I. Chapter One

The word of the Lord comes to Jonah (“dove”) the son of Amittai (“truth”) calling upon him to “arise and go” and “proclaim against” the wickedness of Nineveh, the Assyrian capital to the east. Nineveh is mentioned early in Genesis 10 as one of the first cities founded after Babel, the “great city” of the “mighty hunter” Nimrod. This Nimrod was a descendant of Noah's son Ham who looked upon his drunk and naked father and reported that he had done so. Having failed to distinguish what should and should not be seen, Ham and his descendants were separated from the families of his more pious brothers (Gen. 10), the tribes that came to constitute the people of Israel. Nineveh was notoriously wicked; Jonah's story does not even have to mention that it was a much-hated persecutor of the Israelites in particular.

Unlike Abraham (Gen. 12) and other prompt servants of God who quickly respond to commands to get moving, Jonah refuses to “arise” to fulfill God's “word.” Unlike Moses and others who hesitate, but do obey God's commands, Jonah loses no time in speech. Instead of rising to obey, or delaying to inquire, he “rose up to flee unto Tarshish,” a distant land to the west, by “going down” to the port of Joppa. He pays his fare before “going down” into a ship made for long, rough voyages. This little story contains only 689 words. Why spend even a few of them on this realistic detail? Might it be a quick pointer to Jonah's character? Jonah is running from God, yet he punctiliously pays his fare. In this situation justice requires nothing but an equal exchange, a quantitative balance. Jonah also seems to assume that, if he distances himself from Israel, the land of the “chosen,” he can distance himself, as the story says three times, from the “presence of the Lord.” He seems to imagine God as attached to a particular place. Jonah's flight from land to land understandably is made over water, but why should so much of his story involve such vivid accounts of harrowing experiences on both water and dry land? The narrative directs our attention to the great division made on the second day of Creation.

Almost immediately after Jonah's departure from Joppa, the Lord hurls “a great wind into the sea” and a “great tempest” arises. The cold wet waves and the howling dark sky match the cold and gloom that came aboard with Jonah. The sea threatens to break the ship apart and let the waters in. The pagan mariners are terrified and pray, each to his own god. Together, they consult and “cast forth” the ship's wares to lighten its load. But Jonah is not among them. The shipmaster finds him alone, down in the hold, “fast asleep.” This sleep is the second of Jonah's repeated withdrawals in order to avoid the complex difficulties of life. To some readers, it suggests a return to the beginnings of life in the womb, or the wish to end his life that he expresses at different stages of the story. The descent into the ship's hold is also reminiscent of biblical references to the descent after life to the timeless abode of Sheol, which Jonah later refers to in his prayer of thanksgiving (2:3).Footnote ² The shipmaster asks Jonah why he sleeps, but Jonah does not reply to his question. Echoing God's words at the beginning of the story, the shipmaster then exhorts Jonah to “arise” and urges him to call upon “your God” so that he will “think upon us, that we perish not.” Jonah apparently does arise, for we next find him up on deck where he has joined the others. But will this sleeper ever awaken to consider himself part of a “we” that extends beyond himself and his own people? Can he ever “arise” to fulfill God's original command to go to Nineveh? The frightened sailors now cast lots that point to Jonah as the source of their “evil.” Politely (“please”), they too ask questions: who is he and what are his occupation, country, and people?

Again Jonah does not reply fully to their questions. He does not tell his occupation, his own name or his father's, and he does not say he is an “Israelite,” a word that does not appear in this story. Rather, he guardedly identifies himself as a “Hebrew,” the name used in the Bible by foreigners or by the Israelites when they identify themselves to foreigners. It could mean “[from] the other side,” referring originally, perhaps, to the Euphrates River as a dividing line. Jonah is acutely aware that, even among this mix of mariners, he stands out, alone. Like modern sailors, they may sport tattoosFootnote ³ of pagan gods, Poseidon, perhaps, or of great fish of the sea, body art explicitly forbidden by the laws of Jonah's people (Lev. 19:28). Jonah, the plain traveler, responds plainly: he “fears the Lord, the God of Heaven who hath made the sea and the dry land.” Convinced that their God and their good are different from the false gods and goods of others, Jonah's people, for generations, has defined itself as a people apart. The first stage of his education will aim to remind him that, in the beginning, there were no distinctions, and that, forever after, God's human creatures will all still be in the same boat.

Jonah's story is an astute psychological parable about one man's limitation and its origin in an unintended side effect of the need to shape and protect the so-called chosen people. This word “chosen” also is not used in Jonah's story, but appears in other prophetic books, especially in Isaiah (41:8; 43:10, 20). Jonah tells the sailors that he “fears the Lord,” and we later hear that he has told them he has “fled from the presence of the Lord.” Why does he resist being the chosen agent who will bring those from the “other side” to the good life that has shaped his own people? One reason might be that he misunderstands the status and assignment of the “chosen” people. His attention is focused on distinction, rather than on the good that that distinction is meant to preserve and to extend. He has been shaped by the need to establish and maintain a demanding new way of life. Habituated to watchful separation, he assumes that the good is limited, contained by a dividing line, rather than infinite and shareable with others when they are ready to participate in it. He looks backward and identifies God as belonging to him and his people; he does not look forward to a future in which he and all others belong to God.

Separation, of course, is a prominent theme in the story of Jonah's people. “In the beginning,” the earth is without form, and void. The world takes shape by a series of distinctions, as God separates the light from the darkness, the waters under the firmament from the waters above the firmament, the dry land from the waters, and the living creatures according to their kind, with mankind distinguished from all the others. Yet another separation introduces a woman into this world, in which Eden is fenced off from the rest of the land. Before long, the first man and woman are fenced out from the garden, and people the rest of the created world. Among their descendants, Shem's people and Ham's people, for example, lines will repeatedly be drawn. Division into many language groups prevents overreaching in God's human creatures. Over the generations, the Israelites are given their own special ways that distinguish them from the idol-worshiping pagans around them. They are helped to preserve these ways by explicit commandments and laws, and by distinctive habits and rituals that both shape and protect them. Food, dress, family life, and a yearly calendar, which themselves entail separations and distinctions, set this people apart. Some of these ways are good in themselves; others are designed merely to separate the Israelites from the corrupting influence of others. Years of slavery in Egypt end when a “strong east wind” divides the sea, allowing the Israelites to escape on dry land. The flight is followed by years of wandering in the dry desert, and of exile by the waters of Babylon. The travels and travails of the Israelites also fortify their new ways. Remaining true to their God means, above all, constant attention to “righteousness and justice” (Gen. 18:19), and the expectation that good will be rewarded and evil punished.

From the beginning, Abraham is told that, through his descendants, “all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12:1–3, 18:18). But, for now, they will have to resist and fight off these alien peoples, even slaughter them if necessary, to defend themselves from being wiped out, or attracted to their unjust ways. Generations later, Isaiah repeatedly reminds his own people that they have been distinguished, “chosen,” kept healthy, in part so that they might serve as a “light to the nations” (Is. 42:6, 49:6, 60:1–3). Israel must continue to protect itself among the nations even after the others have followed its example. This self-exile among strangers is a heavy responsibility. To be “chosen” is a yoke, not a reward or privilege. It requires simultaneous attention to particularity and universality. These are not simply distinguishable as opposed alternatives, but include and even imply each other.Footnote ⁴

Let us return to Jonah who, throughout the story, is always alone. Perhaps his isolation is characteristic of any prophet, even one in his own land. But Jonah, unlike at least some other prophets (Hosea), appears to be wifeless and childless, a detached messenger rather than an immersed participant, all the more alone among strangers, away from his own land. Indeed, the absence of women or of any explicit mention of them in this story is striking.Footnote ⁵ Jonah knows well the evils of the Ninevites, and he is certain that they deserve retribution. All righteous people would share or, at least, understand his desire to see them struck down. But he asks no questions of the judge he expects to destroy them. Unlike Abraham, Moses, and the righteous Gentile Job, Jonah is a runner from God, not a tenacious interlocutor. He exhibits one of the defects of those who live in tight, homogeneous communities. Secure in their own ways and unexposed to those of others, they may not think very much about either unless they develop, alongside their habitual obedience, the habit of inquiry. Perhaps this explains the long tradition of commentaries, discussion, encouragement of talk and especially questions that is characteristic of Jonah's people. Such discussion, so markedly absent in Jonah himself, is a way to maintain attachment to received teachings, while deepening understanding of them.

The virtues of generosity and solidarity that also characterize members of such communities do not exhibit themselves in Jonah. Perhaps—again, we are not told—this is because he is not a father of a family or leader in his community. Founders, lawgivers, judges, and parents must make distinctions and judgments that are founded on principles. But the astute among them must often draw lines less sharply than Jonah seems to expect. They make careful distinctions because they care about those they judge. They want, above all, for their charges to be good, or at least better. They are pained when they stray, and especially pleased when they return. For them, justice and punishment are corrective, not destructive. To be good, those who err must be educated; to be educated, they must live. The punishment of death, even when it is the necessary response, is always a last resort, and is, in the deepest sense, a failure. Human judges and parents know that their justice is approximate, not exact like the price of a ship voyage, and that punishments must be based on flexible, not rigid, lines. Apparently, Sodom's fate is not God's first plan for the Ninevites. Abraham's discussion with God makes clear that punishing an entire city is likely to involve unjust punishment for individuals. Moses too pleads with God on behalf of the backsliding Israelites who fashion an idol in the form of a golden calf. Paradoxically, Jonah's own origins in a community devoted to just distinctions may have stunted his soul and produced an ungenerous gift-giver, a prophet who would hide the news he is sent to deliver. Jonah's unusual assignment stiffens his neck and hardens his heart. He must learn that the preferred end of both chosenness and justice is repentance not punishment, reform not retribution.

Jonah has identified himself as a worshiper of the “God of Heaven who hath made the sea and the dry land.” He speaks of the first distinctions, the separations of Creation. But the sailors may hear in his reply something that he himself does not fully understand. These pagan mariners are polytheists; they probably think that there are different gods for different peoples, or that each people has many gods, each associated with a different natural realm or force.Footnote ⁶ Jonah refers to the creative power that made everything by distinguishing, but also to an emphatically singular god, who, unlike, for example, Zeus, Poseidon, and company, is the creator and ruler of all that is: one god for an articulated world that is, nevertheless, one. In what follows, the first part of Jonah's education returns him to the beginning, when there were no distinctions, in order to impress upon him that many separate beings can also be one whole, and that fixed distinctions may hinder, as well as enable, human beings to live good lives.

As the ship sets out from Joppa, torrential rains make the water and the dry land almost indistinguishable. Jonah tells the sailors to cast him into the sea; he does not want innocent others to be punished on his account. We see here again the despair that earlier leads him to lie “fast asleep” in the hold of the ship. But the sailors continue to row hard, trying to “return” to “dry land.” They do not want to cast Jonah overboard like the wares, for, although he is a stranger, they care about him, know that he is human like them and will drown. These pagans show a universal natural reluctance to harm one's fellows, even when they pose a danger to one's own life. A mixed crew with no individual names,Footnote ⁷ they are called, simply, “men.” They seem to have worked out some sort of common language, a mixed Mediterranean sailors' argot, perhaps, so that they can work together. The narrator says that, when appeals to their own “gods” fail, they “called on the Lord.” Then they themselves directly call on Jonah's God by this Hebrew name. They beseech him to spare them from punishment for taking Jonah's life; they too do not want to be blamed for “innocent blood.” In the spare biblical account, their concern or fellow feeling is not given a name. At last, after all their questions and consultations, they reluctantly cast Jonah into the sea. The storm immediately ceases and the sailors “feared the Lord greatly.” They “sacrificed unto the Lord” and “vowed vows.”

On the way to Tarshish, the pagan sailors have made an unexpected turn. The watery tempest and the unintending Jonah have extended the worship of Jonah's God to the “other side.” Note that there is no suggestion of social or political “conversion,” only a turn to spiritual monotheism. Perhaps this turn will be only temporary and they will revert to their pagan polytheism. Or, rising above the worship of multiple gods and idols, perhaps they will now remain turned to Jonah's God as human beings were created to be. But this story is not theirs. They hear no more of Jonah and we hear no more of them.

II. Chapter Two

Chapter Two is puzzling. Is Jonah's long psalm original to the story or was it added later? Is it an interpolated jumble of other writings, or is it the careful work of a redactor who selected preexisting material and made it relevant to its present context?Footnote ⁸ We learn most if we consider it integral to the story and ask what it tells us about Jonah's state of mind when God does not punish but saves him after his attempt to evade God's call. In Chapter One, Jonah speaks only twice, in response to the sailors' questions. In Chapter Two, he speaks forth at great length, uninterrupted and in verse. An awakened, passionate Jonah addresses God directly. The psalm's tone is heightened and personal, in contrast to the flatter, third-person narrative of the rest of the story. The flood of water has produced a flood of words from the usually taciturn prophet. But, here too, Jonah himself does not ask questions or engage in an exchange with an interlocutor. Most astonishingly, he does not refer to his disobedience or repentance.Footnote ⁹

When the sailors cast Jonah overboard at the end of Chapter One, the storm on the surface ceases, but Jonah is plunged into the depths of the cold sea. But, after the first lines of Chapter Two, we have to remind ourselves that Jonah is, all this time, in “a great fish” that God had “prepared” to swallow him up. Surprisingly, to those who know the story from popular folklore, Jonah himself never mentions the fish. It is the water, not the whale, that matters to him. Literalists may wonder whether a man could survive in the gastric juices of the fish, but Jonah speaks only of the salty sea. He remembers crying out to the Lord from the “belly of the underworld [Sheol],” not from the “belly of the fish,” and he vividly describes the flood that swallowed him up. Unlike the story of the first great Flood, and unlike the first part of Jonah's story, this part is from the point of view of the submerged, an underwater view. Everything is in motion, nothing is stable; the heightened verse helps to convey this aspect of Jonah's experience.

Another peculiarity of the psalm is that time itself is fluid, rather than linear and articulated. We are told that Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights. In Genesis, seven days are carefully distinguished from each other by the hierarchical order of the day-by-day creations and by the intervening nights. In Jonah, the three days are not distinguished. Furthermore, we hear Jonah's own gratitude for his salvation, before we hear that he is delivered. Time in the fish, like time “in the beginning,” is measured by the narrator, but Jonah does not experience it as a defined or articulated period. In the unstable deep, dark sea, Jonah is swirled in undifferentiated time and matter.

Other distinctions and hierarchies of the Creation also disappear, even as Jonah uses words that echo the beginning of Genesis. The “great fish” might be one of the “great sea monsters” that God made on the fifth day or, perhaps, the imagined whale of retellings of the story. But here the specific kind and looks are left vague. In a reversal of natural hierarchy, an animal swallows a man. The fish, which is mentioned in the narrative introduction and conclusion, is sometimes female (daga) and sometimes male (dag). Even the Hebrew words (dag/gadol: “fish”/“great”) seem like fluid rearrangements of letters. The floating, formless vegetation, a tangle of unidentified plants, wraps around Jonah's head. It has no elevated top or rooted bottom, and it grows without human nurture; it needs no watering. As Jonah descends in this topsy-turvy realm, even deeper than the ship's hold, he finds high mountains at the low foundations of the sea. Jonah says he felt closed out by the “bars” of the “earth” where, readers will remember, God placed man when he distinguished the “earth” from the waters “in the beginning.” He felt the “deep around me,” threatening to return him to a state like that before God made great fish and other beings in stable distinction from each other, “when darkness was upon the face of the “deep” and “the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters” (Gen. 1:2).

The fish “prepared” by God does provide a refuge in the deep that saves Jonah's life and gives him a second chance. But Jonah does not seem to wonder what his immersion in the sea has to do with his refusal to carry God's message to Nineveh. He is grateful that God did not destroy him. But, in all that flood of talk, he does not speak of his own disobedience. He seems to assume that his rescue from the waters means restored separation—distinction—from the rest of creation, and from the rest of non-Israelite human creation as well. He speaks of God's people and the other peoples almost as if they are different species. The heathens “regard lying vanities,” that is, look to idols, and they “forsake their own chesed,” “loving-kindness” or “mercy.” God has saved the Israelite who fears not idols, but God. Jonah seems to believe he deserves his salvation; as an Israelite, he himself embodies kindness and mercy, as well as justice. He fails to recognize the lesson in the tumbling homogenization to which he has been subjected: that the necessary separation of the people must not make them indifferent to those on the “other side.” Ironically, Jonah does not think of the sailors who tried to save him from death in the sea. Now that he has used this word, perhaps we can call their concern for him a natural and universal chesed, a “caring,” susceptible to shaping and direction by the right customs and laws. He has unwittingly turned these naturally good pagans to his own God. Might he now be the agent who turns unnaturally wicked pagans to God? Or does he persist in his belief that, for the wicked, justice precludes loving-kindness and that the elimination of the unjust is the only way to eliminate injustice?

Some readers fault the story for not showing any “character development.”Footnote ¹⁰ If this is true, it seems to be the intent of the teller, rather than a defect in his art. Some scholars parse Jonah's psalm as a pastiche of verses from other biblical psalms. However, it might not be a textual hodgepodge, but a deliberate indication of Jonah's failure to learn from his immersion in the sea, and a sign of his immersion in the repeated biblical formulae of his people, mere phrases that he has appropriated, but not thought about. Jonah says his own prayers came to God in “Thy holy temple.” He expects that he will now return to Jerusalem, the special place of the “chosen” people, where he says he will “look again toward Thy holy temple” and “sacrifice … that which I have vowed I will pay.” As in his earlier attempts to flee from the “presence of the Lord,” Jonah once again associates God with a distinct location, a contained and safe place, like the hold of the ship or the belly of the fish. In Jonah's parochial view, God remains local and special to the Israelites. But the accounts of the decent sailors, before his psalm, and of Nineveh, after it, suggest a universalism that extends beyond Jerusalem.

God does not respond to Jonah's psalm. Rather, he “spoke unto the fish”—now male again—and Jonah, who earlier was “cast into” the sea, is “vomited out … upon the dry land.” This is an ugly, grotesque way to describe the miracle of Jonah's delivery. Jonah is like the dove that brings Noah a sign from an unknown dry land when the “waters had abated from off the earth” (Gen. 8:12). Jonah's name means “dove”; he also brings a sign, but he will have to bring it to an alien dry land. He emerges from the sea, expecting to walk confidently again upon familiar territory. But a different long walk is in store for the reluctant prophet who asks no questions, for, in no time at all, “the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second time.”

III. Chapter Three

Jonah will not be going home to sacrifice at “God's holy temple.” Again he is told to “arise and go” and to proclaim God's “word” to the “great city.” Again he is not told exactly what to say. Nineveh is “exceedingly great,” literally “great to God.” A three-day journey across dry land, by foot, is the measure of the city's extent. Not contained by the surrounding sea, it can expand without check. The great city has a great king and great men who are distinguished from, and rule over, the rest of its great population. In the Bible such limitless urban expansion is often associated with violence and overweening injustice. Babel is the first example, although it grows upward, rather than outward, without limit. Nineveh was famous in antiquity for its massive mud brick walls and fifteen great-gated entries. But here the walls are not mentioned. Jonah walks right into, and even through, the city, with no interference. Apparently, even the most intractable wickedness is still penetrable.

This time, “according to the word of the Lord,” Jonah, the sleeper, awakens to his duty. Or does he? He does “arise and go” “a day's journey,” that is, a third of the way into the city, but not quite into its center, to deliver his message. Other prophets exhort sinners to reform, and God to have mercy (Amos). They speak in the second person to their hearers, reveal their own travails (Hosea, Amos), plead in elaborate analogies (Hosea), and pour out their threats of punishment and promises of reward (Isaiah). One reader has said that they “foretell punishment to make it unnecessary.”Footnote ¹¹ But Jonah, ungenerous even in speech, delivers just one terse sentence: “Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” He says it once, without repeating or explaining it. Does he expect many Ninevites to understand the language of an alien “Hebrew” who shows up and barks a brief message? As another reader has observed, it feels as though Jonah is trying “to be unsuccessful.”Footnote ¹² Finally, Jonah even divides his proclamation and does not deliver it as a whole conditional statement with an expressed protasis: “If the Ninevites do not turn from their evil ways, then in forty days they will be overthrown.” He does not exhort them to repent and reform, but declares only the punishment for their predicted failure to do so. His shortened sentence is a death sentence. The son of Amittai tells the truth, but not the whole truth.

Jonah also fails to hear a double meaning in his own sentence. What he takes as a prediction of total destruction might also be a prediction that, in forty days, not the physical city but the forewarned wicked city will be overthrown, or “turn over.” The repentant city might then live on. Lacking experience of discussion and the ambiguity of words, Jonah fails to recognize the relation between the words for “overthrow,” or “overturn,” and “turn over,” as we might say, “a new leaf.”

The forty-day period points to another meaning that the laconic prophet does not hear in the language of his own message. Intent on death and destruction, he misses the association with a preparation for life that the number forty often suggests to readers of the Bible. Forty weeks (about nine months) is the time it takes for a human life to gestate in the womb. Moses ascends Mount Sinai for periods of forty days and forty nights when God gives him the tablets bearing the Ten Commandments, and he spends the same amount of time pleading with God to forgive his people after they make the golden calf (Exod. 24:18; Deut. 9:18). Forty years are required for the Israelites to regenerate as a free nation after their enslavement and corruption in Egypt. Jonah's prophecy might mean that the Ninevites have forty days, not until their death, but to come to life again or, as they put it, to “turn” or “return” to God.

Unlike the pagan sailors who question and speak with a stranger in trouble before reluctantly casting him into the sea, Jonah delivers this message of destruction with no sign of concern or fellow feeling—the very chesed that he claimed the idol worshipers “forsake.” Unlike the sailors, he makes no effort to prevent the destruction of those about to be punished. He speaks in the third person, to a collective, homogeneous audience. The people of this city, alien and wicked, especially in their relations to his people, are untouchable and have no claims on his care. They have done unspeakable things and there is nothing further to say about or to them. Justice means that the wicked must be wiped out—right now. This is what Jonah expects of the just God who cares for him. Although he himself has been twice chosen, twice commanded, and, as it were, twice reborn, he delivers only half a message and would deny the Ninevites a second chance.

But the people of Nineveh do hear the multiple meanings of the half-delivered message and, once heard, it spreads quickly. From the “greatest” to the “least,” they respond by fasting and putting on sackcloth. Their penance is spontaneous and free; originating among “the people,” not in an order from a powerful superior authority. Like Jonah, who is returned to the homogeneity of the “beginning” before his second call, the Ninevites begin their reformation with a return to a condition without formal distinctions. When Jonah's “word” reaches the king, who is not even distinguished by a royal name, he too collapses all conventional distinctions and hierarchy. Unlike Jonah, who failed to “rise,” the king promptly “arises” from his elevated throne and removes his royal robe. Dressed in sackcloth, merely a man among other men, he descends to sit in ashes with his repentant people. Along with his nobles, or “great ones,” he “proclaims and publishes” what the people have already done; their spontaneous turnover will need steady guidance and authoritative communal leadership if their new way is to remain stable and not repeatedly turn over. Unlike Jonah, the king promulgates his decree throughout the city. This decree even transcends the natural distinction that God made “in the beginning”: here, both “human and beast”—we hear the phrase twice—are to forgo food and drink, in a universal fast and to “be covered with sackcloth.” Everything in Nineveh is to be purified; the fast, ashes, and sackcloth suggest a symbolic death, after which it will be possible to return to life. All must “cry mightily unto God,” and “turn every one from his evil way” and from the “violence that is in their hands.” The Ninevites repent, both as individuals and as a community; for the community as a whole has encouraged or, at least, failed to discourage, “evil ways.” At this point in the story, no mention is made of the possibility that here, as in Sodom, there might be a few just people, or others who might be considered “not unjust.”

Like the sailors, the Ninevites act together. Also like the sailors, they are referred to generically as “humans” and “men.” And, like the sailors, but unlike Jonah, these people have a question; they wonder whether their destruction is inevitable. Unlike Jonah, who is certain of outcomes and ready to die, the Ninevites gamble on a possibility and hope to live. “Who knows,” they ask, “whether God will not turn and repent and turn away from His fierce anger.” If they turn, might God turn? This question is behind the change in their behavior. God sees their “doings” as evidence of their turnaround and does repent of the “evil which He said He would do unto them.” The sackcloth is only the inert surface; God responds to their “works” and their deliberate decision to abandon the “violence that is in their hands.” Without leaving home, the Ninevites make a symbolic journey and re-turn from exile to the ways of their earliest ancestors to walk with God, as Noah did before the “nations were divided … after the flood” (Gen. 10:32). As with others in the Bible, their change of heart is accompanied by something like a name change. Jonah never speaks their name, which, for him, is synonymous with iniquity. After the king's decree and the universal penitence, the narrator speaks only of “the city.”Footnote ¹³ Only at the very end of the story does God restore their name, when he speaks of his own “pity on Nineveh, that great city.” Like the sailors, they do not join Jonah's people when they recognize his God and save themselves from destruction. They simply are now human beings more true to their created nature, and are ready to live again. Like that of the sailors, their part in this story is over. But Jonah's is not.

***

Before thinking further about him, let us take a few minutes to think about stories. The one about the great city's turnaround is a kind of fairytale. Even as readers rejoice in Nineveh's moral awakening, they don't know for a fact that it ever really happened. If it did, history tells us that it was temporary and that the Ninevites returned to the “violence of their hands.” By the time Jonah was written, Cyrus and the Persians had smashed the Assyrian city and its empire, and allowed the exiled Israelites to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple. Their perennial Israelite victims, the prophet Nachum leading the chorus, rejoiced over God's just punishment of the wicked. From Nachum we hear the details of Nineveh's iniquity: warhorses and chariots, harlots, graven and molten images, and violence and treachery toward other nations. Early readers of Jonah knew all this. But the story mentions only general evil and violence. Here attention is focused on atonement, not on particular iniquities. Our response to Nineveh's repentance suggests something about our own demands for justice. It is natural and human to desire a response in kind to violations of humanity. But, perhaps, like God, we want restorative, as well as retributive, justice. We wish for it, fantasize even—maybe especially—in the most extreme cases, and tell stories that encourage us to believe in the possibility of rehabilitation.

What happens at Nineveh is intended as a real possibility for all people in all places at all times. This is why Jonah's people, on the highest holy day of the year, all over the world, read this story. They must take seriously his anger, and they must seriously accept God's forgiveness of the repentant Ninevites. For some groups, a forty-day period of preparation again suggests the hope of renewed life. On the Day of Atonement itself all are offered the possibility of “return” to an original and better life. A full day of fasting, self-examination, and appeals to God's forgiveness and care for repentant sinners concludes with a return to food and the full activity of life. The reading of Jonah's story on Yom Kippur is designed to invite repeated discussion and questions about its meaning. Every year begins with the rereading of this very small great book. Those who are ready to begin anew are said to be “inscribed” in the “Book of Life.” Shortly after, the ritual calendar year begins, with the rereading, week by week, of the very long great book of stories and of laws that inform the life of the “chosen” people.

Let us return to our story and how it affects us. No parent who has loved a child ever wants to punish an exceedingly wicked one. What we want is a return to genuine human nature, to good. For young children, as well as mature adults, there can be two outcomes of stories about mean kids, wicked stepmothers, and tyrannical kings. These villains can suffer severe punishment or annihilation; bad guys get what's coming to them and the precise justice of it pleases. These are satisfying endings, but their justice is the way of death. Choosing the way of life, justice sometimes attempts to turn such deviants around, that they may become good and flourish. From such stories we derive a different sort of pleasure, one that cultivates our sympathy and care for others, even when they have alienated themselves from us. These have truly happy endings that may be as powerful lessons as the stories of recalcitrant failure and deserved destruction. Our own reaction to the unlikely story of Nineveh's turnaround prepares us to understand what, in the fourth chapter, God wants Jonah to see. Chapter Three of Jonah's story shows the happier scenario for Nineveh. All who come later know about the final disposition of “that great city.” Jonah, however, is impatient for immediate and final judgment. His focus on precisely delineated justice precludes his ability to see that rehabilitation is worth trying, even repeatedly, and that justice as he sees it may still come when mercy and second chances fail to insure a permanent turnaround.

IV. Chapter Four

At the beginning of Chapter Four, Jonah is displeased; this sullen, sleepy, cold fish of a man turns out to have a hot and angry temper. The result of his Ninevite mission is to him a great “evil.” Some suggest that this proud son of a man whose name means “truth” fears that people will regard him as a false prophet. Others argue that he does not want errant Israelites to look worse when pagans reform more readily than the “chosen” do. But he says nothing like this. Unlike Abraham or Job, Jonah does not question God or try to understand his justice. Abraham is concerned that, if Sodom is destroyed, innocent people may be unjustly punished along with the guilty. Job, too, presses God about the undeserved suffering of the good. Jonah, however, either assumes that the population of Nineveh is homogeneously, entirely, evil, or he is worried that, unless Nineveh is totally destroyed, evil people will unjustly prosper. Unlike Abraham, he is untroubled by the possibility that justice for the guilty may require injustice to the innocent, although there must be some such in Nineveh. There is no indication that he is thinking about inevitable tensions between individual and collective justice, or about the possible moral education of the city.

In Chapter Two, the grateful Jonah does not expect or get any response to his long thanksgiving psalm. Now, perhaps, the angry prophet is ready for more of a dialogue with God. And God, from whose “presence” Jonah once thought he could flee, now shows up at Nineveh, not to deal with the Ninevites, but with his own envoy. In his anger, Jonah “prays to the Lord,” asking the only question we ever hear from him. But, just as his hypothetical proclamation to Nineveh suppresses the hypothesis, his question is not really a question. Rather, he asks, “was not this my saying?” Note that his words must have been to himself; Jonah can't even say, “I told you so.” Now he tells God what he already “knew when I was yet in my own country.” The Ninevites wonder about God—“who knows?” they ask. But Jonah says he knew all along that God was “gracious, compassionate, long-suffering and abundant in mercy [chesed],” the very quality he said was lacking in idol worshippers. Jonah here cites with contempt the so-called attributes of God enumerated to Moses in Exodus 34. These explain, Jonah says, why he “fled beforehand to Tarshish.” But, once again, he fails to tell the whole truth. He remembers four of the first twelve “attributes” about God's compassion, patience, and mercy. But he omits the last and longest of the thirteen. It speaks emphatically of God's justice: “He will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and on the children's children unto the third and unto the fourth generation.” Prayers for forgiveness often omit this last “attribute,” and commentators sometimes even interpret the limitation on the number of generations as yet another affirmation of mercy. But the Exodus passage suggests that God's care/mercy “by no means” precludes justice. They are not simply distinguishable and opposed alternatives, as Jonah the divider seems to think, but complementary parts of a whole. Even in tension, might they not imply each other?

On Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, one prominent prayer addresses God as “Our Father, Our King,” attributing to him both merciful “care” (chesed) and “righteousness” (tsedakah) as naturally linked qualities. What Jonah “knew” was that God was too merciful to be just, that he would change his mind about the “evil” that Nineveh deserved. For him, consistent and principled justice means a bad death for the evil, the inverse of Job's expectation of a good life for the good. Job, who is anything but taciturn, asks questions, thinks aloud, and is finally content to live again with friends, family, wife, and children in a world of seeming paradoxes. The solitary Jonah, in contrast, simply concludes that, if evil people are permitted to live, good people might as well choose to die. The fourth part of the story recounts one more effort to teach him something about the complexity of distinctions. Once again, God aims to mitigate Jonah's isolation and lack of fellow feeling for all those made in the image of God, and even for all creation. Chapter Four, like Chapter Two, is a story about dry land and water. This time the lesson takes place on dry land.

Jonah leaves Nineveh and sits down on its “east side.” He came there from the west and delivered his warning after a day's walk, one-third of the way into it. When he emerges on its east he has completely crossed the city. He must have exited through one of those huge gates, and be looking back across the massive city wall. Nineveh is now between him and “his own country.” Why does he go east, in the wrong direction, and hang around Nineveh, instead of returning to his own people on “the other side”? Perhaps he hopes that God will still destroy the city and that he, Jonah, will at last be vindicated and see justice done. He has now separated himself even further from his own better way of life, the principles of which he should have hoped to share with others but which, as we have seen, he thinks is accessible only to those welcome in God's “holy temple.” When they were far from their temple, enslaved in Egypt or wandering in the desert, the Israelites built temporary shelters to protect themselves. Here again a stranger at the edge of a strange land makes a small booth for himself and sits in its shadow to wait and watch.

But nothing happens in Nineveh; the action is all around Jonah. God makes a plant grow up “that it might be a shadow over his head.” The plant provides more shade than his own booth does, and makes the usually dour Jonah “greatly glad.” For a moment, he even feels less lonely. He immediately regards the plant, like God and the temple, as his. The plant, unlike the “great fish” and the seaweed, even has a name, qiqayon. To the perplexity of scholars, who think it may be the broad-leaved castor oil tree, this is its unique mention in the Bible; it is indeed Jonah's personal plant. Unlike the exact fare that Jonah pays for his voyage, the extended shade goes beyond a just measure. God is caring and generous, rather than precise and calculating in his gift to Jonah, who is pleased to be comfortable himself as he waits, hoping for the precisely proportional punishment of Nineveh. God has “prepared” the plant to preserve Jonah from his new “evil,” the bright, dry heat of the sun, just as he “prepared” the fish to preserve him from his former evil, the dark, watery cold of the sea. The story of Jonah, we now realize, is not only about the great crowded city of Nineveh, but also about the small solitary man who is sent to cry out to them.

Then God “prepared” a worm that withers the plant, and a powerful “east wind.” The sun beats upon Jonah and makes him faint. The withered plant is a vivid reminder of complementarity, a kind of unity. The sun makes the plant grow, but can kill it if its heat is too strong; the plant can flourish on dry land, but perishes if completely separated from water. Unlike the shapeless weeds in the sea, the upright gourd often requires higher animal creatures to “serve” it—to irrigate it and remove pests—if it is to “serve” them by providing shade over their heads. Jonah's precisely divided hierarchical world has gone topsy-turvy again, and blurred distinctions between wet and dry, plant and animal, winds and sun. Deprived of his comfortable, almost companionable plant, Jonah once again cries, “It is better for me to die than to live.” Again God attempts to engage him in a discussion. He asks, “art thou greatly angry for the plant?” Jonah replies that he is “greatly angry, even unto death.” Again we must supply his part of the dialogue and the question he fails to ask: “the plant was healthy, did no harm, did me great good; why should it perish?” His anger is not answered with a response to the question of deserved justice, but with God's gentle—and strikingly parental—last question:

This time the greatness of Nineveh is described in terms of its living population, rather than its physical size; what is at stake are the lives of thousands of human beings. No individual is named, and again we hear the generic names for “man” and “human” rather than separating names like “Hebrew” and “Ninevite.” But, ironically, the hyperdistinguishing Jonah fails to make one distinction which God calls to his attention: there are among the Ninevites people who, like children, are incapable of making distinctions, who cannot discern between their right and left hands, and who do not yet even know the meaning of “right.” How will justice deal with the unknowing “violence” of these right and left hands? Those who are like children may yet learn to distinguish between their right and left hands. We have insisted that the story does not rule out a judgment that there are some deeds so unnatural and heinous, so antithetical to the principles of human life that even natural human pity and mercy must be suppressed in dealing with their perpetrators. The most extreme punishment for the past evil deeds of some may also be required for the future health of many. Forgiveness is not prescribed as a universal human response to evil. Nor is turning the other cheek. Capital punishment and war are evils that may be necessary to preserve the good of peace. But political prudence—providence or foresight—may sometimes convince human judges, as well as God, not to punish injustice with exactly what it deserves, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

The poignant addendum—“and also much cattle”—is one more item for consideration in the dialogue that comes so hard to Jonah. It returns to the question of distinctions among God's creatures and suggests the worth and unity of all of them: the “chosen” and the rest of Adam's kind, all of whom can learn to distinguish between right and wrong, and those who, by nature, will never be capable of making distinctions. The echo of the Deuteronomy command to destroy a city turned idolatrous, even “all the cattle thereof” (Deut. 13:15) is part of an ongoing biblical dialectic about the letter of the law and its prescribed punishments. Twelve times in this little story we hear the word “great” (gadol). In his last attempt to reach Jonah we realize that God, a caring judge, loves and cherishes even the small and undiscerning, and is reluctant to destroy them for the sins of those who are morally responsible.

The story of Jonah and Nineveh clarifies the status of the “chosen” people. Sometimes called “dove” (yonah) (Ps. 74:19; Prov. 11:11), Israel is to be the guardian and harbinger of a good way of life. If this requires separation, the children of Israel must not think that they are inherently more worthy than those of other nations, for this would deny the unity of the world that comes into being through separation. Atonement makes a fractured human being one whole again, and at one with a good life to which all can aspire. For the Creator, division and wholeness are not simply opposed; the Israelites apart are part of a whole. Jonah, alone in his booth, is “greatly glad” when God extends the “shadow” over his head; but he values it only as an expansion of his own shade, as useful to him. But Jonah's people have been told, from the beginning, that their own good, like the plant's shadow beyond the booth's shadow, is also meant to be extended.

We are not told whether Jonah, alone under his withered gourd, angry, hot, and thirsty, understands what has happened to him. Unlike other biblical heroes, the eponymous protagonist of this story undergoes no name change. He does not seem to have learned anything from his dramatic dunk in the sea, a metaphorical antidote for hyperdistinction. The story of the plant is a parable that invites the unquestioning Jonah, who thinks he “knows” even what God will do, to think in response to questions. A “parable”—“something thrown alongside”—is a kind of metaphor or analogy, a story that juxtaposes the hearer's situation with one that it resembles, and provokes him to ask about what he himself might learn from it. This parable asks its hearer to reformulate the question in another hypothetical sentence: “If you have pity on the withered plant, in which you invested no care, then should not God, who created and long nourished the Ninevites, be reluctant for them to perish like the ephemeral plant?” Note that God substitutes “pity” for the anger Jonah has expressed over the plant. The conclusion of God's question goes beyond his investment in them, and addresses their own inadequacy. God spares them because he pities them. The parable of the prophet Nathan in 2 Samuel 12:1–15 is an example of a parable that does have its intended effect. King David is a generous, caring, and warm lover of his people, his friend, his sons, his wives, and, disastrously, of another man's wife. He is a passionate and original psalmist, a man of music, who dances before the God he loves. His affinity for others and his sharp questioning mind allow him to acknowledge that he himself is the subject of Nathan's parable.

Although stories can make us better and more thoughtful human beings, there are some people who are deaf to stories. We hear nothing of friend, wife, or child in Jonah's solitary life. His tight, cold isolation and his propensity for rigid distinctions may prevent him from recognizing that God's parable of the withered plant is also the story of Jonah. This time he may not summon up the spirit to live again and to return to his “own land” after the long journey that might have made him a deeper and kinder man. His suppressed care for his fellows, both aliens on “the other side” and those who, through their wickedness, have alienated themselves, has given him an incomplete notion of a justice distinguished from its partner mercy. Is there a future for such a man? We shall never know, for he does not respond to God's question. God “prepared” the storm, the fish, the city, the plant, the worm, and the east wind for Jonah's sake. Jonah's story, I assume, was prepared for the rest of us.