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23 July 2022
The prophetic books[1] of the Hebrew Bible are mostly composed of poetic utterances. The exception is Jonah, a prose story about a prophet called to preach to Nineveh. Jonah is also exception in that the prophet is called to speak to foreigners, Assyrians, enemies of Israel, rather than Israelites.
If Job struggles with the question of why bad things happen to good people, the book of Jonah deals with the opposite question. Why do good things happen to bad people?
Yahweh calls Jonah to preach to Nineveh, because God is fed up with Nineveh's wickedness. Jonah immediately runs off to somewhere else, taking a boat to a far-away port. His disobedience leads to a terrible storm, and the sailors, knowing how such things tend to work, suspect that someone must have angered a deity. Jonah confesses, and at his suggestions they reluctantly toss him into the water. It works.
Yahweh prepares a great fish, which swallows Jonah. Jonah says a prayer of thanks from inside the fish, which, at Yahweh's command, spits him right out. Again Yahweh commands Jonah to go to Nineveh, and, apparently having learned a hard lesson, Jonah complies. In forty days Nineveh will be destroyed, he says. The Ninevites, including their king, believe God and repent with ashes and sackcloth and fasting. God sees their change of heart and changes his plans. They are spared.
Jonah gets mad. This, he tells Yahweh, is exactly why he ran off. He knew Yahweh was too much of a softie. Yahweh asks Jonah if he is right to be angry.
Jonah goes up a hill to sit and watch and see what will happen to the city. Yahweh God makes a plant grow to shade Jonah, and Jonah really likes this. Then God has a worm (worms?) kill the plant. Jonah gets mad. Yahweh asks Jonah if he is right to be angry about the plant. Yes, says Jonah. He is so angry he could die.
God then asks Jonah whether he should be so concerned about the death of a plant, and not concerned about the death of an entire city.
The end.
Several things are missing from the story. For one, why is God angry at Nineveh? What have they done wrong? When they repent, what do they repent of? And why does Jonah harbor such hatred toward them? We are not told; or at least, we are not told in the book of Jonah. However, there is a single reference to Jonah outside the book, in which we are told (2 Kings 14:25) that certain events around the first half of the eighth century were a fulfillment of Jonah's prophecy. On the assumption that the book of Jonah was written by something with a picture of Jonah like that of Kings, we might put him vaguely around the eighth century.
In the ninth and eighth centuries, the Assyrian Empire fought repeatedly against Israel and Judah, even going so far as to destroy the Northern Kingdom in 722 when the North rebelled after a period of domination, and besieging Jerusalem in 701. They are described by both the Bible and historians as a brutal Empire. So it is not at all odd to see an Israelite prophet might harbor ill will toward the Assyrians. What is more interesting is that God takes an easier line toward them.
While the prophet Jonah's story is set around in the seventh century, there is another prophet, Nahum, whose work is concerned with Nineveh. Unlike Jonah, he prophesies its destruction and it comes to pass in 612. The contrast is interesting.
Another thing that is missing from the story is an ending. Does Jonah see God's point? Does he continue to be obstinate? We are not told. Whatever might occur off-stage, as it were, the on-stage Jonah is unrelentingly awful, reaching a comedic point as he announces that he's so angry he could die over a plant that dies, leaving him unshaded as he burns physically and emotionally, wishing for genocide. This makes Jonah an exception to the typical pattern, in which the prophet is painted as a uniquely moral person, delivering God's message to a rebellious and defiant Israel. Here we have a vindictive prophet, evading and opposing God's plans, peaching to a repentant enemy. The differences in content between Jonah and the other prophets are matched by the difference in form: the prose story of Jonah simply does not sound like the other prophetic, poetry-filled books.
Horton, R. F. (1904). The Minor Prophets: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, and Micah.
Mitchell, Hinckley G.; Smith, John Merlin Powis; and Julius A. Bewer (1912). A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, and Jonah.
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