The Book of Jonah: And how he never got to Tarshish

Tucked incongruously among the angry denunciations of the other prophets, the Book of Jonah is a charming, upbeat tale of divine compassion and human frailty. It is of course the familiar tale of Jonah and the Whale, and as much fun as it would be to say, as I have before about other familiar tales, “it’s a different story in the text than the one you think you know,” that wouldn’t be true in this case. It is, in fact, exactly the story you know.

But let’s recap: Jonah, son of Amittai, gets tapped by God to go deliver some prophesy against the large, prosperous city of Nineveh. Like many of us, he doesn’t feel cut out for the work of persuasion, so he books a ship to Tarshish. No one knows where Tarshish was, exactly, but it was some sort of Phoenician outpost in the Western Mediterranean. It was as far from Israel and from Nineveh as you could get, in other words.

Now, since the Hebrews, although more or less monotheistic themselves, live in a polytheistic context where most folks believe in a multitude of local gods, Jonah’s strategy is rational enough. If he can get out of his god’s territory, maybe he’s off the hook. Except, of course, that his god is God, and isn’t tied to a locality, and therefore can’t be run away from. This, I suspect, is the main intended take-home of this story.

Because, God isn’t going to let Jonah off the hook. He afflicts the ship with a mighty storm. The sailors realize that there must be supernatural forces at work, and through divination determine that the fault is Jonah’s. That their pagan divination works is an odd note, but we’ve seen plenty of this going all the way back to pharaoh’s magicians. Pay this detail no mind.

Instead, enjoy this detail: when Jonah admits to the sailors what he has done, and tells them they will have to throw him overboard to survive, they don’t want to do it. They’re decent human beings! They do their best to try to make landfall without killing their passenger. But they can’t, and finally they do a lot of praying for forgiveness before they, well, kill their passenger.

As you know, however, Jonah doesn’t drown! As the seas quickly calm around the ship and its newly converted crew, Jonah is swallowed by a whale, or at least a “great fish,” where he stays alive but presumably rather uncomfortable for three days. He finds this whole experience a rather convincing demonstration of God’s power, does some repenting, and gets vomited up on a beach. One pictures him waking up to see a crude arrow sign stuck in the sand, pointing the way to Nineveh.

So, What Happens After the Bit With the Whale, Again?

In the less familiar second half – the Book of Jonah, incidentally, has four short chapters and occupies only about a page and a half of my Bible – Jonah arrives in Nineveh. He delivers a message typical of Old Testament prophesy, to wit that they’ve been very wicked and that God will destroy their city in forty days. The people of Nineveh, however, have an unusual reaction to this news. They believe it. Like Jonah in the fish, they repent. “He’s right,” say all the people. “We are quite awful.” They begin to fast and wear sackcloth. When the king hears about it, he concurs entirely. Putting on sackcloth himself, he plops down in the dust. “Maybe if we forsake evil and ask God nicely, he’ll spare us,” he proclaims.

Now, recall that God didn’t have Jonah say “shape up or else.” He had Jonah say “God will destroy your city in 40 days.” So on Day 41, when nothing happens, Jonah is really pissed off. “That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish,” he complains. “I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. Now, Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live” (4:2-3). This is a very attractive vision of God, who elsewhere in the Old Testament is not remarkable for relenting to send calamity. To a very young reader, indeed, it might be confusing why Jonah is so upset.

Why is he so upset? Well, God has “made him a liar,” as we say, and he fears he will look foolish to the people he was threatening. But more importantly, he is showing the unpleasant but wholly human trait of feeling righteous indignation when seeing other people avoid punishment. And I suppose thirdly, he may just be disappointed that he’s missing the show he paid for, like some people leaving an auto race where there were no fiery crashes.

So Jonah hikes out in the desert to sulk.

In the final act, God first grows a vine to shelter him from the sun, and then has it wither. Jonah is upset about this, too. God says something like, “you’re all bent out of shape about this one little vine. Nineveh has 120,000 people. Shouldn’t I care about them?” In a way, this seems like the opposite of the each-little-sparrow concept that we seem to see more often in the Bible, in which every detail counts and none more than any other. To me, though, this reasoning seems like a breath of fresh air. “Get a sense of proportion, Jonah! Not going to render an eighth of a million people homeless just so you feel a sense of closure about your prophecy gig!” This seems eminently reasonable.

The book ends abruptly, so I will too.

The Book of Obadiah

Melozzo da Forlì,“Obadiah” in the Sacristy of St. Mark, ca. 1477, as snaffled without so much as
a how-do-you-do from another guy's Bible blog.

The book of Obadiah is just one chapter long, and is probably – indeed, I have just confirmed it with a quick Google – the shortest book in the entire Bible.  It is a pretty straightforward condemnation of the Edomites and the people of Esau, who God is going to punish but good.  In order for this to make much sense, I had to look up who the Edomites were, and remind myself who Esau was.

Esau, as I recalled when consulting an eminent authority, was the older twin brother of Jacob, son of Issac, son of Abraham, the one who didn’t get to be a patriarch because he was screwed out of his birthright in the famous “mess of pottage” scam.  Well, he didn’t get to be an Israelite patriarch, anyway.  Instead, it turns out that he took off to the southeast, and became a patriarch of the Edomites. 

The Edomites are naturally a weak and sinful people, at least according to these scriptures written by the Israelites.  We’ve seen them quite a bit over throughout the Bible, but if you’re like me you kind of blip over the unfamiliar names of the small neighboring peoples.  Refresher: the Edomites are the ones who wickedly refused to allow the Israelites to route the Exodus through their county, but were later conquered and vassalized by Judah during the age of Kings.  They live south of the Dead Sea, where the roads coming out of Egypt up towards Babylon and Persia have to go through passes in the uplands, and therefore control bottlenecks on the trade routes used by neighbors much, much more powerful than themselves.

So that’s the context.  What the prophet Obadiah is angry about is that when Nebuchadnezzar sacked Jerusalem, the Edomites weren’t sad about it. There might even have been snickering.  Indeed, there was probably a fair amount of complicity:

13 You should not march through the gates of my people
    in the day of their disaster,
nor gloat over them in their calamity
    in the day of their disaster,
nor seize their wealth
    in the day of their disaster.
14 You should not wait at the crossroads
    to cut down their fugitives,
nor hand over their survivors
    in the day of their trouble.

So: the Edomites have been conquered and are looked down on by the more powerful Israelites, who define them as the descendants of their own very clever ancestor’s stupid lummox of a brother.  When the Babylonians, hugely more powerful than either, put Judah to the sword, at least some of the Edomites are more than willing to join in on the fun.  This sense of being betrayed by a junior partner, and of being humiliated by those whom one is used to being able to humiliate, is naturally pretty galling to the Israelites.

Hence Obadiah’s rage.  And none of the happy ending business where God will relent after a few years of punishing the Edomites, either. 

18 Jacob will be a fire
    and Joseph a flame;
Esau will be stubble,
    and they will set him on fire and destroy him.
There will be no survivors
    from Esau.”
The LORD has spoken.

Did you follow that?  The people of Jacob (the smart brother) and Joseph (Jacob’s even smarter son, he of the amazing technicolor dreamcoat) will not stand for this shit; they will take on the people of Esau (the dumb brother/uncle) and, well, there will be no survivors.  I guess that last part was pretty straightforward.

Now, it’s worth mentioning that when I was trying to figure out where Edom was, I stumbled on a little knowledge (which is of course a dangerous thing) about the Nabataeans, the Arabian group that would eventually build Petra.  Seems that during the period that Judah was falling, the Nabataeans were expanding northward, into Edomite territory.  This pressure, plus Judah’s weakness when its ruling class was in exile, tempted many Edomite herders to start migrating into the unprotected Israelite lands.  It strikes me that this wouldn’t have been any too pleasing to the likes of Nehemiah and Ezra when they got back to town and set up shop.  The Book of Obadiah, then, is fairly openly serving notice to the Edomites that they should, at best, consider themselves back under the yoke of Jerusalem.

The Book of Amos: “What do you see, Amos?”

Amos (on left), with Nahum, Ezekiel, and Daniel.  Detail of mural by John Singer Sargent, Boston Public Library.

Amos is another book of Old Testament prophecy.  Obviously I am not zipping through the Old Testament prophets at a clip that keeps the details firmly in memory, but Amos seems very much of a piece with the rest of the prophets, which is to say: Rhetorical, focused on punishment to the point of ranting, accusatory, somewhat tedious to a modern reader.  It has, like several of the other prophecies, a quiet little coda that says that everything will be great for Israel, after the countless years of horrible torments and comeuppance get wound up.

I wonder if people who read the Bible quite regularly experience a different style, a different “feel,” among the various prophets.  Probably they do.  I actually don’t.  For me, the Bible mostly reads like the Bible.  It reminds me of reading Italian literature, which I always thought had a real sameness to it – but then one day I realized that the same guy, William Weaver, was the go-to translator for all of the marquee Italian novels.  So, do modern Italians write in a similar style, or am I perceiving the style in English of William Weaver?  Did Hebrew prophets write in similar styles, or am I perceiving the style of the NIV Committee on Bible Translation?

Anyway, Amos is “one of the shepherds of Tekoa” and the book is “what he says concerning Israel two years before the earthquake.” (1:1)  That “two years before the earthquake” is terrific, reminding us that this was written down for a specific audience that wasn’t us.  This was originally intended for the generation that would be all like “Oh yeah, sheesh, the earthquake, I remember the earthquake.  Two years before that?  Oh yeah, that was when I still lived up in Abkahak.  That must be why I don’t remember this Amos guy.”

Anyway, Amos starts off by talking about how the Lord is going to punish all of Israel’s neighbors – Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom, Ammon, Moab – for their various wrongdoing.  There is a stock phrasing that gets repeated for all of them: “For three sins of [Damascus], even for four, I will not turn back my wrath.”  It sounds great, but I don’t quite understand what it means.  At first, I tried to make sense of it as meaning something like “I’ll forgive the first few sins, even the fourth sin I’ll let slide, but after that KAPOW!”  But, that’s not what those words mean with the “not” in there.  With the “not,” I’m not sure what they mean.

I mean, obviously the gist is that God is going to bring on the punishments.  And if the original Israelite audience is feeling pretty smug at this point, they have another think coming, because at 2:4 Amos says the same thing about Judah, and at 2:6, it’s Israel’s turn.  And, it will remain Israel’s turn for the rest of the book.  The message is pretty straightforward: “I will crush you as a cart crushes when loaded with grain.” (2:13)

Chapter Three begins with a series of rhetorical questions to the effect that there is no smoke without fire, leading up to the idea that prophets wouldn’t make prophecies if God wasn’t speaking through them.  Then, Amos says that God says that he will punish the Israelites mightily.  Specifically, he will punish them because he is angry about “the oppression within her people” and “they who do not know how to do right, …who hoard plunder and loot in their fortresses.” (9,10)  This is the kind of passage where someone with my own class background wants to cheer a little bit, because we like the idea of God taking on those fat cats with their oppressive ways and their disproportionate claim on a society’s resources.  But wait a minute – the people of Israel isn’t just the fat cats, it’s also the working Joes and the widows and orphans on the other end of the exploitation stick.  So why are they ALL going to get punished, Amos?

The NIV’s section headings for Chapters 4 and 5 clarify it, if we were in any suspense: “Israel Has Not Returned to God” and “A Lament and Call to Repentance.”  Don’t be fooled by Amos 4:4:

Go to Bethel and sin; Go to Gilgal and sin yet more.
Bring your sacrifices every morning, your tithes every three years.

It’s not a commandment!  It’s supposed to be read in conjunction with 4:5:

Burn leavened bread as a thank offering and brag about your freewill offerings –
Boast about them, you Israelites, for this is what you love to do,” declares the Sovereign Lord.

So, Amos is mocking his audience for their bad behavior.  He’s telling them that they sin all the time, that they regularly make pagan sacrifices but are lax in their responsibility to the temple, that their sacrifices to God are meager and don’t follow the proscribed rules, and then they brag about what little they gave.  They’re a despicable lot, and they deserve whatever they have coming.  People probably loved Amos; everyone would have thought he was brilliantly speaking some righteous truth about certain of their neighbors.

In Chapter 6, the focus is on complacency and pride.  The complacency section has some more of that vaguely leftist feel to it:

4 You lie on beds adorned with ivory
    and lounge on your couches.
You dine on choice lambs
    and fattened calves.
5 You strum away on your harps like David
    and improvise on musical instruments.
6 You drink wine by the bowlful
    and use the finest lotions,
    but you do not grieve over the ruin of Joseph.
7 Therefore you will be among the first to go into exile;
    your feasting and lounging will end.

Again, the average Israeli goatherd probably wasn’t lounging on ivory beds, but this passage also begs the question of why it would be bad to emulate David, who was pretty much God’s favorite human who ever lived.  I mean, I know why I personally don’t feel like David is a great role model, but I’m surprised to see him cast as a bad example right here in the Bible.

In Chapters 7 and 8, there is a charming pattern where God shows Amos something and has him identify it, each time as a lead-in to some more stern prophecy. 

8:1 This is what the Sovereign LORD showed me: a basket of ripe fruit.
2 “What do you see, Amos?” he asked.
“A basket of ripe fruit,” I answered.
Then the LORD said to me, “The time is ripe for my people Israel; I will spare them no longer.”

I really love the pure rhetoric at work here.  Baskets and fruit have nothing to do with it; the only function of the exchange is to bring up the concept of “ripeness.”  And what a stretch!  Because, you could show 100 people a basket of ripe fruit, and I’d guess fewer than ten would say “that’s a basket of ripe fruit.”  They’d say “that’s a basket of fruit” or perhaps “that’s three apples, five bananas, and some grapes.”  But Amos is the perfect straight man in this case.  Then, God’s punchline sounds like something Mohamed Ali might have said.  Of course, Mohamed Ali was picking on other prizefighters, which kept his threats from seeming especially sinister.  There’s a different power dynamic when God says it:

3 “In that day,” declares the Sovereign LORD, “the songs in the temple will turn to wailing.  Many, many bodies—flung everywhere!”

Which brings us to the final chapter, Chapter Nine, which has the NIV headings “Israel to be Destroyed” (10 verses) and “Israel’s Restoration” (5 verses).  We’ll close with Verse 8, which pretty much summarizes not only the Chapter, but to an extent the whole Book of Amos and, come to think of it, much of Old Testament prophecy as a whole:

8 “Surely the eyes of the Sovereign LORD
    are on the sinful kingdom.
I will destroy it
    from the face of the earth.
Yet I will not totally destroy
    the descendants of Jacob,” declares the LORD.