The conversation continues
On Wednesday I began a conversation with strategy consultant and comms expert Karin Robinson about Jonah. Karin has been reading my little book Jonah: poet in extremis, and it has given rise to some serious questions. You can read the first part of the conversation here. Today the conversation continues below, with my answers in red. Please feel free to join in via the comments box.
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Jonah arrives at Nineveh and begins preaching. He tells them that unless they repent of their (undefined) evil ways, the Lord will destroy them in 40 days. Now, where does that come from? God hasn’t previously mentioned this 40 day deadline. Are we meant to assume a conversation between Jonah and God that isn’t reported in the text? Are we supposed to think it was implied in God’s initial request to Jonah? Or is Jonah just lying – or exaggerating? Or engaging in wishful thinking?
I believe ’40 days’ would have been an ‘apocryphal’ time, such as ‘a month of Sundays’ or ‘a fortnight’. This is why we see it in the story of the Flood, the story of Christ’s temptation in the Wilderness and elsewhere. I suspect Jonah would have thought it was the ‘right’ kind of time limit to impose. Alternatively, the person who wrote his story down felt the same.
Now, I have to say though that this is the only point in the story where I was actually pretty impressed with Jonah as a character. He arrives in a strange city, about which he knows nothing (and does he even speak the language? That Tower of Babel curse must have foiled many prophets with its scrambling of tongues), and he walks through the city for 3 days at the end of which not only the whole city to accept the word of this stranger that his God is mighty, that their city is under threat of imminent destruction, AND that they should radically change their lives according to this testimony. Not only that, but he persuades the LEADER of that city to embrace this belief. That has to be the single most effective communications campaign in all of the bible. The Sermon on the Mount, for instance, was exceptionally good speech making – but the people of Palestine did not immediately cease judging lest they be judged. Imagine if Christ had persuaded Pontius Pilot? What a different world we would live in today! But there’s little in the book that tell us HOW he did it. Was it all threat (the 40 day deadline)? Was it personal testimony (“behold what the Lord did to me, behold me returned from the very belly of the beast to give you this warning of his might…”)? Did he quote from scripture? What?! I bet as a preacher you’d be as curious about that as I am as a communicator, no?
As a preacher I would love to know how Jonah pulled it off! In fact, I am tempted to say ‘I want what Jonah had’, with notable exceptions. As I emphasize in the book, Jonah would have cut a terrifying figure, with his skin burnt and his hair and eyebrows bleached by the acid in the whale’s stomach. What clothes he had retained after his near drowning and acid exposure would have been no more than rags. I will go a long way to achieve audience impact – but not that far! Frustratingly, we are not privy to the actual content of Jonah’s preaching. If other Old Testament prophets such as Hosea, Elijah and Jeremiah are anything to go by – he will have used his own circumstances as a visual warning about the consequences of God’s judgment.
And then there’s that extraordinary passage where Jonah and the Lord go head to head, so to speak. Jonah’s loathing of Nineveh is potent – absolutely dripping with contempt. He would literally rather die himself than see Nineveh spared. You talk about this as xenophobia, a loathing for the other. But I don’t really buy that. Jonah doesn’t just think the people of Nineveh are icky – he repeatedly tells the Lord that he himself is better off dead than witnessing their salvation. Prejudice doesn’t take that form – a bigot might want to kill a stranger that the loath, but they aren’t inspired to self immolation! There’s something else going on here with Jonah, and it feels like the story just doesn’t give us enough information to know what that is. But you can read Jonah’s unmotivated rage another way – as an overzealous sense of righteousness. We can see this instinct a little bit in today’s, with some small number of people (religious or not) who seem more focussed on the sins of others than their own. Jonah makes an overt case against MERCY – he’s offended by the Lord’s forgiveness, and he wants the Ninevan wrongdoers punished so much he can’t conceive of living on if they are not. His whole world seems to hinge upon the idea that justice must be done and it must take the harshest form (there’s a more modern fictional counterpart to this dynamic in the character of Javert from Les Miserable – he too chooses to die rather than live in a world that doesn’t live up to his sense of righteousness). We never know what made the Lord declare Nineveh to be wicked, so Jonah’s sense of outrage may well be justified – perhaps the Ninevans were killers of children, rapers of women under their protection, robbers from the poor… Even in this case, God claims the right to forgive. And Jonah doesn’t want to live in a world where these things are forgivable. Again, you can read this story as one in which Jonah bravely asserts his own sense of righteousness above that of the God himself, almost at the cost of his own life. And he seems to, perhaps, loathe himself for being weak enough to cave in and save his life. It’s… a remarkable thing to do. A tiny mouse asserting his will over a giant elephant just before he gets stomped. It’s not exactly admirable, since the impulse is away from mercy and the movement towards mercy is the harder, more honourable path in the end. But it’s… kind of impressive. But my impression is that this type of unshakeable belief in punishment would have been more the norm than not in Jonah’s time, wouldn’t it?
Karin, I find your parallel with Javret fascinating. Not only will it make me see both Jonah and Les Miserables differently, but it confirms my belief that there are archetypes who swim across the seas of distance and time, crossing oceans and epochs only to make landfall in different clothing with different faces. Much though I hate Jonah’s small-heartedness, I cannot help but admire his pluck in stating it. I believe that most of Jonah’s fellow countrymen would have shared his outrage at God’s intention to forgive the Ninevites. Their own sense of worth in the eyes of God was bolstered by their belief in the opposite about everyone else. Hence, the story of Jonah had to be told.
And finally, God asserts himself in a very unsatisfying ending. We never find out how Jonah reacts to God’s words, so it’s all very up in the air. Since you’ve been thinking about these issues for some time, I wonder what you believe Jonah’s response would have been?
A friend recently wrote the following to me about Jonah: ‘I imagine him living the rest of his life as a grumpy git, looking like he has that awkward smell in his nostrils permanently. He probably lived to a ridiculous age with one of those interminable Old Testament existences too – poor bugger’. I couldn’t help but laugh, and went on to imagine the scenario:‘in a retirement home near Nineveh, a grumpy old man languishes in the corner. He is forever picking unmentionable things from between his teeth and his lack of eyebrows give him a permanent expression of being startled. The pot plant in his favorite corner has to be replaced every other week, and rumours amongst the staff about what makes it shrivel on such a regular basis are rife.’ Seriously, though, I think Jonah may have found himself like the American astronauts whose stories are told in Moondust – where every experience after their lunar journey felt just too small. He is unlikely to have settled in Nineveh, where he would have been confronted with a daily reminder of God’s irritating goodness. Equally, returning to his small home life after all his experiences would have been very hard. Perhaps he became the original ‘wandering Jew’?
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Please join Karin and I in the conversation via the comments box below.
