Some Thoughts on Jonah
We break from our abnormal programming to revisit a fish tale.
I’m reaching back into my sordid past as a grad student and seminarian for this one, so if you’re not inclined to matters of biblical interpretation and textual criticism, feel free to wait for the next ‘stack. —b.
Yesterday was a good day at church, which if you’ve known me for any amount of time, you’ll know that’s not something I say often.
I’ve been known to spend entire trips home from Sunday mornings discussing the things the minister got wrong, the parts of the text that should have gotten more emphasis, the eisegesis, and so on. At one time, I kept a running tally of pulpit cliches; I stopped when I realized most preachers in my upbringing were stringing together prooftexted references and common phrases to the point that they weren’t really communicating anything of importance at all. I’m a blast at parties.
But yesterday was good! We’ve been on the road and busy with our insane lives for the last few weeks, so my wife and I were dropped into the middle of a series on Jonah that was refreshingly fixed to the text and stayed focused on the protagonist as a character study, rather than the whole in-the-fish part or on the Nineveh repents, yay Jesus! part that most Evangelicals get stuck on.
I’m typically in the back row, flipping through my resources on my phone, fact-checking and doing exegesis on the fly while the sermon is going on. Yes, this is an incredibly nerdy thing to do. No, not nearly enough adherents do it. Yes, it is a skill just about any adherent can develop at a base level. No, it doesn’t take a seminary degree to get there. Yes, seminary and/or advanced degrees matter. No, not everyone with one is willing to actually use those tools to make the church better people as we seek faith toward understanding.
So, here are some of my back-row gleanings from Jonah while listening to yesterday’s message:
Names mean things.
Well, duh. Really, though: Jonah is the son of Amittai, which means ‘truth,’ or ‘veracity.’ Jonah means ‘dove,’ which you know is a symbol of peace, a symbol that comes from the Hebrew Bible.
The child of truth is peace.
(I mean, we really could stop there, couldn’t we?)
What is Jonah, the dove, told to tell Nineveh? You’re evil, you need to repent or you’re going to be destroyed. Welllllllll…not quite: the word there appears to be intentionally ambiguous, in some cases it’s used in context as destruction, in others, it’s a more straightforward ‘overthrown’. Either would make sense, especially since…
Jonah is situated during Jeroboam II’s reign.
An Israelite prophet is told to go to Nineveh, in Assyria. Assyria is not Israel. Israel, in fact, is more or less feeling itself under the reign of Jeroboam II, under whom the nation enjoyed its greatest era of stability, wealth and prominence. This same Israelite prophet encouraged the king to go to war to restore the borders according to II Kings 14, a conflict that pitted Israel against Assyria, though in a downswing.
And now that prophet was told to go to Nineveh to tell them to get their act together.
Jonah was told to go east. He went west.
For whatever reason, Jonah didn’t want to go to Nineveh. Take your pick:
He’s a consultant to the king of Israel, something the Assyrians probably would have known and likely recognized straightaway by looking at him. This isn’t a short term missions trip to a state over to work at a homeless shelter; he’s a diplomat with a message.
He doesn’t want to go to a rival nation to tell them to get right with God.
Doing this confronts the reality of Israel’s decadence and social injustice, after all, everything’s going great! Going to the other guy is a bad look!
This isn’t a story about a guy disobeying God for not proselytizing, giving Nineveh the Romans Road, a human video and an altar call. Jonah’s tasked with a hard job. And the son of truth, the dove, runs away from it. He goes to Joppa, the port city on the Mediterranean (Jaffa, part of Tel Aviv today) and hops aboard a boat. It’s not enough to run the other way, when he runs out of land, he takes to the sea.
It’s easy to talk trash about your MAGA relatives on Bluesky or to not show up at Thanksgiving. You and I belong in a fish’s gut just as much as Jonah does. Speaking of fish guts…
Take a look at the Hebrew words for fish used.
In Jonah 1, the word is dag, a masculine noun. In the second chapter, the word is daga, a feminine noun. At the end of the second chapter, the word is dag again.
There are at least two different giant fish-things in this story, and Jonah is shared between them. ‘Belly’ could mean any number of things, from general innards to the stomach (internal or external)…
…or whale junk.
The prevailing instances of Hebrew Bible contextual usage of the word is for the reproductive goods. That’s not to say that this is what’s being done here, except for the fact that there are multiple fish partners involved.
This story is bonkers, man.1
Jonah finally gets to Nineveh, and the weirdest thing happens.
The question we have reading the account: Why should Assyrians give a crap about the Hebrew god?
Assyrians had their own gods, notably Ashur, though the religious practice of the time was less in service to theistic principles as it was to serve the interests of the state (as was common with most Mesopotamian nation-states of the era, including Israel and Judah…and the Hebrew Bible’s clearly pro-Davidic orientation). We also know that there is more than a little cross-pollination amongst the ancient tribes and nations when it comes to religious formation and identity, some of which is a direct result of this…well, let’s call it what it is: self-interest.
With this principle in mind, with Assyria in a relative nadir in its empire, and having been beaten back by Israel, the fundamentalist, uncompromising modes of religion we see in our Western and Near Eastern frameworks don’t situate well when overlaid onto what we understand of the actual context.
Jonah shows up and tells these Assyrian weaklings to repent because they’re wicked — although they might not be as wicked as they are weak — and they listen. Because what do they have to lose? The Hebrew God Who Is clearly is doing something for Israel, right?
We shouldn’t be surprised that Jonah is pissed and starts whining.
“Didn’t I say before I left home that you would do this, LORD? That is why I ran away to Tarshish! I knew that you are a merciful and compassionate God, slow to get angry and filled with unfailing love. You are eager to turn back from destroying people. Just kill me now, LORD! I’d rather be dead than alive if what I predicted will not happen.” — Jonah 4.2-3 [NLT]
There’s some phrasing that’s left out of many translations and a rarest of NIV dubs: The source material (as we have it) doesn’t say “That’s why I bailed for Tarshish,” or at least that’s not all it says.
Here’s a translation based on the Hebrew: “God, I didn’t have to leave home to know this would happen! In order to delay the inevitable, I bailed for Tarshish…” [emphasis mine]
That ‘delaying the inevitable’ part [qāḏam2] is omitted from many translations into English, and that’s stupid, because it’s a linchpin to a fuller understanding of Jonah’s mindset and the bigger picture:
Jonah knows Israel is in a gilded age, with its half-hearted commitment to the covenant and prevalent socioeconomic inequities and injustice (saying nothing of the fraternal tensions between Israel and Judah). Jonah recognizes that Assyria is down, but not out. Familiar with the stories of old and the cycles of Israelite history, he knows that a nation getting right with a merciful, compassionate God can only mean one thing:
Israel’s time is short. And Assyria is coming for them.
You see, a prophet isn’t a fortune teller. Jonah isn’t on the receiving end of a sacred 900 number. A prophet is a spokesperson for God, sure, but the prophet sees what’s happening and knows the score. The role is less guru or mystic — although those elements can certainly be part of the job — and more strategic advisor, or even an ombudsman, speaking on behalf of God or the people (or both!).
Jonah’s call for Nineveh’s repentance is necessarily a call for judgment against Israel and its mediocrity in keeping the covenant as well as its mistreatment of marginalized people.
It’s also a tacit reminder that the Abrahamic contract was to be blessed to be a blessing to others, and that the contract with Abraham was to be shared with the nations. One way or another, this was going to happen.
We overlook the ending at our peril.
We get tied up in all the goofiness of the fish and preaching, but the ending really matters:
Jonah sees a plant grow over his head, shading him from the sun. A worm comes and eats through the stem of the plant, killing it. The sun beats down on Jonah, and a hot wind blows from the east. Jonah, not recognizing the metaphor, starts whining at God again. The exchange:
“Death is better than watching the plant die!”
“Are you justified in your anger over the plant dying?”
“Yup. I’m pissed and I want to die.”
The plant is Israel. The worm is Nineveh. The hot eastern wind is Assyria coming for Israel. Jonah, after everything he experienced, is still unhappy with the outcome.
God reveals God’s nature in a challenging, beautiful closing line:
“You’re mad about the plant, but you didn’t do anything to put it there: it came and went. But Nineveh has more than 120,000 people who don’t know the difference between right and wrong, and a bunch of animals, to boot. Shouldn’t I have compassion on them, too?”
It’s this story that sets the stage for everything else.
Despite Jonah being a resentful jerk of a prophet, his work in bringing Nineveh in line sets the stage for the rest of the history of Israel: after Jeroboam II, we get two short stints of kings, a ten-year reign, a two-year run, a 20-year reign, a nine-year reign and Shalmaneser’s resurgent Assyria captures Samaria in 722 BCE, anywhere 20-60 years after Jonah’s episode. Judah lasted a little longer, but Assyria is overrun by Babylon, which captures Jerusalem in 586.
It’s Jonah’s work that serves as prologue to Jeremiah, Daniel, Ezekiel and the story of a people in exile. There’s a reason Jonah is resentful and Jeremiah whines. Jonah wasn’t there to make Israel great again. The prophetic word is often not good news; the prophet’s role is actually kinda crummy. They matter most when things aren’t going well, and they are anything but sooth-sayers in the most literal sense of the word.
The truth is never in the gilding; it’s in the decay gilding covers up.
What, then, is the prophet’s focus? Moreover, what is ours?
I remember sitting in my undergraduate Old Testament survey course and the professor very matter of factly discussing these realities in the text and the entire lecture hall was alternatingly gobsmacked, horrified or giggling through the whole thing. Buzz Brookman, you were far too good for us and that institution.
Based on usage throughout the Hebrew Bible, it’s clear that the usage here is correct, ‘anticipate’ rather than ‘receive,’ ‘meet’ or ‘hurry,’ which is a frankly strange translation of the word, since there already is a word for that: mahēr. The more you study and engage with the source material, the more you see that our English translations are a mess of doctrinal presuppositions and sometimes outright disregard for even good exegetical practice. For this reason alone, the texts cannot be infallible, saying nothing of being “God’s word.” Another conversation for another day.