Conclusion
Chapter Six
Looking into Jonah 4
The delight we might feel at the happy outcome of is completely lost on Jonah. opens by completing the sketch of his character in such unfavourable colours that it is shocking. In so doing, however, the author puts in place an important element of his book’s message that enables it to call the most self-assured reader to self-examination. Those who see in Jonah only the antithesis of their own essentially (and inherently?) irreproachable theology, or who assume that their knowledge of God has prevented mistakes and corruption of this magnitude, need to see (as we all do) that the ethic of is both a mighty deep and a glorious height that must drive repentance and trust in divine forgiveness.
The narrator begins by showing us Jonah’s reaction to Nineveh’s deliverance. He does so first by telling us about it, then by quoting Jonah’s own description of it in his prayer, and finally by giving God’s reaction to Jonah’s prayer. While the main character’s speech is always important, the words Jonah speaks are unusually revealing since they uncover his motives, and since they reveal Jonah as he relates to God’s character. These very precise descriptions of Jonah’s reaction in Jonah 4:1–3 underline its importance for understanding the book as a whole, and focus our attention on his words in particular (4:2–3). The story continues, strange to say, when Jonah refuses to answer God’s first question; but to begin we will consider the first few verses of Jonah .
Jonah’s anger against Yahweh
Nineveh’s deliverance
While the time of this episode is not explicitly stated, it is clear that Jonah has concluded through observation (after waiting the necessary ‘forty’ days) that Nineveh’s repentance entails the rescinding of God’s threat. Against the backdrop of still-standing Nineveh, we see the Israelite prophet fuming over the city’s deliverance, something he judges to be ‘very evil’. The first phrase of 4:1 sheds a good deal of light on his reaction with its mention of ‘evil’, since that reminds us of God’s description of the city’s wickedness (1:3; 3:8, 10). This verse, however, is the only time in the book of Jonah that the adjective ‘very’ is used in conjunction with the moral term ‘evil’. Speaking tongue in cheek, it seems Jonah is more upset with Nineveh’s deliverance than was Yahweh with its sin! In another striking contrast, a moment later the narrator uses the same term ‘evil/calamity’ for something of which God ‘relents’ (4:2) – Jonah thus finds Nineveh’s deliverance worse than the divine judgment that had threatened its existence.
By these means the book emphatically shows Jonah rendering the strongest possible negative verdict on God’s clemency toward Nineveh. As in , where he seems to have imposed a death sentence upon himself, Jonah may firmly believe that immediate retribution is the only appropriate divine response to sin. Unlike , however, when Yahweh acts in mercy to suspend Jonah’s sentence and Jonah responds in praise, here Jonah experiences immense anger and frustration when the deliverance of Nineveh becomes a reality.
The expression for Jonah’s anger, at the end of verse 1, is fairly common in Hebrew. Its significance will thus come into view only in the light of its context. Since only God has been angry to this point in the book (against Nineveh’s sin, 3:9), we might ask ourselves if Jonah is somehow taking to himself divine prerogatives, especially given the enormously different reasons for his and God’s anger. If Jonah had expressed anger against Nineveh’s sin prior to her repentance, he would have had God on his side, so to speak. But Nineveh’s repentance makes that impossible for the time being, and the cause of Jonah’s anger clearly lies elsewhere. This is clarified by the context: as with the verb ‘it was evil’, the subject of the verb ‘it caused anger’ must be determined from the context, and the nearest candidate is, once again, God’s sparing of Nineveh. God’s second response to Jonah (4:10–11) establishes beyond doubt that Yahweh’s grace in sparing Nineveh was the cause of Jonah’s anger.
The root of Jonah’s anger: God’s gracious character
When Jonah speaks, his words reveal what must have been, even in the period of the OT when Israel and the nations were generally separated, a shocking antipathy toward non-Israelites and an aversion to seeing God’s mercy extended to them. What is more, this theological parochialism was already fomenting as soon as the call of 1:1 came to him, a detail that explains his otherwise nonsensical flight from his commission in and which accounts for the blithe self-centredness of his prayer from the fish’s belly.
The description Jonah gives of the God whose recent actions he finds offensive first came to expression (biblically speaking) in Exodus 20:5–6. The predominant similarities of that passage to Exodus 34:6–7, which nonetheless is hardly a direct quote of the earlier passage, prompt Widmer to speak of the latter passage as ‘a deliberate reformulation’ of Exodus 20: 5–6 (Widmer 2004: 184). Notably, it is the description as presented in Exodus 34 that becomes a classic statement of Yahweh’s character that later biblical writers frequently cite.
Why does Jonah choose to describe God in these terms? The historical context of Exodus 34:6–7 is the blatant fracture of the recently concluded Sinai covenant. Israel has committed apostasy and idolatry by constructing and worshipping the golden calf, not to mention the immoral behaviour that accompanied these actions. Yahweh very clearly sees that the covenant relationship has been horribly breached (note how he distances himself from the people by attributing the exodus to Moses, Exod. 32:7) and so threatens to annihilate Israel and to continue his purposes through Moses. Moses, however, intercedes passionately and selflessly on Israel’s behalf, preventing the ‘immediate and total destruction of the Israelites’, but at that point ‘we are very far from any kind of resolution at this point in the story’ (Hayes 2004: 56). Judgment is first exercised against those who refuse to acknowledge Yahweh’s rule over them (32:25–29), and when Moses attempts to secure forgiveness for the sinful Israelites, God affirms that he will hold them responsible for their sins (32:30–35). In the following chapter Moses continues to intercede on behalf of Israel, asking God to restore the divine presence lost through Israel’s sin. Exodus 34:6–7 comes just before his final petition that sees the covenant reinstated.
Coming back to Jonah 4, we are struck by the fact that Jonah has the theological acumen to draw on this unprecedented description and demonstration of God’s gracious character. As noted earlier, the order and selection of divine attributes in Exodus 34 exhibits differences from the earlier description of Yahweh in Exodus 20:5–6, and when Jonah speaks in Jonah 4:2 he also selects only some of the description given in Exodus 34. These differences are summarized in the following table, which puts variations in italics; the order of Exodus 34:6–7 has been modified to facilitate comparison with the other texts.
Jonah 4:2
Exodus 34:6–7
Exodus 20:5–6
The LORD, the LORD God,
I, the LORD your God,
yet he will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations.
am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate me,
You are a gracious and compassionate God,
compassionate and gracious,
slow to anger and abundant in loving kindness,
slow to anger, and abounding in loving kindness and truth;
who keeps lovingkindness for thousands of generations, who forgives iniquity, transgression and sin;
but showing loving kindness to thousands of generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.
and one who relents concerning calamity.
To begin with the differences between the two Exodus texts, Widmer argues that Exodus 34 shows ‘a decisive shift from an emphasis on divine jealousy to an emphasis on divine mercy, grace, and loyalty. . .. [But] divine justice is still a fundamental part of YHWH’s attributes’ (Widmer 2004: 202). This is taken a step further in Jonah, where the prophet (because he is beside himself with rage?) omits all punitive language by citing only some of the description of God given in Exodus 34. His selectivity emphasizes as strongly as possible the gracious disposition that characterizes Yahweh (cf. Joel 2:13; Num. 14:18; Pss 86:15; 103:8; 145:8; Neh. 9:17; 2 Chr. 30:9; Mic. 7:18–20).
There is more that requires notice here, especially the fact that neither Exodus 34 nor the later quotations of that text elsewhere in Scripture include ‘any limiting element which would confine Yahweh’s behavior to Israel’ (Wolff 1986: 167). On the contrary, Moses’ explicit reference to the covenant with Abraham (cf. Exod. 32:13, which quotes or alludes to Gen. 15:7; 17:8; 22:17) reminds us of God’s purposes to bless the nations by blessing Abram and his descendants. Jonah 4, however, is the first and only time that the OT explicitly applies this text to Gentiles.
Jonah’s interpretation of Nineveh’s situation, though severely twisted, once again contains some theologically astute perceptions. He has described God’s actions in terms drawn from not just any description of God’s character, but from a description that accentuates God’s mercy and grace and does not restrict the significance of that grace to Israel. As we have seen, God’s grace per se is not onerous to Jonah: he simply hates grace shown to those he thinks don’t deserve it, especially non-Israelites (the issue of merit, though it overturns grace in proper theological terms, seems necessary to Jonah’s understanding of it). But in taking upon his lips the divine self-revelation of Exodus 34 Jonah unwittingly and ironically condemns his own critique of Yahweh’s indiscriminate grace.
If the echo of Exodus 32 – 34 were not sufficient to show the centrality of mercy, grace, patience and faithfulness in God’s character, Jonah adds (drawing on what has just unfolded before his eyes) that Yahweh ‘relented concerning the threat’ he had made. This summary of Nineveh’s deliverance, though remarkable in itself, gains further significance in the light of the context’s relation to Exodus 32 – 34. The author of Jonah seems to want us to make this connection to Exodus 32, and so to see that God’s compassion to Israel then is no different from his compassion to Nineveh now, for he has cast his description of God’s reaction in Jonah 3:10 in the same words as God’s decision to spare Israel in Exodus 32:14. One notable difference exists, however, between those two situations: Israel in Exodus 32 had not yet even repented (though Nineveh had) – Israel was spared only because of God’s gracious response to Moses’ intercession!
Before moving on we need to reckon with the fact that Jonah, ever since the word of the Lord came to him, had been fearful that God would show mercy to Nineveh (Jon. 4:2a). This short admission, because it appears so late in the book, is especially powerful in revealing Jonah’s inner motivations. Earlier we struggled to understand why Jonah fled to Tarshish when first instructed to go to Nineveh, and while noting in Jonah 3 that he did finally obey, we also wondered if the prayer of Jonah 2 was really solid evidence of repentance or reorientation on Jonah’s part. Here in Jonah 4 the author draws the veil back on the deepest motivations of both God and Jonah, and while God’s delight in mercy is consistent with the warning he issued to Nineveh and his relenting once she repented, the incongruity between Jonah’s mission and his unchanging antipathy for displays of grace to non-Israelites is alarming. When Jonah’s deepest convictions and dispositions are contrasted with Yahweh’s gracious and compassionate character, the book portrays with immense power the deviant nature of Jonah’s attitudes and beliefs.
The fruit of Jonah’s anger: life with God impossible
All this talk of grace on Jonah’s part leads, very unexpectedly, to his prayer that God take his life. This is particularly odd since God’s grace delivers from death, not over to death! Until this point in the book all the characters, human and divine alike, have understood the necessary connection between sin and death (Riede 2009: 260). The Gentile characters have seen death as the ultimate punishment, and God has presented death in essentially the same way when he threatened to destroy Nineveh on account of her sin. In , however, Jonah apparently thinks that seeing God display his grace indiscriminately is worse than death, and if his goal in going overboard was to escape his commission, he was thinking like this as early as .
In yet another allusion to earlier Scripture, Jonah’s request to die is cast in terms of Elijah’s (1 Kgs 19). In both cases the prophet retreats from his commission, is deeply frustrated by what his prophetic call entails in terms of his own experience, and so asks God to take his life. But lying behind these superficial similarities are several stark contrasts. While Elijah saw his own limitations in the face of Jezebel’s violent opposition to Yahweh and his purposes (1 Kgs 19:10, 14), Jonah was crushed by the fact that God had acted with unprecedented mercy toward the Gentiles, saving them from punishment as he had spared Israel at Sinai. Furthermore, while Jezebel is Elijah’s nemesis, Yahweh himself, since he acts in a way contrary to Jonah’s xenophobic and arrogant wishes, is Jonah’s worst enemy!
The contrast between Jonah and his God is complete when we compare this prayer with his prayer in the fish. In Jonah 2 when Jonah himself was saved from drowning, he produced a prayer that extolled God as the source of deliverance. In Jonah 4, however, when Jonah’s enemies are saved from destruction, Jonah’s next prayer sees him begging for death, from which God has so recently delivered him. As Simon puts it, Jonah ‘is praying for death because the Lord’s attributes – so frequently stated to praise him – are loathsome to the prophet, and his unwilling participation in their application has deprived his life of meaning’ (Simon 1999: 34). It is difficult to imagine a more convoluted and incoherent theology than we see in Jonah.
Yahweh’s first response to Jonah’s anger
God’s question to this seemingly misnamed (because ferociously angry) prophet (‘Jonah’ means ‘dove’) is a gentle call to rethink his position. By using some of the narrator’s description of Jonah’s reaction in his question, God explicitly affirms the evaluation of Jonah given in 4:1, creating a neat conclusion to this first exchange between the mercurial prophet and his God.
It is important to catch the note of challenge in Yahweh’s question to Jonah. We know that the prophet is frustrated and angry, and the comparison of his desire for Nineveh’s destruction with Yahweh’s gracious character in 4:2–3 has already made it quite clear that Jonah and God are not on the same page. Sasson, however, noting that the verb that begins God’s question and which we translate as ‘Is it good for you to. . .?’ can also function adverbially, focuses on the degree of Jonah’s anger or dejection and translates the question as ‘Are you utterly dejected?’ Sasson uses this alternate translation to shift the emphasis from a divine censure of Jonah’s anger to something quite different, suggesting that ‘God sympathizes with Jonah’s despair, perhaps even wishes to relieve his pain’ (Sasson 1990: 287).
While it is true that the verb used here (like most words) can mean more than one thing, this does not give interpreters the latitude necessary to shift the emphasis of the passage quite as much as Sasson does. Not only is Jonah’s anger more central to the passage than his dejection (as was argued above), but whether translated as ‘are you so angry?’ (i.e. adverbially) or ‘do you do well to be angry?’ (i.e. as a transitive verb), the immediate context and God’s explicit reply in 4:10–11 show that such anger is nonsensical and wrong.
To take up another intriguing element of the passage, what are we to make of Jonah’s refusal to respond to God’s question? Here again Sasson’s interpretation makes us carefully examine what occurs in the passage. He suggests (Sasson 1990: 287) that ‘Jonah finds comfort in the measured words from on high, for the time being at least’, assuming that Jonah’s silence implies his satisfaction. But to reason so is to overlook the fact that Jonah, far from getting over his dashed hopes for Nineveh’s destruction, becomes increasingly enraged and irrational until in 4:9 he is ‘angry to the point of death’ over the collapse of nothing more than a gourd. If Jonah is so wrathful because of the gourd’s demise, how much more would his anger still burn against God for sparing Nineveh, a reality that cut him to the very core of his being?
Jonah’s anger over his discomfort
The hut goes up (4:5)
Having refused to answer God’s question, Jonah’s next move is to leave the city and settle down to its east, where he builds himself a hut. When Jonah leaves the city in 4:5, the narrative is resuming after an interruption that apparently involved Jonah’s return to the city (which in any case was not far from him), perhaps to see what post-repentance Nineveh was like.
We may infer from Jonah’s decision to build a hut that he was prepared to spend more than a day or two watching Nineveh, but for what purpose? Yahweh had seen the Ninevites’ repentance and decided not to overturn the city, and Jonah is very aware of this, as his explosive reaction showed. What then prompted him to keep an eye on Nineveh?
We should first remember that God’s sparing Nineveh was not a guarantee of its long-term well-being. Were the city to revert to its pre-repentance violence, God could conceivably warn or punish her. For this reason Jonah may have justifiably understood God’s relenting as a mere delay in judgment. But while Israelites like Jonah knew from their nation’s experience that delays in judgment were just that, one wonders if the lengthy delays in judgment that the book of Kings mentions, for example, are not to be contrasted with Jonah’s radically shortened time frame here. While he might not have expected God to overturn Nineveh mere days after its repentance, the phrase ‘until he would see what would happen to the city’ shows that Jonah was unconvinced God would spare Nineveh for a lengthy period of time.
It is impossible to be certain how long Jonah might have been willing to stay at his self-appointed post. In favour of a longer stay would be the expectation that as time went on, it would become increasingly probable that Nineveh’s (new) sins would catch up with her. In favour of a shorter stay are the nature of the booth itself, the fact that Jonah has no means of sustaining himself, and his very probable disinclination to interact with the Assyrians any more than necessary. It seems reasonable to conclude that he was ready to sit there for perhaps a few weeks until (he apparently hoped) the sin of the Ninevites once again became dominant, entailing their final destruction.
The gourd goes up and Jonah’s joy peaks (4:6)
The hut, of course, was to shelter Jonah from the heat of the sun, as the mention of shade in 4: 5 makes clear. But why then does ‘Yahweh Elohim’ cause a gourd to spring up next to him? Leaving aside for a moment the nuances associated with this compound divine name, the effect of the gourd is clearly beneficial for Jonah. More than that – he is ecstatic about it! In context, this is most likely because it provided him with sorely needed shade, improving his makeshift hut. This is corroborated by the fact that shade from the sun is also in view in Jonah 4:6, which tells us that the gourd was to ‘deliver him from his evil’. The only other explicit ‘evil’ in context is the anger and frustration that Jonah felt at Nineveh’s deliverance, and no gourd was sufficient to change that.
While this explains the gourd’s function, we can still ponder why Jonah’s joy is described in such strong terms here. The only other time the adjective ‘very’ is used to describe Jonah it is part of a description of his equally strong (and opposite) reaction to Nineveh’s deliverance in 4:1. Given the very close proximity of these two descriptions, the contrast is intentional and clear: Jonah is as glad about a little more shade for his head as he was enraged when God’s mercy disappointed his hope that Nineveh would be destroyed.
Let us return now to the compound divine name ‘Yahweh Elohim’, which is used in the account of the gourd’s appearance. Earlier we saw that when ‘Yahweh appoints’ something (like the fish), he does so to deliver Jonah from some danger or hardship. So too here, the Yahweh element in the divine name that the author uses is consistent with God’s intention to provide shade for Jonah. But why, we might ask, does the author add ‘Elohim/God’ to that designation? Since the beginning of the book, Jonah has been closely associated with Yahweh, a divine name that brings to mind his unique covenantal relationship with Israel (1:1, 3, 9; 2:2, 6, 9; cf. Exod. 3:6). The non-Israelites in the story, by contrast, are almost always associated with ‘God’, the sole exception being the sailors who turn to Yahweh in trust and submission in 1:14–16. When the author of the book changes his pattern of usage in , therefore, and connects Jonah with ‘God’, he has most probably done so in order to show that the God who has shown mercy and compassion toward the Gentiles is the same God Jonah knows, the same God Israel has known from her very beginning.
The gourd comes down and Jonah’s anger mounts (4:7–9)
The narrative continues beyond this description of Jonah’s effervescent joy to show Yahweh still at work on Jonah. The fact that Jonah is not yet anywhere near repenting can be seen as a partial cause for God’s continued interaction with him, much as God spoke further to Job to produce repentance after the first speech from the whirlwind failed to do so (Job 38:1 – 40:5) (Timmer 2009a).
The gourd, we quickly learn, did not function exclusively to increase the shade protecting Jonah from the sun – God has more in store for Jonah than physical comfort. The Lord next appoints a worm which, as early as possible the next day, attacks the plant and causes it to wither, bringing an abrupt end to Jonah’s supplemental source of shade. Before we read of Jonah’s reaction, therefore, we know that this source of ‘great joy’ has disappeared as quickly as it appeared. But more bad news is to come: once the sun is up Yahweh also directs a scorching east wind to blow upon Jonah (who, having sat down on the east side of the city, is directly in its path), and the sun compounds the problem by beating down on his head. Whether he is not in his booth, or whether (as is more likely) it offered very defective protection from this heat, the scorching temperature takes a toll on Jonah, and he wilts under it. This physical discomfort makes him beg God to let him die, a request that the narrator brings to prominence by adding to it Jonah’s overall evaluation of his circumstances: ‘my death is better than my life’.
We have already seen Jonah’s lamentable self-absorption in his desire to die when he sees his hopes for Nineveh’s destruction dashed. His egotism and banality reach new depths here, however, when he becomes enraged explicitly on account of the gourd (4:9) and wishes for death simply because the shade on his head is removed and a hot wind is buffeting him. Furthermore, when God repeats the same question he asked in 4:4 about this insignificant facet of Jonah’s existence (there it concerned the highly significant deliverance of Nineveh), Jonah finally responds – and affirms that he has good reason to be angry! And if that were not enough, Jonah even adds his own adverbial phrase that provides more detail than God’s question sought: Jonah is right to be angry ‘to the point of death!’
Yahweh’s second response to Jonah’s anger
Jonah having reached rock-bottom spiritually, theologically and emotionally, the reader’s expectations for closure have to find fulfilment by another means. Happily, Yahweh has the last word on the issues that Jonah raises and so provides not only literary closure but theological finality with regard to Jonah’s petulant rebellion. It is clear on a number of levels that God’s words here are sufficient to bring the book to a close, not least because just as Jonah expressed himself in thirty-nine words in 4:2–3, Yahweh uses precisely the same number of words in 4:10–11 to refute the prophet’s tortured reasoning.
It is important to note that Yahweh does not simply chide Jonah for being petty. Jonah’s beliefs and behaviours are critiqued in comparison with nothing other than God’s own character and behaviour with regard to Nineveh. God’s critique takes the form of an object lesson that contrasts Jonah, the gourd and their respective roles with God, Nineveh and God’s actions toward her. The use of the same verb–preposition pair (‘have pity on’) to describe Jonah’s sentiments for the plant and Yahweh’s compassion for Nineveh highlights what is at issue.
God begins by reminding Jonah of the pity he had felt for the recently withered gourd, a pity clearly motivated by the benefit it had brought him rather than for the gourd itself. The elements of grace and deliverance are artfully woven into Yahweh’s lesson. Jonah did nothing at all for the gourd – rather, Yahweh graciously provided it for him, catering to his immediate physical comfort. When God took it away, therefore, Jonah had no good reason to complain. God also reminds Jonah that the plant was of negligible significance, living and dying in the space of a day (4:10b).
The second half of the object lesson begins with a series of contrasts. To begin, Yahweh has compassion on Nineveh even though he derives no necessary benefit from it. Secondly, while Jonah did nothing to bring the gourd to life and so escape his discomfort, Nineveh’s repentance was a necessary (though not sufficient) element in God’s relenting from the calamity that he had threatened (as just noted, ‘discomfort’ and ‘calamity’ translate the same Hebrew word here, adding another contrast). Last, Nineveh’s significance far exceeds that of the short-lived gourd.
Since God gives several details about Nineveh in 4:11 that together constitute what I refer to as its significance, we should consider how they fit into his argument here. First, God refers to it as a ‘large city’, something we investigated above in the light of its archaeology. Secondly, God states with some specificity its population, or, more precisely, states that its population exceeds 120,000. While the population of Israel and Judah varied significantly over the centuries, a single city inhabited by so many people would surely have impressed an Israelite readership at any point in time.
God also says of this population that they do not know their right hand from their left, an expression that implies a lack of discernment. This is probably best understood in the context of the whole book, so that apart from the information passed on to them by Jonah, they would have persisted in ‘their evil way’ and come under judgment much sooner. Finally, at the very end of the book, God adds that Nineveh’s human population was complemented by ‘many cattle’. While the repentance of Nineveh centred on its human population, the animals’ involvement in it is significant in that context (3:7–8) and are mentioned again here, making clear their significance in God’s eyes as part of his creation.
To conclude our reflections on the object lesson at the end of Jonah 4, note that amid all these contrasts (pity with or without received benefit; Jonah’s inaction over against Nineveh’s repentance; the insignificant gourd contrasted with Nineveh; Jonah’s discomfort versus the annihilation that Nineveh narrowly escaped) is one notable similarity. Although Nineveh had repented, God was in no way obliged to deliver the city because they ‘turned from their evil way’, but spared them out of pure grace. God acts with grace toward both Nineveh and Jonah, underlining once again the compassionate character so forcefully presented at the beginning of Jonah 4.
Conclusion
In a word, Jonah is not able to accord God the sovereignty to pour out his grace on his fallen image-bearers without discrimination. This is very closely connected with another fault: Jonah wants to receive God’s grace without being changed by it, and at the same time to snatch it away from those whose lives are in fact changed by it. Jonah’s theology and practice are both fatally flawed, and as in Jonah’s scrape with death in the Mediterranean, only God can save the prophet from the self-imposed danger that will otherwise prove fatal. But the book closes (with great rhetorical effect) without revealing to the reader Jonah’s response to God’s corrective rebuttal. By doing so, it urges a process of self-examination and reflection upon the reader that we will take up in the closing chapter.