tells me is prob­a­bly in south­ern Spain, and one of the ends of the earth most likely — the far­thest point to which one can sail.

At this point in the story, we have not been told why Jonah wants so badly to escape God. We’re laugh­ing at him for try­ing to escape the word of the Lord. But there are at least two rea­sons we can con­jec­ture for his attempt­ing to flee:

1. He’s scared of what will hap­pen to him if the peo­ple don’t take kindly to his mes­sage (appetite/self-preservation).
2. He under­stands what is just, and under­stands Nin­eveh to be fun­da­men­tally unjust.

In either case, the gra­cious­ness of the Lord is merely a dream, one that a change of cli­mate should dis­pel any thought of. Regard­ing the sec­ond point — pride, honor and human rea­son are all mixed together. Con­trast with the Pla­tonic tri­par­tite soul: there is no appeal to rea­son as the high­est here.

But there’s a higher and a lower moti­va­tion for Jonah, poten­tially, and both moti­va­tions are not alien to the way we act. You might won­der why not grant­ing mercy is a just action, but think about what an inabil­ity to trust another does to the pos­si­bil­ity of jus­tice in the world: enlight­ened self-interest has per­haps never been enough to main­tain soci­ety, let alone found it. Actors who can­not be trusted at all must be dis­pensed with, for the not insignif­i­cant rea­son that it is just to dis­pense with them (there’s a rea­son why the Levit­i­cal law is lib­eral with death as a punishment).

1: 4–15 — But as we are all aware, a few strange things hap­pen to Jonah while he tries to run from God. The first is the dan­ger that his ship encoun­ters: a storm hits the ship and amongst all the sailors “each cried to his god.” They threw the cargo on board into the sea to lighten the load, thus depriv­ing them­selves of any poten­tial profit. Jonah was sleep­ing the whole while before being awoken by the cap­tain, who tells him to call on his god.

The piety the sailors dis­play just in order to sur­vive is quite impres­sive. They could com­plain, they could be hate­ful, they could be with­out any pride — in Thucy­dides, the destruc­tion of the Athen­ian force at Sicily occurs while the sol­diers har­bor a dis­trust of the divine: every omen they saw they only saw doom from.

This piety con­tin­ues as the sailors attempt to use div­ina­tion to find out if they have done some­thing wrong (1: 7–8). Even the Gen­tiles have a rudi­men­tary under­stand­ing that links the divine with the just — we can see here how it is that Nin­eveh will repent later. To be formed in the image and like­ness of God is to be moral.

The div­ina­tion is a cast­ing of lots: there is no strange rit­ual involved, no augurs or any pagan ele­ment involved. As we have dis­cussed before, elec­tion by lot is the most demo­c­ra­tic way to choose in the ancient world; vot­ing is aris­to­cratic. The equal­ity before the Divine Will is per­haps the ulti­mate truth behind the Law, and it is being used to indict Jonah, who (unwit­tingly?) tells the sailors his God made the sea and the dry land, and thus tells them the present source of their trou­bles is the very nature of his God (i.e. this means in the very sep­a­ra­tion of land from sea in Gen­e­sis 1, there is a moral teaching).

The sailors do not threaten Jonah; they instead ask him how this can be reme­died. He tells them to throw him over­board. They refuse to do this, because they do not want to shed “inno­cent blood.” They are truly descended from Noah, and the line of Cain is gone. But God has a way of mak­ing even the strongest will crack, and the storm rages, and their efforts to row to land are fail­ing. So they throw Jonah over­board, and when the sea calms, make sac­ri­fices and vows.

The whole first chap­ter of Jonah, then, is an inver­sion of the Noah story — we have some­one who emphat­i­cally does not want to do God’s will, and is pre­served in spite of him­self. There is no domin­ion through the Ark, but the Ark-like whale swal­lows and saves Jonah.

Why is any of this impor­tant? The most impor­tant thing about this first chap­ter is Jonah’s attempt to escape God. Not only does he fail to escape God, but he fails to escape the piety he is beholden to. The under­ly­ing truth of human exis­tence is Prov­i­den­tial, and not in spite of neces­sity. Rather, it is reflected through neces­sity. We can see peo­ple fall apart in the face of the worst of cir­cum­stances — but how do we explain what we’re see­ing when they do their best regardless?

2: 1–10 — Jonah’s prayer demon­strates the notion of piety that is cre­at­ing the ten­sion between him and the will of God. It isn’t that Jonah is impious.

It is pre­cisely because Jonah wor­ships God and under­stands jus­tice that he wants Nin­eveh destroyed. His action on the ship is not igno­ble — he doesn’t offer to be thrown over­board out of despair. He is pre­cisely the sort of per­son with whom judg­ment can reside. He can be trusted to say who should pun­ished and how.

Jonah’s prayer can be taken as one where he requests to be spat out of the whale. But he doesn’t ask that directly, and the story he tells could be taken to be a story of whether he did the right thing or not. “Out of the belly of Sheol” is where he cried, in the chaos where it seems impos­si­ble to make a cor­rect deci­sion (2: 2–3). Per­haps some­thing greater is form­ing, but all one can see are the waves and bil­lows (2:3, again, note how the Gen­e­sis 1 account of Cre­ation is Prov­i­den­tial). But again, in a rever­sal of the Noah story, Jonah remem­bered God (2:4, con­trast with Gen­e­sis 8:1), and even as he was being sunk, pushed down to the “roots of the moun­tains” (2:6), he stayed loyal and did not wor­ship vain. The tem­ple of the Lord has always been the human heart, noth­ing less.

I think Chap­ter 2 can be read as a prayer of thanks­giv­ing that the sailors, who were not guilty, were not killed on account of him. That Jonah doesn’t really care for his own life is some­thing we have to take seri­ously — what he cares for is his notion of jus­tice. What we think is that his notion of jus­tice is flawed with­out mercy. We seem to for­get just how many times we allow the worst sorts of evil to take place because of “mercy:” our “mercy” comes at tremen­dous cost. Jonah knows who is guilty. Should he not act on this knowledge?

3: 1–10 — So Jonah is spat out and told to go to Nin­eveh, and he does as he is told. He per­haps does it half-heartedly, but I’m not sure — I think the length of Nin­eveh is meant to tell us how quick some peo­ple are to embrace the Lord, and we should con­trast that zealotry of the new con­vert with Jonah’s griz­zled wis­dom. Yes, Jonah has been shamed by the Lord. Any of you who think you know bet­ter, take it up with him in the next life. I wouldn’t be sur­prised if every sin­gle idea and argu­ment you had about mercy and jus­tice was given back to you in tatters.

Every­one in Nin­eveh imme­di­ately repents, and again there are echoes of Noah and Cre­ation — human beings and ani­mals fast and cry unto the Lord and attempt to return the world to its orig­i­nal, prelap­sar­ian state.

If you think some­thing is strange about this, where the world can repent to such a degree because of the threat of destruc­tion that the Fall never hap­pened, then you’re pretty sharp. Mar­tin Buber and Leo Strauss and Wal­ter Kauf­mann would prob­a­bly yell at me here and tell me the word “repent” has noth­ing to do with this. There is no “sin,” per se. There is the Fallen world, and all it needs do is merely “return.” (If you want to read more on this — see Kaufmann’s Intro­duc­tion to Buber’s I and Thou, and also see Strauss in “Progress or Return?,” the final essay in The Rebirth of Clas­si­cal Polit­i­cal Ratio­nal­ism, ed. Thomas Pangle).

I don’t know that the Judaic “Return,” or any doc­trine or Scrip­tural teach­ing of any sort, for that mat­ter, cov­ers the enor­mity of what is hap­pen­ing here. This seems to be a colos­sal joke, just like get­ting eaten by a whale, and just like hav­ing a notion of jus­tice which is inflex­i­ble — look, now every third-rate reader of the Bible can laugh at you, Jonah, and then go back to com­mit­ting the 101 injus­tices they were in the midst of.

The only thing that brings this text back to the utmost seri­ous­ness is the pos­si­bil­ity that this could hap­pen, not the actuality.

It is the mere pos­si­bil­ity that the world can be just that mat­ters. It is for that rea­son, and that rea­son alone, that God’s mercy is just. And we have to won­der if human mercy is per­mis­si­ble at all.

4: 1–11 — Now, finally, after all is said and done, the Lord and Jonah have some­thing like a dia­logue. Jonah calls God out on his mercy (4: 3), and all the Lord does is ask if he has the right atti­tude — “Is it right for you to be angry?” (4: 4).

Jonah, know­ing full well that argu­ing with God is pretty point­less, walks out into the desert. It is hot and uncom­fort­able, and God makes a bush to give Jonah shade. Jonah gets happy, and that’s when God kills the bush via a worm and blasts Jonah with a nasty wind to the point where Jonah almost dies. Jonah says he misses the bush and is angry about it, and God says that if he’s “con­cerned” about the bush which He labored to grow, how much should He be “con­cerned” about Nin­eveh and the more than 120,000 peo­ple there?

The allu­sion to Moses is obvi­ous — not just the bush, but the num­ber of 120. Per­haps what God is doing is dis­miss­ing Jonah’s wis­dom because Jonah has not led a peo­ple; he is merely a prophet, com­pletely sub­or­di­nate to the Law and never in dia­logue with God.

The story leaves off with the ten­sion between God and Jonah unre­solved. In the deep­est sense, it can­not be resolved: it is the ten­sion which comes from the spirit of the law and the let­ter of the law. And it can­not be said that those who study only the let­ter are unwise — they’re incred­i­bly wise, for if they weren’t, there would never be a con­flict this seri­ous in the first place.

You might argue we can read this story and say that Jonah’s unwill­ing­ness to be mer­ci­ful in any way towards Nin­eveh com­pro­mises his love of jus­tice. There is Scrip­tural sup­port for this posi­tion, and it isn’t hard to argue that jus­tice doesn’t mean a heck of a lot in a world with­out mercy. And I’m not going to say that’s a bad read of this story: I will only sub­mit that it is incomplete.

The truth is that we’re more like Jonah than we care to admit, and it might not be our weak­nesses that make us like him. Human jus­tice and human wis­dom may have to be tran­scended by the Divine, but if only the Divine can prop­erly show mercy, then can the Divine ade­quately teach us any­thing about jus­tice and wis­dom? The Bible doesn’t pre­tend this is easy to answer: love of jus­tice and the Lord is the start­ing point, and the point of Jonah is to empha­size a love of human­ity, to which jus­tice and the Lord are both directed. But in some ways, that only brings up the same prob­lems — humil­i­a­tion for the wise, and the prospect of utter destruc­tion for every sin­gle other per­son — all over again. What is obvi­ous in sto­ries is never so sim­ple in practice.

• The Virtues of Selflessness
• Remem­brance
• On The Beat­i­tudes and The Commandments
• From Love to God: On Hop­kins’ “As king­fish­ers catch fire…”
• On Hop­kins’ “The Caged Skylark”

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