Mennonite Weekly Review

Why does our spring quarter’s series on “Community” start with the story of Jonah? This errant prophet runs away from the only community and God he ever knew. The ending leaves us with a disillusioned Jonah baking alone under a worm-eaten bush, feeling betrayed by a God who changed plans and undercut his efforts.

Halteman Finger

Is this a lesson in anti-community?

Although this short story is included among the 12 smaller books called the Minor Prophets, it is not a collection of poetic oracles like the others. This is a prose narrative no patriotic Israelite in the eighth century B.C. could have possibly dreamed up, unless — well, unless he was threatened with being thrown to a sea monster!

Mention Nineveh, and an Israelite would start shaking in his sandals. The capital of the Assyrian Empire to the East, Nineveh was breathing down the neck of its tiny neighbor, demanding tribute and threatening capture. Israel knew that Assyrians could lay siege to any of their cities, starve them out and break through their walls. The “wickedness” of “Nineveh, that great city” (1:2) did not have to be explained to readers of this narrative.

Good storytelling

No doubt these readers could identify with Jonah’s reaction when asked to enter this ferocious empire. The text of 1:1-3 is spare, but is marked by geographical irony and literary repetition. “Go at once to Nineveh, that great city!”

Nineveh was far east and north of Israel, so Jonah flees in the opposite direction — to Tarshish, a city in Spain at the western edge of the known world. Movement is constantly “down” and “away from the presence of the Lord” (verse 3, twice). He goes “down [south] to Joppa” (verse 3), “down into the hold of the ship” (verse 5), and then down into the raging sea (verse 15).

Israelites did not like the sea. Their land had poor harbors, and they saw the sea as full of monsters waiting to devour sailors. But rather than confront his worst enemies, Jonah would rather flee solid ground, his people and his God to embrace the unknown ocean. And suffer he did, for his poetic cry from the belly of the fish (2:2-9) compared it to Sheol, the place of the dead, from which no one returns alive.

Did this really happen?

Literalists insist this is history, not parable, and will suggest that other people have been swallowed by a fish and survived. Withholding judgment, I urge Sunday school classes to read aloud all of chapter 1 and the printed text of 3:1-9 to better capture the drama of this amazing “fish story.” How do the pagan characters come across compared to Jonah — the captain and his sailors on the ship? (1:13-16); or the Ninevites, including their king? (3:5-9). Can you picture every inhabitant of the city, down to the newborn baby or the hen with her chicks, wearing sackcloth on their heads? How long could they survive without food or water? (3:7-8).