God's justice and his relenting

Chapter Five

Looking into Jonah 3

Introduction

With the renewed call to go to Nineveh Jonah is given a second chance to obey the God from whom he has tried quite unsuccessfully to flee. The fact that he has just been saved from drowning by the very God whose commission he flouted gives him a deeper appreciation for God’s ability to deliver anyone, anywhere, but the self-centredness of his prayer leaves us with chastened expectations as we follow him to one of Assyria’s most prominent cities.

Because the events of this chapter take place outside Israel, and feature an almost entirely foreign cast of characters, we will have to spend more time than usual trying to understand these elements. As one can readily imagine, the archaeological remains of Nineveh are what is most readily accessible to us, but the city’s size and religious importance motivate us to look further than the material remains. Similarly, some elements of Neo-Assyrian religion are well known to us, but the Ninevites’ repentance gives rise to several questions we must pursue in order to understand the chapter. A good dose of patience and perseverance will allow us to make our way through this challenging section of Jonah.

Assyria in the eighth century BC

Despite the very unflattering picture painted of Jonah thus far, the second half of his story begins positively. Just as his disobedience at the beginning of was described with a chain of verbs to emphasize its thoroughness, so here his obedience is presented in the same way. And whereas Jonah’s flight was ‘from the presence of the LORD’, here his obedience is ‘according to the word of the LORD’ – so far, so good!

As we noted briefly while studying Jonah 1, Nineveh was a prominent city in an empire built upon violence and God-defying self-aggrandization. In the eighth century Nineveh was one of three royal cities in the Assyrian empire, the two others being Calah and Ashur. Adad-Nirari III (810–783) had even built a royal palace there just a short while before Jonah came on the scene, so the city was very closely connected with Assyria’s monarchy and all that went with it.

At the time of Jonah’s visit, however, the empire as a whole was unusually troubled. In terms of the nation’s political stability, once Adad-Nirari III was succeeded by Shalmaneser IV (782–773), the Assyrian king no longer had direct control over the totality of the empire, parts of which had come under the control of several different regional officials. This state of affairs continued during the nominal reigns of Assur-Dan III (772–755) and Assur-Nirari V (754–745).

Several of the most prominent of the regional officials during this time lived within a short distance of Nineveh and so may have had some control or influence over it, perhaps as Nineveh’s ‘king’ or as some of his ‘officials’. They included:

All of these men controlled significant areas of land and directed military campaigns in the period 810–752 bc. Moreover, their allegiance to the empire could hardly be counted upon. This is most clearly the case for Shamshi-ilu, who decorated the entrance to his palace at Til-Barsip with two immense lion sculptures on whom he had inscribed his exploits against Urartu, a perennial enemy of Assyria. Younger highlights the fact that while he adopted the literary form of royal inscriptions for his inscription, it contains no mention of the Assyrian king. It is in this inscription that Shamshi-ilu identifies himself (almost certainly with exaggeration) as ruler of the lands of Hatti, Guti and Namri before telling how he suppressed a Gutian revolt in the east in accord with the divine wills of Assur and Ninlil.

In addition to this instability at the level of government, a number of famines, revolts and plagues are recorded in Assyrian records, events whose evil portent was believed to be clearly indicated by accompanying eclipses. An Assyrian list of year-by-year significant events known as the eponym list, together with other official documents, record a plague in 765, revolts in 763–759, a solar eclipse in 763 and famine (continuous or sporadic is not clear) from 765 to 759. Reports of eclipses in Neo-Assyrian documents were typically followed by ‘such statements as “the king will be deposed and killed and a worthless fellow seize the throne”; “the king will die, rain from heaven will flood the land”; “there will be famine”; “a deity will strike the king and fire will consume the land”’ or the like. This state of affairs would have made both rulers and subjects unusually attuned to the message of a visiting prophet, as the book bears out.

Nineveh in the eighth century BC

The focus of Jonah 3 is of course the city of Nineveh itself, not the empire. We know from 1:2 that God sent his prophet to a prominent city, one that had been quite significant before Jonah’s arrival because it housed earlier royal palaces and temples and was located at an important river crossing and natural road junction. Nineveh’s prominence may be reinforced by the author’s statement in 3:3 that Nineveh was ‘a great city to God/the gods’. While the phrase is usually translated in modern Bibles as ‘an exceedingly great city’, this glosses over the question of what the reference to ‘God/the gods’ means. In Hebrew the same term (’ĕlōhîm) can refer to either one God (the plurality indicates respect) or to several gods. There is also the problem that English translations which take the expression as superlative have no similar phrases that justify that rendering.

If we avoid novel understandings of the phrase, we can affirm that the city is great with respect to ’ĕlōhîm, but is it so with respect to one or more God/gods? On the one hand, if it involves ‘gods’ the statement could reflect the religious importance of the city within the context of Assyrian religion, and thus its prominence for its gods. This is by no means impossible, since Nineveh was an important religious centre. In addition to the extremely important temple of Ishtar which had stood there since the third millennium, two temples to Nabu, the god of writing (cf. Isa. 46:1, there in his Babylonian garb), had also recently been constructed in Nineveh in 788–787.

Despite Nineveh’s close association with various Assyrian gods, however, the events of Jonah 3 make it unlikely that the existence of the Assyrian gods is being recognized, or that the writer is presenting the city within a frame of reference consistent with Assyrian religion. As we will soon see, the Ninevites (just like the sailors) seem to detach themselves from any gods they knew once Jonah spoke of his God. Furthermore, it is clear from Jonah 4:11 that because of its size (and, from 1:2, because of her sin), Yahweh had taken notice of Nineveh. Nineveh was, therefore, a great city to Israel’s God.

One more point on Nineveh’s size or importance has to be settled: the description of the city as being ‘three days’ walk’. Nineveh eventually grew to about 7 miles in circumference under Sennacherib, but this was well after Jonah’s ministry. In the mid-eighth century the city was about three-quarters of that size, but in neither case would it have taken any reasonably mobile person three days’ time to walk through, or even around, Nineveh. Furthermore, ‘no other city in the Bible or any ancient Near Eastern literature is described by the circuit of its walls or by its diameter’ (Marcus 1999: 44). How then are we to understand this expression?

First, it is helpful to remember the possibility that the very similar phrase in 1:17 probably has a figurative meaning. If that is the best way to understand ‘three days and three nights’, it is certainly possible that the shorter phrase ‘three days (walk)’ would also carry an approximate rather than precise meaning. The likelihood that the following phrase describing the beginning of Jonah’s ‘one day’s journey’ into the city in 3:4 probably should not be interpreted literally either and strengthens the case for understanding the phrase in 3:3 in the same way. While Jonah could have meandered about the streets of Nineveh and so travelled the same linear distance as he would have by moving in one direction in open country (had he travelled in a straight line he would have left Nineveh within a few hours at most), it seems more natural to avoid associating a linear distance with displacements of either ‘one day’ or ‘three days’.

It is probably best to conclude, then, that ‘three days (and nights)’, like the phrase in 1:17, indicates a long time in the book of Jonah, whether the longest time Jonah could be thought to survive in the fish or the longest time a visitor could use to describe the duration of a visit to a proportionately enormous city (cf. Gen. 30:36; Exod. 3:18). Sasson notes that the same effect is made by Yahweh’s reference to the city’s population in 4:11. Jonah’s ‘one-day’ foray into the city was of a correspondingly shorter duration, but evidently gave him sufficient time to transmit his message effectively.

Jonah’s message

When it comes to Jonah’s message, we have a mere sentence with which to work: ‘Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown.’ As suggested earlier, this is almost certainly a summary of the main thrust of Jonah’s address(es) to the inhabitants, since they are made aware of the reason for God’s displeasure, of his sovereignty and of the necessity of repentance. Despite the prophet’s reluctance to participate in this endeavour, the book nowhere suggests that his words to Nineveh curtailed a fuller message that God had commanded him to convey. Rather, the book’s willingness to document his disobedience in Jonah 1 allows us to conclude that the message was faithfully transmitted.

Since in all likelihood we do not have the full transcript of Jonah’s address, what can we justifiably infer from the rest of the OT as to its content and how it served to produce repentance among the Ninevites? We have already noted, in the light of Jeremiah 18:7–8, that one of the main functions of threats of judgment against nations was to facilitate repentance. Jonah himself, we learn from Jonah 4, likewise understood very clearly that delivering such an oracle of judgment entailed the possibility of its being heeded. In the case of this and similar threats,

the prophetic word is not. . . directed toward its fulfillment in history, but is an instrument of history that is intended to bring about the conversion of those who hear it, and therewith the non-fulfillment of what was threatened. (Wolff 1963: 340)

The presence of ‘yet forty days’ in Jonah’s announcement seems to confirm that the threat was intended to produce repentance. Had God simply intended to overturn the city, he could have done so without any advance warning at all. The author’s choice of the word translated ‘overturned’, which often refers to destruction (a nuance we will explore shortly) but which can also refer to a change of heart (Peleg 2004: 266–268), also suggests that Jonah’s message had two very different potential outcomes.

But despite its potentially conditional nature, Jonah’s message is nothing to trifle with. The choice of ‘overturned’ to describe the city’s fate comes with connotations of gross sin and correspond-ingly definitive judgment, since it is used repeatedly of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 19:21, 25, 29 [twice]; Jer. 20:16; Isa. 13:19; Amos 4:11) (Peleg 2004: 265). The mention of ‘forty days’ and the description of Nineveh as ‘evil’ are similarly reminiscent of the flood account, the archetypical judgment of sin in the OT. Taken as a whole, then, Jonah’s message is one of severe judgment against heinous sin, but one that nonetheless (albeit implicitly) holds out the possibility that judgment might be delayed, mitigated or avoided.

Some might object by saying that the message of Jonah to Nineveh did nothing more than affirm that the just and righteous creator of the universe was calling Nineveh to account for her sins. Ware, for example, argues:

The ostensible rationale of Jonah’s commission is not a divine purpose for the conversion of the nations but the existence of a universal moral standard to which God holds all nations accountable; cf. Jer 18:7–10. . .. The occasional characterization of Jonah as a missionary. . . is thus far overstated. (Ware 2005: 71)

On such a view, God’s plan of redemption did not, even in its partially revealed form, lie behind (in terms of purpose) the message that the Ninevites heard.

This line of reasoning can be extended to conclude that the Ninevites’ response could not have been a conversion, since the message did not contain the information necessary for such a change of heart. Lichtert points out that the Ninevites never hear (as far as we know) the name Yahweh, something he suggests makes their relationship with God less full than that of the sailors, to whom Jonah spoke of Yahweh. This understanding of the threat’s content separates it from the message of salvation that God had begun to announce in Eden, and so makes it insufficient in terms of its very content of facilitating conversion to the worship of the true God. In the terms defined in earlier chapters, such proclamation would not itself be ‘mission’, though it might be related to it.

The daring claim that the gospel was not present in Jonah’s message to Nineveh, whether in terms of purpose or content, may also be advanced by noting that the messages of judgment that Israel heard were received in the context of the covenants God had made and that explicitly expressed his saving will and plan while calling for faith and repentance. This made it possible for them to function as saving special revelation for Israel. Nineveh, however, since it lacked a covenantal relationship with God, could not receive an oracle of judgment in the same way, and so could not repent, at least not as part of a conversion to Yahweh.

Let us pause to consider Jonah’s message in the light of these points. First, the claim that Jonah made no mention of the possibility that God might relent is an argument from silence, and a risky one given that his message was very possibly more detailed than the summary we have of it. More tellingly, Rahab came to saving faith (Jas 2:25) by hearing principally (Josh. 2:8–11) that God had delivered Israel from Egypt and enabled them to destroy Sihon and Og. This too may have been a summary of what she knew of Israel and her God, but the text in Joshua is silent as regards forgiveness or calls to repentance. This cautions us against denying that Jonah’s message, in terms of its God-intended function or actual content, might have served to convert some of Nineveh’s inhabitants.

As for the protest that there was no covenantal basis for a saving response to Jonah’s message, this objection founders on the reality that the covenants with Israel are themselves the way by which the nations come to God. By believing in him as made known through his covenants with Israel, the nations can come to know him and join his people.

Though the Assyrians may well have integrated Jonah’s message into their theology, it seems best to conclude that as special revelation in one of the most obvious senses, Jonah’s message did indeed bear some relation to the gospel. As part of the gospel ‘announced beforehand’ (Gal. 3:8), and thus in the stream of God’s special revelation, Jonah’s efforts do indeed merit the term ‘mission’. Because Nineveh’s reaction to this message will help us further understand its content and nature, we turn to consider their statements about God and their repentance before leaving this question.

The response of the Ninevites

Until this point, what we know of the Ninevites in Jonah is highly unfavourable. The book opens by identifying them in terms of where they live and in terms of their morality (or lack thereof, Jon. 1:2), but only the latter description has any lasting significance throughout the book. Yahweh’s message to them hinges not at all on their ethnic or national identity (a significant omission), but exclusively on their evil behaviour. While the sailors are contextually the most likely object of Jonah’s condemnation of ‘those who regard vain idols’ (2:8), the Ninevites’ religious beliefs were essentially identical and he may have had them in mind as well. Finally, and most importantly, Jonah’s message of imminent destruction characterizes them as potential objects of Yahweh’s wrath (3:4).

Especially in the light of the recalcitrance of Israelites to accept prophetic condemnations of their behaviour (an excellent example is Amos 7, an episode essentially contemporaneous with Jonah’s ministry), it is striking that the Ninevites are willing to identify themselves as those who have violated Yahweh’s moral standards and so stand exposed to his wrath. The whole city ‘believed in God, proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest to the least of them’ (Jon. 3:5). What is going on here? Has the whole (formerly pagan) city become an immense body of Yahweh-worshippers?

While frequently used in the Pentateuch to describe the response that Israel should have toward God after seeing his miraculous works on her behalf, ‘believing in God’ also describes believing response to Yahweh’s word. While its use with Abraham is particularly important (Gen. 15:6), saving belief in Yahweh is not the only possible meaning of the phrase, as 2 Chronicles 20:20 makes clear. There, belief in God has the result that the Judahites would ‘be established’ (niphal of ’āman) against the threat posed by a composite force of Moabites, Ammonites and others. The following, parallel, phrase promises that ‘belief in Yahweh’s prophets’ (again with the hiphil of ’āman with bĕ) will see Judah ‘delivered’. The phrase itself thus cannot be assigned a single unambiguous meaning in Jonah 3 without looking at that context for clues to what is going on.

Even the most restrictive understanding of Nineveh’s ‘believing in God’ (Jon. 3:5), I will argue, establishes that Nineveh responded to Jonah’s message by judging it true and reacting accordingly. First, the Ninevites (on the assumption that their attitude is comparable to that of their king, as their repentance certainly is) do not presume that Yahweh will relent and change his mind (3:9) simply because they repent. While they clearly understood the threatened destruction of their city as punishment for their wickedness, their repentance is not presented as being motivated by self-interest. While they probably understood that their repentance increased their ‘chances’ of being spared, such concerns are relativized by the emphasis in the passage on Yahweh’s sovereignty and grace.

Another detail that affects our understanding of the Ninevites’ reaction to Jonah’s message appears in the recognition by God himself (thus excluding a specious repentance) that the Ninevites ‘turned from their evil way’ (3:10; the Hebrew term that describes their reaction is šûb, the most common term for ‘repentance’). When this phrase occurs elsewhere in the OT, it describes the kind of repentance God called for (which Israel and Judah often did not exhibit; 1 Kgs 13:33; 2 Kgs 17:13; 2 Chr. 7:14; Jer. 23:32; 25:5; 35:15; 36:3; Ezek. 13:22; 33:11; Neh. 9:35; Zech. 1:4). This repentance had been preceded by other evidences of the seriousness with which they took God’s threatened judgment: donning sackcloth and fasting (cf. Isa. 58:5 for their appearing together).

We should also return here to the difference in divine names that Lichtert used to downplay the saving potential of Jonah’s message. Though interesting, this detail cannot be pressed so far as to associate salvation exclusively with Yahweh, leaving Elohim to warn and punish (or relent concerning) the Gentiles, as Clements suggests (Clements 1975: 18). After all, the same ‘God’ who is the object of their belief in Jonah 3:5 responds to their change in behaviour in 3:10: if the same ‘God’ threatens and relents, no fundamental disjunction exists in his character between judgment and deliverance. And whatever protests might be made in the light of the message’s cryptic nature, the overarching reality remains the same: the Ninevites did repent, something the narrator makes very clear by attributing that conclusion to God himself.

All these points together allow us to reflect on the populace’s response in the light of the possibility that their repentance was not precluded by the message. In the light of what I have said so far about Nineveh’s repentance, it might even seem difficult to deny that they came to believe in Israel’s God and showed by their actions that their belief was genuine. While such an understanding is possible, we must be more cautious in drawing conclusions about the extent of Nineveh’s repentance.

The limits of Nineveh’s repentance

Like Nineveh, but much more often, Israel herself was threatened with oracles of judgment, and on occasion responded with repentance, but which sadly did not go far enough to renew the whole nation. Both groups, then, when faced with messages of judgment, are shown on some occasions to change their behaviour and escape threatened punishment. Here Jeremiah 18:1–12 is again relevant: Gentile nations and Israel are seen in the same paradigm of threatening and repentance, but for Nineveh this was not necessarily the same thing as changing religions or (for Nineveh and Israel) having sins pardoned or forgiven. It should not escape our notice that no language of forgiveness or pardon appears in the story – God relents, but the Ninevites’ prior sins remain unpunished.

The flexibility of ‘believing in God’ should also keep us from an overly hasty equation of Nineveh’s actions with holistic conversion to Yahweh. As noted above, the phrase admits of various meanings, and though only here in Jonah 3 is it connected with repentance, the context allows us to establish some boundaries for the significance of those two actions. The city believed God’s word through Jonah, and abandoned their violence and wickedness in the hope that God would spare them. This is a striking moral reform, but there is nothing in Jonah 3 that requires us to say it was more than that. ‘While one cannot deny the importance of proper works as a major step in repentance, this is not the terminology that would be expected of a full conversion to Yahweh.’

We should also notice that while fasting, mourning, putting aside violence, and belief in God’s word are evident, ‘the reform of the Ninevites makes no mention of putting away their other gods’. While we might be tempted to dismiss this as an argument from silence, we have already seen in the examples of Ruth and Naaman just this element when they explicitly abandon their gods and attach themselves to Yahweh (Ruth 1:16; 2 Kgs 5:17). This criterion of breaking off one’s former relationship with all other gods, we should be reminded, had a well-earned place in the definition of conversion offered by Wright (C. J. H. Wright 2004a: 18–19).

This brings us to one final point. If Jonah came to Nineveh in the decades before the fall of Israel, as the chronological details surrounding him suggest, then the Nineveh that repented under Jonah was very soon involved once again in the exercise of imperialistic violence, and that against the very nation from which Jonah came! From violence before Jonah, to repentance from violence under Jonah’s preaching, and back to violence a few decades later – this is an unconvincing portrait of thoroughgoing repentance.

Where does all this leave us? Nineveh believed in God, turned from her sin in some degree, but did not fully turn to God. In other words, her repentance was partial and incomplete. As we noted in , the biblical teaching on repentance affirms that a change in behaviour is only part of the concept. It appears that the author of Jonah recognized that Nineveh’s repentance did not signify the conversion of the whole city to Yahweh, but still chose to portray their response to the threat of divine judgment in the strongest possible terms in order to press his critique of Israel’s unwillingness to repent in even a comparable way.

The response of Nineveh’s king

It is likely that the author of Jonah chooses to present two sides of Nineveh’s repentance with this same goal of accentuating its extent without actually saying that these Assyrians became Yahwists through and through. The first, the reaction of the populace, is dealt with above. The second, the king’s reaction to Jonah’s proclamation, is no less remarkable than that of his subjects, and is very tellingly focused on elements of his person very intimately connected to Assyria’s (and Nineveh’s) imperialism.

First, by paying heed to the message he distances himself from his former idolatrous imperialism by recognizing that Yahweh is both clearly superior to his gods and opposed to the political entity with which Assyrian theology aligns them (Nineveh as part of Assyria). The king also puts off his royalty of his own accord as he arises from his throne to sit down in ashes, and lays aside his royal regalia to dress himself in sackcloth (Jon. 3:6). Like the other Ninevites, the king recognizes God’s evaluation of Neo-Assyrian morals as valid and takes seriously the threatened judgment as well as the possibility of God’s clemency, without presuming upon it (cf. 3:9 with Joel 2:14). From whatever preaching Jonah did, the king of Nineveh gathered enough of God’s true identity not only to believe in him and hope for his mercy, but to recognize God’s sovereignty despite the threat it posed to him.

The royal decree that he issued as part of his response calls for the Ninevites to turn from a thoroughly sinful lifestyle (violence in particular characterized Neo-Assyria) to one that is not defined by violence and evil. Its inclusion of the city’s animals may be seen as putting humans and animals on similar footing as God’s creatures or as demonstrating the sincerity of the city’s response, and probably owes something to Neo-Assyrian methods for avoiding bad luck associated with astrological cycles. One such text suggests the following course of action: ‘To avoid it [bad luck], humans, cattle, sheep, and donkeys must refrain from sleeping for three days and pray to Lisi-gūn that the entire household may prosper.’

Another Assyrian text, closer to the decree of Jonah 3 in terms of genre and content, is a royal call to repentance issued in 793 BC by an unnamed Assyrian king (most likely Adad-Nirari III, who ruled 810–783) and addressed to Mannu-kī-Assur, the governor of Guzana/Gozan province who, according to the Assyrian Chronicle, led a military excursion in 794. It reads:

Decree of the king. You and all the people, your land, your meadows will mourn and pray for three days before the god Adad and repent. You will perform the purification rites so that there may be rest.

This decree, like the one in Jonah 3, is untypically focused on repentance, something that did not characterize most ancient Near Eastern religions given the symbiotic relationship between the gods and their worshippers. When confronted with suffering or threats of punishment, it was very common for people across the ancient Near East to seek to remedy their situation by appeasing the god by other means, especially sacrifice, which was essentially a calculated giving to the deity of what he or she wanted. Confession, too, was widespread and often accompanied the other measures that those in suffering took to change their situation, though outside Israel it was encumbered by polytheism and a lack of revelation as to the god’s explicit will. If the gods have not clearly revealed their wills, one is not sure which god one has disobeyed, nor what part of his or her will has been violated. Apart from these details, it was typical in the ancient Near East to interpret suffering as a necessary consequence of wrongdoing, whether for kings, nations or individuals.

A brief comparison of these two decrees is suggestive. Both are comprehensive (though in Jonah that includes the animals), involve a single deity and call for repentance. The decree recorded in Jonah, however, is more specific about the change of behaviour required, and is not motivated by the present experience of unrest but by a threat of future judgment. And, of course, the deities involved have little in common: Adad has quite limited spheres of operation, and has not revealed himself. Hadad/Adad ‘functions as a god of oracles and judgement’ (Greenfield 1999: 378) and was also responsible, at the height of his powers in the ninth century and following, for bringing agricultural fertility and prosperity to the land in his capacity as the storm god (Grayson 1996b: 231). The God of whom Jonah spoke, by contrast, was in control of the future and made moral demands of the Ninevites (demands which they at least interpreted quite specifically). It could also be argued that the God of Israel, simply by virtue of being the only deity in Jonah’s thinking, was sovereign in ways that Adad was not. This would explain the unwillingness of Nineveh’s king to affirm that their repentance necessarily entailed their deliverance.

Whatever the identity of the person behind the decree in Jonah 3 (the possibilities are discussed in the next section), the significance of his actions and decree are clear. Indeed, by leaving him anonymous the author forces us to focus on what he says and does rather than on who he is, probably because the king and his people are equally guilty before God. This is all the more significant when we recall that Neo-Assyrian prophecy was focused, as consistently as anywhere else in the ancient Near East, on reaffirming the existing king and power structure:

Most of the [extant Neo-Assyrian] prophecies can be characterized as oracles of well-being, proclaiming the reconciliation of the king with the gods. This reconciliation guarantees the equilibrium of heaven and earth, as demonstrated by the stable rule of the Assyrian king, his superiority over all enemies and adversaries and the legitimate succession.

One such example will suffice to show the positive nature of the typical Neo-Assyrian prophecy. Though delivered not quite a century later than Jonah’s ministry, when prophets were unusually prominent in Assyrian governance, the empire’s dependence upon its gods for its security and well-being is essentially constant across the centuries covered by our study:

Fear not, Esarhaddon! I am Bel, I speak to you! I watch over the supporting beams of your heart. When your mother gave birth to you, sixty Great Gods stood there with me, protecting you. Sîn stood at your right side, Shamash at your left. Sixty Great Gods are still standing around you; they have girded your loins.

Do not trust in humans! Lift up your eyes and focus on me! I am Ishtar of Arbela. I have reconciled Assur to you. I protected you when you were a baby. Fear not; praise me!

Is there an enemy that has attacked you, while I have kept silent? The future shall be like the past! I am Nabû, the Lord of the Stylus. Praise me!

The king’s acceptance of Jonah’s oracle, one that was radically different from what Assyrian rulers understandably liked to hear, completes the portrayal of his repentance as something more than superficial.

Who was Nineveh’s king?

While a moment ago I suggested that the story of Jonah intentionally neglects to name Nineveh’s king, this is not to say that there is nothing interesting about his office or his response to Jonah’s message. At least three possibilities exist as to his identity: the term could refer to the king of Assyria, to a regional governor responsible for the region of Nineveh (like those listed earlier) or to a substitute king (more on this last possibility below). All things considered it is more probable that the ‘king’ of Nineveh was a provincial governor. As Ferguson has noted, it would be odd if the king of the Assyrian empire would issue an edict of repentance for only one city (and not even the capitol city) while ignoring the more important cities of Calah and Ashur, both of which were fairly close to Nineveh (P. Ferguson 1996: 309). Despite our contemporary habit of associating royalty only with a supreme king, in the ancient Near East the title could well apply to rulers of lesser stature: thus we find in the bilingual Tell Fekheryeh inscription, probably left by Adad-Nirari II (911–891), the parallel use of the Assyrian term for ‘governor’ (šakin) and the Aramaic term ‘king’ (mlk). This flexibility makes it plausible that the substitute ‘king’ ritual could function for governors as well as for higher-ranking rulers such as kings.

Despite our modern assumption that kingship is a position that can be ended but not interrupted, it is quite plausible that the ‘king’ of Nineveh (assuming that a regional governor held that office or role) temporarily relinquished his position precisely because of Jonah’s message of threatened judgment. This is attested in the longstanding practice of the ‘substitute king ritual’ across the ancient Near East. The substitute king (šar pūḫi) ritual was based on the belief that ‘an eclipse, lunar or solar, normally portended nothing less than the death of the king’, and was practised from Isin in the nineteenth century BC down to Assyria in the seventh century.

In Assyria, at least, not only lunar and solar eclipses were significant. An Assyrian ritual tablet speaks of ‘the evil portent of evil and unlucky signs, eclipses of the moon, the sun, Jupiter, Venus, Mercury and Saturn, [and Mars]’ (Parpola 1983: xxii). But if Jupiter were visible during a lunar eclipse, or if Jupiter and Venus were visible during a solar eclipse, the substitute king ritual was unnecessary, since these eclipses were seen as related to a lesser dignitary.

These beliefs were put into practice as follows. Once an evil omen was witnessed, a king would try to avoid his anticipated death or the hardship announced in the omen by putting a substitute king on the throne for a certain time, while the (real) ruler took the status of a farmer or commoner but remained within the palace. The substitute himself was typically a person of low standing – attested replacements include a prisoner of war, a death-row inmate, a political enemy of the king, a gardener and a simpleton. For a while (the maximum duration of the replacement period seems to have been 100 days) this individual lived a life of luxury, since he had really to look the part of the king whose death the eclipse or ominous event portended. Robes, food, a significant entourage, residing in the palace with a ‘queen’ and other royal privileges were his to enjoy (but only for a while). Once the proscribed period was over, the substitute king would then be killed with the hope that the omen’s force would thus be exhausted.

Intriguingly, ‘to make sure that the omens would irrevocably remain affecting the substitute, the document where they were written was physically attached to his garments’, something that makes it possible that the king of Nineveh removed his royal robes not simply as part of his mourning, but also in order to leave them to the substitute.

Nineveh’s repentance in context

Even if Nineveh’s response to Jonah’s message included significant repentance but stopped short of full faith in Yahweh, as seems to be the case, it is difficult to imagine an account better calculated to overthrow the assumption that heathens could not or would not respond to God’s word. It simultaneously condemns Israel’s lack of repentance in an unprecedented way: ‘By their response to a prophetic warning, however ephemeral it may have been, the Ninevites put hard-hearted Israel to shame.’ Moreover, even a response so qualified met with a demonstration of God’s mercy that surely would have shocked many Israelites of Jonah’s day. While a similar picture was painted with only a few characters in , here 120,000 people and their cattle form an immense demonstration of the far-reaching mercy of God. Nineveh, as incredible as it seemed to Jonah, had turned from her wickedness and been spared.

How does God ‘relent’?

Before we move on to Jonah 4, we need to consider two theological questions that arise from the events of Jonah 3. First, the resolution of the crisis that faced Nineveh is ultimately the result of God’s relenting from the threat that he had announced against Nineveh. Jeremiah 18:7–8 has already been mentioned to show that God is free to respond in mercy to those who repent before his call, or in judgment to those who refuse his lordship in presumption upon his promise of blessing. But how does that work theologically? How can God, whom the Bible elsewhere says is eternal and does not change his mind (e.g. 1 Sam. 15:29), not follow through on such threats and promises?

R. W. L. Moberly tackles this knotty question by first identifying the issues involved in the various contexts in which the OT addresses God’s relenting or repenting. Moberly shows, on the one hand, that in Jeremiah 18:1–12 God’s ‘repenting’ is part and parcel of his ‘genuine, because responsive, relationship’ with human beings. Though God is truly sovereign, ‘YHWH’s sovereignty is not exercised arbitrarily, but responsibly and responsively, interacting with the moral, or immoral, actions of human beings’ (Moberly 1998: 114). Richard Pratt Jr. expresses the same thought somewhat differently:

belief in God’s immutability does not negate the importance of historical contingencies or especially the importance of human choices. Under the sovereign control of God, the choices people make determine the directions history will take.

Thus when Nineveh repents, God’s relenting is both his sovereign decision and a response to Nineveh’s change in behaviour.

The other side of the question involves passages (esp. Num. 23:19; 1 Sam. 15:29) in which God denies that he repents. Moberly shows, by probing the references to God’s election of Israel in the context of Numbers 23 and of David in the context of 1 Samuel 15, that God does indeed unchangingly maintain his covenant commitments – he will not relent from promises of that sort. An additional detail in Numbers 23 and 1 Samuel 15 involves the contrast that those passages establish between God and (fallible) human beings: ‘there is a qualitative difference between divine and human “repentance”’ that cautions readers against assuming anything improper inheres in divine ‘repentance’ (Moberly 1998: 117).

When we hear God threaten Nineveh with judgment, therefore, we should not see this as one of his eternal decrees (to which we are not privy in any case) that he is modifying ‘on the fly’. His relenting, though not forced by human repentance, is nonetheless a gracious response to it. I have described Jonah’s message to Nineveh as a ‘threat’ to highlight the conditional nature of Jonah’s message and thus the possibility of such a divine response. Threats by their very nature are intended to change behaviour. To deny this mode of speech to God is an arbitrary and unnecessary application of immutability and divine purpose to matters that are inherently historically contingent, and runs the risk of rendering any call to repentance with such motivations impossible.

God’s justice and his relenting

A second theological issue we need to face in Jonah 3 is the question of God’s justice in the face of his decision to delay the punishment of Nineveh’s sin. The fact that God relented of his threat to destroy Nineveh on the basis of an incomplete repentance has caused some interpreters to conclude that God, at least in the book of Jonah, is not just. Levine, for example, restricts the theology of the book of Jonah to the ‘morality of antiquity’, which, he avers, allows for evil to be corrected by suffering the appropriate punishment, performance of an equally weighty good deed or propitiation. The events of Jonah 3 therefore fail to fit his theory of justice, since Nineveh’s repentance is hardly as significant as her violence and wrongdoing had been. Furthermore, Levine sets human justice on the same plane as divine by protesting that God cannot forgive Nineveh’s evil, which ‘wasn’t done to him but to the victims of Nineveh’s evil’ (Levine 2002: 178–179).

While logical within the world view he has adopted, Levine’s protests ignore what God himself establishes as justice, not only in Jonah but everywhere that the character traits of Exodus 34 are evident in the OT. The OT also has no category for works whose moral value cancels the guilt of previous sin. Lastly, it is not accurate to state the problem Levine sees in Jonah 3 in terms of forgiveness. Neither Jonah 3 nor Jeremiah 18 uses forgiveness to explain God’s actions when he relents. God does not give Nineveh a clear pass in Jonah 3, and he relents for no other reason than his own mercy and patience.

God, no less than Jonah, would say that ‘an evil deed must, by necessity, be punished’ (Levine 2002: 182). What distinguishes Jonah from God in that regard is God’s willingness to await repentance and to delay judgment. Jonah seems ignorant of those possibilities for himself, and finds them revolting when he sees them realized in God’s dealings with the Ninevites. Levine too is not inclined to allow justice and mercy to coexist, and seems to approve of Jonah’s world view in this regard: ‘All along, Jonah’s concern is the defense of justice from the encroachments of mercy.’ But while God’s patience does allow human evil to proliferate (as Levine observes), the immediate divine punishment that Levine sees as the only way to achieve justice can only spell the destruction of every human being who sins. Since this would entail the destruction of every human being without exception, the only world view that Levine finds valid requires that divine justice not be honoured. Consequently, he urges the expression of ‘the ultimate values. . . in the practical working of the law’ (Levine 2002: 190–191).

Happily for sinners of all eras, there is another way, one that accepts the compatibility of God’s remaining just even as he refrains from immediately imposing sin’s full consequences on his rebellious image-bearers. Far from removing any motivation to serve God, as long as one comes to see one’s own sinfulness, the account of Nineveh’s repentance and God’s merciful response to it is a wonderful encouragement to throw oneself on God’s mercy, which is offered in full accord with his justice on the basis of Christ’s cross-work.

Even in the context of the OT, the incomplete repentance of the Ninevites should not be taken as proof that God will let sin go unpunished indefinitely, as Guillaume does. The book of Jonah shows only that the threatened punishment did not come on the terms Jonah had announced in the light of Nineveh’s superficial but not hypocritical repentance. Seen in the context of the whole canon, in which deeply rooted repentance and faith in God’s sovereign mercy go together, affirmations that ‘repentance is important but is not everything. God is merciful and just’ fail to keep divine justice and forgiveness together. Again, the delay between threat and punishment affords humans the time to repent and seek God’s mercy, before that opportunity passes. In Nineveh’s case, Nahum eventually assigns retribution to the subsequent, and final, exercise of God’s wrath against it for its sin.

It is worth pausing, finally, to contrast Nineveh’s experience with the sailors on this point. Though the word ‘repent’ is not employed in Jonah 1, the sailors’ actions clearly show a reorientation of heart and life in the context of a monotheistic relationship with Yahweh. Within the boundaries of the book of Jonah, the very different outcomes of the different types of repentance that the sailors and Nineveh display encourage (genuine) repentance in sinners who also come to trust God’s mercy, quite simply because he offers it to them.

↑ Back to top