Right at the beginning of the Book of Jonah, the reluctant prophet is instructed by God to go and preach to the pagan inhabitants of Nineveh to abandon their evil ways. But by verse 3 of Chapter 1 he is headed in the opposite direction as fast as a ship will carry him, to the other end of the world. He has absolutely no intention of obeying.
One of the Bible’s shorter books, the Book of Jonah is characterised by high drama and comedy. But it is fundamentally a parable about the abounding love of God. Written probably in the 4th century BC, it should not be read as history but as a fable that is intended to instruct and amuse, providing insight into the nature of God and that of human beings.
Both narrative and message are attractive and moving. A huge storm lashes the ship and the sailors draw lots to discover who is to blame for it. Jonah offers to sacrifice himself to calm the sea and the sailors obligingly throw him overboard. He is scooped up by a whale (sent by God) in whose belly he remains for three days and nights.
Christian typological interpretations of this episode as a foreshadowing of Christ’s burial in the earth and subsequent resurrection are sanctioned by Jesus Himself who cites the episode in the Gospel of Matthew. The prophet prays fervently and we are told that the sea monster “vomited out Jonah on the dry land”.
Save for Michelangelo’s depiction of Jonah in the Sistine Chapel and a painting by Rembrandt’s teacher, Pieter Lastman, in which a sprawling, naked prophet is flung onto the shore, Jonah has not inspired a great deal of memorable art. However, the scene inside the whale in Disney’s Pinocchio from 1940, which is certainly Biblically inspired.
“Nineveh City was a city of sin; the jazzin’ and a-jivin’ made a terrible din,” run the lyrics to Michael Hurd’s “Jonah-Man Jazz” (1966), a lively cantata that children seem no longer to sing at school. So enormous was Nineveh that it took three days to cross on foot, and Jonah warns the inhabitants that in 40 days it will be destroyed.
The King of the Ninevites, who knew nothing of the God of Israel, orders fasting, sackcloth and ashes. He instigates a communal penitential effort in which even the animals take part, and, to Jonah’s great chagrin, God’s anger is averted. The prophet is indignant: he fled in the first place because, he tells God, “I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil.” Once again, he asks that his life be brought to an end.
Later in Matthew, Jesus cites the Book of Jonah a second time, contrasting the citizens of Nineveh who turned away from wickedness with the perverse generation of his own time who refuse to believe in Him. Jonah’s story could have been brought to a neat close at this point, but there follows a passage in which the aggrieved prophet retreats to the edge of the city to sulk in the vain expectation that God might yet relent and destroy Nineveh anyway.
Prophet and deity then have a dialogue about whether it is just that God should be merciful to sinners, particularly when they are not His chosen people. God provides Jonah with shelter from the sun by making a plant grow over him. He then makes it wither and once more the desperate Jonah begs for death, claiming that he has every right to be angry with God.
The sentence that ends the Book of Jonah sees God both justifying His actions because He is a loving God and making one last effort to win over the grumpy seer: “And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than six score thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?”
Sometimes we as individuals don’t know our right from our left, and sometimes as societies we don’t either. The Book of Jonah – ship, sailors, whale, gourd, cattle and the rest – highlights God’s nature as unreasonably loving and immensely long-suffering. His sense of humour is divine, too.
Gabriele Finaldi is director of the National Gallery in London
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