necessary to mention that the metaphor was borrowed, not, as has been
alleged by many, from some Greek, or other foreign, myth, which, like
that of Perseus and Andromeda, had its scene in the neighbourhood of
Joppa, but from a Semitic mythology which was well known to the
Hebrews, and the materials of which were employed very frequently by
other prophets and poets of the Old Testament.[1488]
Why, of all prophets, Jonah should have been selected as the type of
Israel, is a question hard but perhaps not impossible to answer. In
history Jonah appears only as concerned with Israel’s reconquest of her
lands from the heathen. Did the author of the book say: I will take
such a man, one to whom tradition attributes no outlook beyond Israel’s
own territories, for none could be so typical of Israel, narrow,
selfish and with no love for the world beyond herself? Or did the
author know some story about a journey of Jonah to Niniveh, or at least
some discourse by Jonah against the great city? Elijah went to Sarepta,
Elisha took God’s word to Damascus: may there not have been, though we
are ignorant of it, some connection between Niniveh and the labours of
Elisha’s successor? Thirty years after Jonah appeared, Amos proclaimed
the judgment of Jehovah upon foreign nations, with the destruction of
their capitals; about the year 755 he clearly enforced, as equal with
Israel’s own, the moral responsibility of the heathen to the God of
righteousness. May not Jonah, almost the contemporary of Amos, have
denounced Niniveh in the same way? Would not some tradition of this
serve as the nucleus of history, round which our author built his
allegory? It is possible that Jonah proclaimed doom upon Niniveh; yet
those who are familiar with the prophesying of Amos, Hosea, and, in his
younger days, Isaiah, will deem it hardly probable. For why do all
these prophets exhibit such reserve in even naming Assyria, if Israel
had already through Jonah entered into such articulate relations with
Niniveh? We must, therefore, admit our ignorance of the reasons which
led our author to choose Jonah as a type of Israel. We can only
conjecture that it may have been because Jonah was a prophet, whom
history identified only with Israel’s narrower interests. If, during
subsequent centuries, a tradition had risen of Jonah’s journey to
Niniveh or of his discourse against her, such a tradition has
probability against it.
* * * * *
A more definite origin for the book than any yet given has been
suggested by Professor Budde.[1489] The Second Book of Chronicles
refers to a _Midrash of the Book of the Kings_[1490] for further
particulars concerning King Joash. A _Midrash_[1491] was the expansion,
for doctrinal or homiletic purposes, of a passage of Scripture, and
very frequently took the form, so dear to Orientals, of parable or
invented story about the subject of the text. We have examples of
Midrashim among the Apocrypha, in the Books of Tobit and Susannah and
in the Prayer of Manasseh, the same as is probably referred to by the
Chronicler.[1492] That the Chronicler himself used the _Midrash of the
Book of the Kings_ as material for his own book is obvious from the
form of the latter and its adaptation of the historical narratives of
the Book of Kings.[1493] The Book of Daniel may also be reckoned among
the Midrashim, and Budde now proposes to add to their number the Book
of Jonah. It may be doubted whether this distinguished critic is right
in supposing that the book formed the Midrash to 2 Kings xiv. 25 ff.
(the author being desirous to add to the expression there of Jehovah’s
pity upon Israel some expression of His pity upon the heathen), or that
it was extracted just as it stands, in proof of which Budde points to
its abrupt beginning and end. We have seen another reason for the
latter;[1494] and it is very improbable that the Midrashim, so largely
the basis of the Books of Chronicles, shared that spirit of
universalism which inspires the Book of Jonah.[1495] But we may well
believe that it was in some Midrash of the Book of Kings that the
author of the Book of Jonah found the basis of the latter part of his
immortal work, which too clearly reflects the fortunes and conduct of
all Israel to have been wholly drawn from a Midrash upon the story of
the individual prophet Jonah.
4. OUR LORD’S USE OF THE BOOK.
We have seen, then, that the Book of Jonah is not actual history, but
the enforcement of a profound religious truth nearer to the level of
the New Testament than anything else in the Old, and cast in the form
of Christ’s own parables. The full proof of this can be made clear
only by the detailed exposition of the book. There is, however, one
other question, which is relevant to the argument. Christ Himself has
employed the story of Jonah. Does His use of it involve His authority
for the opinion that it is a story of real facts?
Two passages of the Gospels contain the words of our Lord upon Jonah:
Matt. xii. 39, 41, and Luke xi. 29, 30.[1496] _A generation, wicked and
adulterous, seeketh a sign, and sign shall not be given it, save the
sign of the prophet Jonah.... The men of Niniveh shall stand up in the
Judgment with this generation, and condemn it, for they repented at the
preaching of Jonah, and behold, a greater than Jonah is here. This
generation is an evil generation: it seeketh a sign; and sign shall not
be given it, except the sign of Jonah. For as Jonah was a sign to the
Ninivites, so also shall the Son of Man be to this generation._
These words, of course, are compatible with the opinion that the Book
of Jonah is a record of real fact. The only question is, are they also
compatible with the opinion that the Book of Jonah is a parable? Many
say No; and they allege that those of us who hold this opinion are
denying, or at least ignoring, the testimony of our Lord; or that we
are taking away the whole force of the parallel which He drew. This is
a question of interpretation, not of faith. We do not believe that our
Lord had any thought of confirming or not confirming the historic
character of the story. His purpose was purely one of exhortation, and
we feel the grounds of that exhortation to be just as strong, when we
have proven the Book of Jonah to be a parable. Christ is using an
illustration: it surely matters not whether that illustration be drawn
from the realms of fact or of poetry. Again and again in their
discourses to the people do men use illustrations and enforcements
drawn from traditions of the past. Do we, even when the historical
value of these traditions is _very_ ambiguous, give a single thought to
the question of their historical character? We never think of it. It is
enough for us that the tradition is popularly accepted and familiar.
And we cannot deny to our Lord that which we claim for ourselves.[1497]
Even conservative writers admit this. In his recent Introduction to
Jonah Orelli says expressly: “It is not, indeed, proved with conclusive
necessity that, if the resurrection of Jesus was a physical fact,
Jonah’s abode in the fish’s belly must also be just as historical.”[1498]
Upon the general question of our Lord’s authority in matters of
criticism, His own words with regard to personal questions may be
appositely quoted: _Man, who made Me a judge or divider over you? I
am come not to judge ... but to save._ Such matters our Lord surely
leaves to ourselves, and we have to decide them by our reason, our
common-sense and our loyalty to truth—of all of which He Himself is
the creator, and of which we shall have to render to Him an account
at the last. Let us remember this, and we shall use them with equal
liberty and reverence. _Bringing every thought into subjection to
Christ_ is surely just using our knowledge, our reason, and every other
intellectual gift which He has given us, with the accuracy and the
courage of His own Spirit.
5. THE UNITY OF THE BOOK.
The next question is that of the Unity of the Book. Several attempts
have been made to prove from discrepancies, some real and some alleged,
that the book is a compilation of stories from several different hands.
But these essays are too artificial to have obtained any adherence from
critics; and the few real discrepancies of narrative from which they
start are due, as we have seen, rather to the license of a writer of
parable than to any difference of authorship.[1499]
In the question of the Unity of the Book, the Prayer or Psalm in chap.
ii. offers a problem of its own, consisting as it does almost entirely
of passages parallel to others in the Psalter. Besides a number of
religious phrases, which are too general for us to say that one prayer
has borrowed them from another,[1500] there are several unmistakeable
repetitions of the Psalms.[1501]
And yet the Psalm of Jonah has strong features, which, so far as we
know, are original to it. The horror of the great deep has nowhere in
the Old Testament been described with such power or with such
conciseness. So far, then, the Psalm is not a mere string of
quotations, but a living unity. Did the author of the book himself
insert it where it stands? Against this it has been urged that the
Psalm is not the prayer of a man inside a fish, but of one who on dry
land celebrates a deliverance from drowning, and that if the author of
the narrative himself had inserted it, he would rather have done so
after ver. 11, which records the prophet’s escape from the fish.[1502]
And a usual theory of the origin of the Psalm is that a later editor,
having found the Psalm ready-made and in a collection where it was
perhaps attributed to Jonah,[1503] inserted it after ver. 2, which
records that Jonah did pray from the belly of the fish, and inserted it
there the more readily, because it seemed right for a book which had
found its place among the Twelve Prophets to contribute, as all the
others did, some actual discourse of the prophet whose name it
bore.[1504] This, however, is not probable. Whether the original author
found the Psalm ready to his hand or made it, there is a great deal to
be said for the opinion of the earlier critics,[1505] that he himself
inserted it, and just where it now stands. For, from the standpoint of
the writer, Jonah was already saved, when he was taken up by the
fish—saved from the deep into which he had been cast by the sailors,
and the dangers of which the Psalm so vividly describes. However
impossible it be for us to conceive of the compilation of a Psalm (even
though full of quotations) by a man in Jonah’s position,[1506] it was
consistent with the standpoint of a writer who had just affirmed that
the fish was expressly _appointed by Jehovah_, in order to save his
penitent servant from the sea. To argue that the Psalm is an intrusion
is therefore not only unnecessary, but it betrays failure to appreciate
the standpoint of the writer. Given the fish and the Divine purpose of
the fish, the Psalm is intelligible and appears at its proper place. It
were more reasonable indeed to argue that the fish itself is an
insertion. Besides, as we shall see, the spirit of the Psalm is
national; in conformity with the truth underlying the book, it is a
Psalm of Israel as a whole.
If this be correct, we have the Book of Jonah as it came from the hands
of its author. The text is in wonderfully good condition, due to the
ease of the narrative and its late date. The Greek version exhibits the
usual proportion of clerical errors and mistranslations,[1507]
omissions[1508] and amplifications,[1509] with some variant
readings[1510] and other changes that will be noted in the verses
themselves.
FOOTNOTES:
[1458] Unless the Psalm were counted as such. See below, p. 511.
[1459] _Minus_ Ruth of course.
[1460] Cf. with Jonah i. 1, וַיְהִי, Josh. i. 1, 1 Sam. i. 1, 2 Sam. i.
1. The corrupt state of the text of Ezek. i. 1 does not permit us to
adduce it also as a parallel.
[1461] See below, p. 496.
[1462] See above, Vol. I., p. 236.
[1463] Acts xi. 8.
[1464] Cf. Gittah-hepher, Josh. xix. 13, by some held to be El Meshhed,
three miles north-east of Nazareth. The tomb of Jonah is pointed out
there.
[1465] 2 Kings xiv. 25.
[1466] Cf. Kuenen, _Einl._, II. 417, 418.
[1467] iii. 3: היתה, _was_.
[1468] See above, pp. 21 ff., 96 ff.
[1469] Cf. George Smith, _Assyrian Discoveries_, p. 94; Sayce, _Ancient
Empires of the East_, p. 141. Cf. previous note.
[1470] As, _e.g._, by Volck, article “Jona” in Herzog’s _Real.
Encycl._²: the use of שֶׁל for אֲשֶׁר, as, _e.g._, in the very early
Song of Deborah. But the same occurs in many late passages: Eccles. i.
7, 11, ii. 21, 22, etc.; Psalms cxxii., cxxiv., cxxxv. 2, 8, cxxxvii.
8, cxlvi. 3.
[1471] A. Grammatical constructions:—i. 7, בְּשֶׁלְּמִי; 12, בְּשֶׁלִּי: that בשל
has not altogether displaced באשרל König (_Einl._, 378) thinks a proof
of the date of Jonah in the early Aramaic period. iv. 6, the use of לוֹ
for the accusative, cf. Jer. xl. 2, Ezra viii. 24: seldom in earlier
Hebrew, 1 Sam. xxiii. 10, 2 Sam. iii. 30, especially when the object
stands before the verb, Isa. xi. 9 (this may be late), 1 Sam. xxii. 7,
Job v. 2; but continually in Aramaic, Dan. ii. 10, 12, 14, 24, etc. The
first personal pronoun אני (five times) occurs oftener than אנכי
(twice), just as in all exilic and post-exilic writings. The numerals
ii. 1, iii. 3, precede the noun, as in earlier Hebrew.
B. Words:—מנה in Pi. is a favourite term of our author, ii. 1, iv.
6, 8; is elsewhere in O.T. Hebrew found only in Dan. i. 5, 10, 18, 1
Chron. ix. 29, Psalm lxi. 8; but in O.T. Aramaic מנא Pi. מנּי occurs
in Ezra vii. 25, Dan. ii. 24, 49, iii. 12, etc. ספינה, i. 5, is not
elsewhere found in O.T., but is common in later Hebrew and in Aramaic.
התעשת, i. 6, _to think_, for the Heb. חשב, cf. Psalm cxlvi. 4, but
Aram. cf. Dan. vi. 4 and Targums. טעם in the sense _to order or
command_, iii. 7, is found elsewhere in the O.T. only in the Aramaic
passages Dan. iii. 10, Ezra vi. 1, etc. רבּו, iv. 11, for the earlier
רבבה occurs only in later Hebrew, Ezra ii. 64, Neh. vii. 66, 72, 1
Chron. xxix. 7 (Hosea viii. 12, Kethibh is suspected). שתק, i. 11, 12,
occurs only in Psalm cvii. 30, Prov. xxvi. 20. עמל, iv. 10, instead of
the usual יגע. The expression _God of Heaven_, i. 9, occurs only in 2
Chron. xxxvi. 23, Psalm cxxxvi. 26, Dan. ii. 18, 19, 44, and frequently
in Ezra and Nehemiah.
[1472] In chap. iv. there are undoubted echoes of the story of Elijah’s
depression in 1 Kings xix., though the alleged parallel between Jonah’s
tree (iv. 8) and Elijah’s broom-bush seems to me forced, iv. 9 has been
thought, though not conclusively, to depend on Gen. iv. 6, and the
appearance of יהוה אלהים has been referred to its frequent use in Gen.
ii. f. More important are the parallels with Joel: iii. 9 with Joel ii.
14_a_, and the attributes of God in iv. 2 with Joel ii. 13. But which
of the two is the original?
[1473] Kleinert assigns the book to the Exile; Ewald to the fifth or
sixth century; Driver to the fifth century (_Introd._^6, 301); Orelli
to the last Chaldean or first Persian age; Vatke to the third century.
These assign generally to after the Exile: Cheyne (_Theol. Rev._, XIV.,
p. 218: cf. art. “Jonah” in the _Encycl. Brit._), König (_Einl._), Rob.
Smith, Kuenen, Wildeboer, Budde, Cornill, Farrar, etc. Hitzig brings it
down as far as the Maccabean age, which is impossible if the prophetic
canon closed in 200 B.C., and seeks for its origin in Egypt, “that land
of wonders,” on account of its fabulous character, and because of the
description of the east wind as חרישׁית (iv. 8), and the name of the
gourd, קיקיון, Egyptian _kiki_. But such a wind and such a plant were
found outside Egypt as well. Nowack dates the book after Joel.
[1474] See above, Vol. I., p. 5.
[1475] Below, pp. 523 ff.
[1476] Contrast the treatment of foreign states by Elisha, Amos and
Isaiah, etc.
[1477] Abridged from pp. 3 and 4 of Kleinert’s Introduction to the Book
of Jonah in Lange’s Series of Commentaries. Eng. ed., Vol. XVI.
[1478] Köhler, _Theol. Rev._, Vol. XVI.; Böhme, _Z.A.T.W._, 1887, pp.
224 ff.
[1479] Indeed throughout the book the truths it enforces are always
more pushed to the front than the facts.
[1480] Nearly all the critics who accept the late date of the book
interpret it as parabolic. See also a powerful article by the late Dr.
Dale in the _Expositor_, Fourth Series, Vol. VI., July 1892, pp. 1 ff.
Cf., too, C. H. H. Wright, _Biblical Essays_ (1886), pp. 34-98.
[1481] Marck (quoted by Kleinert) said: “Scriptum est magna parte
historicum sed ita ut in historia ipsa lateat maximi vaticinii
mysterium, atque ipse fatis suis, non minus quam effatis vatem se verum
demonstret.” Hitzig curiously thinks that this is the reason why it
has been placed in the Canon of the Prophets next to the unfulfilled
prophecy of God against Edom. But by the date which Hitzig assigns
to the book the prophecy against Edom was at least in a fair way to
fulfilment. Riehm (_Theol. Stud. u. Krit._, 1862, pp. 413 f.): “The
practical intention of the book is to afford instruction concerning
the proper attitude to prophetic warnings”; these, though genuine
words of God, may be averted by repentance. Volck (art. “Jona” in
Herzog’s _Real. Encycl._²) gives the following. Jonah’s experience is
characteristic of the whole prophetic profession. “We learn from it (1)
that the prophet must perform what God commands him, however unusual
it appears; (2) that even death cannot nullify his calling; (3) that
the prophet has no right to the fulfilment of his prediction, but must
place it in God’s hand.” Vatke (_Einl._, 688) maintains that the book
was written in an apologetic interest, when Jews expounded the prophets
and found this difficulty, that all their predictions had not been
fulfilled. “The author obviously teaches: (1) since the prophet cannot
withdraw from the Divine commission, he is also not responsible for the
contents of his predictions; (2) the prophet often announces Divine
purposes, which are not fulfilled, because God in His mercy takes back
the threat, when repentance follows; (3) the honour of a prophet is
not hurt when a threat is not fulfilled, and the inspiration remains
unquestioned, although many predictions are not carried out.”
To all of which there is a conclusive answer, in the fact that, had the
book been meant to explain or justify unfulfilled prophecy, the author
would certainly not have chosen as an instance a judgment against
Niniveh, because, by the time he wrote, all the early predictions of
Niniveh’s fall had been fulfilled, we might say, to the very letter.
[1482] So even Kimchi; and in modern times De Wette, Delitzsch, Bleek,
Reuss, Cheyne, Wright, König, Farrar, Orelli, etc. So virtually
also Nowack. Ewald’s view is a little different. He thinks that the
fundamental truth of the book is that “true fear and repentance bring
salvation from Jehovah.”
[1483] Isa. xl. ff.
[1484] So virtually Kuenen, _Einl._, II., p. 423; Smend, _Lehrbuch der
A. T. Religionsgeschichte_, pp. 408 f., and Nowack.
[1485] That the book is a historical allegory is a very old theory.
Hermann v. d. Hardt (_Ænigmata Prisci Orbis_, 1723: cf. _Jonas in_
_Carcharia, Israel in Carcathio_, 1718, quoted by Vatke, _Einl._, p.
686) found in the book a political allegory of the history of Manasseh
led into exile, and converted, while the last two chapters represent
the history of Josiah. That the book was symbolic in some way of the
conduct and fortunes of Israel was a view familiar in Great Britain
during the first half of this century: see the Preface to the English
translation of Calvin on Jonah (1847). Kleinert (in his commentary
on Jonah in Lange’s Series, Vol. XVI. English translation, 1874) was
one of the first to expound with details the symbolising of Israel in
the prophet Jonah. Then came the article in the _Theol. Review_ (XIV.
1877, pp. 214 ff.) by Cheyne, following Bloch’s _Studien z. Gesch. der
Sammlung der althebräischen Litteratur_ (Breslau, 1876); but adding the
explanation of _the great fish_ from Hebrew mythology (see below). Von
Orelli quotes Kleinert with approval in the main.
[1486] Isa. xlii. 19-24.
[1487] Jer. li. 34, 44 f.
[1488] That the Book of Jonah employs mythical elements is an opinion
that has prevailed since the beginning of this century. But before
Semitic mythology was so well known as it is now, these mythical
elements were thought to have been derived from the Greek mythology.
So Gesenius, De Wette, and even Knobel, but see especially F. C. Baur
in Ilgen’s _Zeitschrift_ for 1837, p. 201. Kuenen (_Einl._, 424) and
Cheyne (_Theol. Rev._, XIV.) rightly deny traces of any Greek influence
on Jonah, and their denial is generally agreed in.
Kleinert (_op. cit._, p. 10) points to the proper source in the native
mythology of the Hebrews: “The sea-monster is by no means an unusual
phenomenon in prophetic typology. It is the secular power appointed by
God for the scourge of Israel and of the earth (Isa. xxvii. 1)”; and
Cheyne (_Theol. Rev._, XIV., “Jonah: a Study in Jewish Folk-lore and
Religion”) points out how Jer. li. 34, 44 f., forms the connecting link
between the story of Jonah and the popular mythology.
[1489] _Z.A.T.W._, 1892, pp. 40 ff.
[1490] 2 Chron. xxiv. 27.
[1491] Cf. Driver, _Introduction_, I., p. 497.
[1492] 2 Chron. xxxiii. 18.
[1493] See Robertson Smith, Old Test. in the Jewish Church, pp. 140,
154.
[1494] See above, pp. 499 f.
[1495] Cf. Smend, _A. T. Religionsgeschichte_, p. 409, n. 1.
[1496] Matt. xii. 40—_For as Jonah was in the belly of the whale three
days and three nights, so shall the Son of Man be in the heart of
the earth three days and three nights_—is not repeated in Luke xi.
29, 30, which confines the sign to the preaching of repentance, and
is suspected as an intrusion both for this and other reasons, e.g.
that ver. 40 is superfluous and does not fit in with ver. 41, which
gives the proper explanation of the sign; that Jonah, who came by his
burial in the fish through neglect of his duty and not by martyrdom,
could not therefore in this respect be a type of our Lord. On the
other hand, ver. 40 is not unlike another reference of our Lord to His
resurrection, John ii. 19 ff. Yet, even if ver. 40 be genuine, the
vagueness of the parallel drawn in it between Jonah and our Lord surely
makes for the opinion that in quoting Jonah our Lord was not concerned
about quoting facts, but simply gave an illustration from a well-known
tale. Matt. xvi. 4, where the sign of Jonah is again mentioned, does
not explain the sign.
[1497] Take a case. Suppose we tell slothful people that theirs will be
the fate of the man who buried his talent, is this to commit us to the
belief that the personages of Christ’s parables actually existed? Or
take the homiletic use of Shakespeare’s dramas—“as Macbeth did,” or “as
Hamlet said.” Does it commit us to the historical reality of Macbeth
or Hamlet? Any preacher among us would resent being bound by such an
inference. And if we resent this for ourselves, how chary we should be
about seeking to bind our Lord by it.
[1498] Eng. trans. of _The Twelve Minor Prophets_, p. 172. Consult also
Farrar’s judicious paragraphs on the subject: _Minor Prophets_, 234 f.
[1499] The two attempts which have been made to divide the Book of
Jonah are those by Köhler in the _Theol. Rev._, XVI. 139 ff., and by
Böhme in the _Z.A.T.W._, VII. 224 ff. Köhler first insists on traits
of an earlier age (rude conception of God, no sharp boundary drawn
between heathens and the Hebrews, etc.), and then finds traces of a
late revision: lacuna in i. 2; hesitation in iii. 1, in the giving of
the prophet’s commission, which is not pure Hebrew; change of three
days to forty (cf. LXX.); mention of unnamed king and his edict, which
is superfluous after the popular movement; beasts sharing in mourning;
also in i. 5, 8, 9, 14, ii. 2, דָּגָה, iii. 9, iv. 1-4, as disturbing
context; also the building of a booth is superfluous, and only invented
to account for Jonah remaining forty days instead of the original
three; iv. 6, להיות צל על ראשׁו for an original לְהַּצִּל לוֹ = to
offer him shade; 7, _the worm_, תולעת, due to a copyist’s change of
the following בעלות. Withdrawing these, Köhler gets an account of the
sparing of Niniveh on repentance following a sentence of doom, which,
he says, reflects the position of the city of God in Jeremiah’s time,
and was due to Jeremiah’s opponents, who said in answer to his sentence
of doom: If Niniveh could avert her fate, why not Jerusalem? Böhme’s
conclusion, starting from the alleged contradictions in the story, is
that no fewer than four hands have had to deal with it. A sufficient
answer is given by Kuenen (_Einl._, 426 ff.), who, after analysing the
dissection, says that its “improbability is immediately evident.” With
regard to the inconsistencies which Böhme alleges to exist in chap.
iii. between ver. 5 and vv. 6-9, Kuenen remarks that “all that is
needed for their explanation is a little good-will”—a phrase applicable
to many other difficulties raised with regard to other Old Testament
books by critical attempts even more rational than those of Böhme.
Cornill characterises Böhme’s hypothesis as absurd.
[1500] _To Thy holy temple_, vv. 5 and 8: cf. Psalm v. 8, etc. _The
waters have come round me to my very soul_, ver. 6: cf. Psalm lxix. 2.
_And Thou broughtest up my life_, ver. 7: cf. Psalm xxx. 4. _When my
soul fainted upon me_, ver. 8: cf. Psalm cxlii. 4, etc. _With the voice
of thanksgiving_, ver. 10: cf. Psalm xlii. 5. The reff. are to the Heb.
text.
[1501] Cf. ver. 3 with Psalm xviii. 7; ver. 4 with Psalm xlii. 8; ver.
5 with Psalm xxxi. 23; ver. 9 with Psalm xxxi. 7, and ver. 10 with
Psalm l. 14.
[1502] Budde, as above, p. 42.
[1503] De Wette, Knobel, Kuenen.
[1504] Budde.
[1505] _E.g._ Hitzig.
[1506] Luther says of Jonah’s prayer, that “he did not speak with these
exact words in the belly of the fish, nor placed them so orderly, but
he shows how he took courage, and what sort of thoughts his heart had,
when he stood in such a battle with death.” We recognise in this Psalm
“the recollection of the confidence with which Jonah hoped towards God,
that since he had been rescued in so wonderful a way from death in the
waves, He would also bring him out of the night of his grave into the
light of day.”
[1507] ii. 5, B has λαόν for ναόν; i. 9, for עברי it reads עבדי, and
takes the י to be abbreviation for יהוה; ii. 7, for בעדי it reads
בעלי and translates κάτοχοι; iv. 11, for ישׁ־בהּ it reads ישׁבו, and
translates κατοικοῦσι.
[1508] i. 4, גדולה, perhaps rightly omitted before following גדול;
i. 8, B omits the clause באשר to לנו, probably rightly, for it is
needless, though supplied by Codd. A, Q; iii. 9, one verb, μετανοήσει,
for ישוב ונחם, probably correctly, see below.
[1509] i. 2, ἡ κραυγὴ τῆς κακίας for רעתם; ii. 3, τὸν θεόν μου after
יהוה; ii. 10, in obedience to another reading; iii. 2, τὸ ἔμπροσθεν
after קראיה; iii. 8, לאמר.
[1510] iii. 4, 8.
CHAPTER XXXV
_THE GREAT REFUSAL_
JONAH i
We have now laid clear the lines upon which the Book of Jonah was
composed. Its purpose is to illustrate God’s grace to the heathen in
face of His people’s refusal to fulfil their mission to them. The
author was led to achieve this purpose by a parable, through which the
prophet Jonah moves as the symbol of his recusant, exiled, redeemed
and still hardened people. It is the Drama of Israel’s career, as the
Servant of God, in the most pathetic moments of that career. A nation
is stumbling on the highest road nation was ever called to tread.
_Who is blind but My servant,
Or deaf as My messenger whom I have sent?_
He that would read this Drama aright must remember what lies behind the
Great Refusal which forms its tragedy. The cause of Israel’s recusancy
was not only wilfulness or cowardly sloth, but the horror of a whole
world given over to idolatry, the paralysing sense of its irresistible
force, of its cruel persecutions endured for centuries, and of the long
famine of Heaven’s justice. These it was which had filled Israel’s
eyes too full of fever to see her duty. Only when we feel, as the
writer himself felt, all this tragic background to his story are we
able to appreciate the exquisite gleams which he flashes across it:
the generous magnanimity of the heathen sailors, the repentance of
the heathen city, and, lighting from above, God’s pity upon the dumb
heathen multitudes.
The parable or drama divides itself into three parts: The Prophet’s
Flight and Turning (chap. i.); The Great Fish and What it Means (chap.
ii.); and The Repentance of the City (chaps. iii. and iv.).
* * * * *
The chief figure of the story is Jonah, son of Amittai, from
Gath-hepher in Galilee, a prophet identified with that turn in Israel’s
fortunes, by which she began to defeat her Syrian oppressors, and win
back from them her own territories—a prophet, therefore, of revenge,
and from the most bitter of the heathen wars. _And the word of Jehovah
came to Jonah, the son of Amittai, saying, Up, go to Niniveh, the Great
City, and cry out against her, for her evil is come up before Me._ But
_he arose to flee_. It was not the length of the road, nor the danger
of declaring Niniveh’s sin to her face, which turned him, but the
instinct that God intended by him something else than Niniveh’s
destruction; and this instinct sprang from his knowledge of God
Himself. _Ah now, Jehovah, was not my word, while I was yet upon mine
own soil, at the time I made ready to flee to Tarshish, this—that I
knew that Thou art a God gracious and tender and long-suffering,
plenteous in love and relenting of evil?_[1511] Jonah interpreted the
Word which came to him by the Character which he knew to be behind the
Word. This is a significant hint upon the method of revelation.
It would be rash to say that, in imputing even to the historical Jonah
the fear of God’s grace upon the heathen, our author were guilty of an
anachronism.[1512] We have to do, however, with a greater than
Jonah—the nation herself. Though perhaps Israel little reflected upon
it, the instinct can never have been far away that some day the grace
of Jehovah might reach the heathen too. Such an instinct, of course,
must have been almost stifled by hatred born of heathen oppression, as
well as by the intellectual scorn which Israel came to feel for heathen
idolatries. But we may believe that it haunted even those dark periods
in which revenge upon the Gentiles seemed most just, and their
destruction the only means of establishing God’s kingdom in the world.
We know that it moved uneasily even beneath the rigour of Jewish
legalism. For its secret was that faith in the essential grace of God,
which Israel gained very early and never lost, and which was the spring
of every new conviction and every reform in her wonderful development.
With a subtle appreciation of all this, our author imputes the instinct
to Jonah from the outset. Jonah’s fear, that after all the heathen may
be spared, reflects the restless apprehension even of the most
exclusive of his people—an apprehension which by the time our book was
written seemed to be still more justified by God’s long delay of doom
upon the tyrants whom He had promised to overthrow.
But to the natural man in Israel the possibility of the heathen’s
repentance was still so abhorrent, that he turned his back upon it.
_Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the face of Jehovah._ In spite of
recent arguments to the contrary, the most probable location of
Tarshish is the generally accepted one, that it was a Phœnician colony
at the other end of the Mediterranean. In any case it was far from the
Holy Land; and by going there the prophet would put the sea between
himself and his God. To the Hebrew imagination there could not be a
flight more remote. Israel was essentially an inland people. They had
come up out of the desert, and they had practically never yet touched
the Mediterranean. They lived within sight of it, but from ten to
twenty miles of foreign soil intervened between their mountains and its
stormy coast. The Jews had no traffic upon the sea, nor (but for one
sublime instance[1513] to the contrary) had their poets ever employed
it except as a symbol of arrogance and restless rebellion against the
will of God.[1514] It was all this popular feeling of the distance and
strangeness of the sea which made our author choose it as the scene of
the prophet’s flight from the face of Israel’s God. Jonah had to pass,
too, through a foreign land to get to the coast: upon the sea he would
only be among heathen. This was to be part of his conversion. _He went
down to Yapho, and found a ship going to Tarshish, and paid the fare
thereof, and embarked on her to get away with_ her crew[1515] _to
Tarshish—away from the face of Jehovah_.
The scenes which follow are very vivid: the sudden wind sweeping down
from the very hills on which Jonah believed he had left his God; the
tempest; the behaviour of the ship, so alive with effort that the story
attributes to her the feelings of a living thing—_she thought she must
be broken_; the despair of the mariners, driven from the unity of their
common task to the hopeless diversity of their idolatry—_they cried
every man unto his own god_; the jettisoning of the tackle of the ship
to lighten her (as we should say, they let the masts go by the board);
the worn-out prophet in the hull of the ship, sleeping like a stowaway;
the group gathered on the heaving deck to cast the lot; the passenger’s
confession, and the new fear which fell upon the sailors from it; the
reverence with which these rude men ask the advice of him, in whose
guilt they feel not the offence to themselves, but the sacredness to
God; the awakening of the prophet’s better self by their generous
deference to him; how he counsels to them his own sacrifice; their
reluctance to yield to this, and their return to the oars with
increased perseverance for his sake. But neither their generosity nor
their efforts avail. The prophet again offers himself, and as their
sacrifice he is thrown into the sea.
_And Jehovah cast a wind[1516] on the sea, and there was a great
tempest,[1517] and the ship threatened[1518] to break up. And the
sailors were afraid, and cried every man unto his own god; and they
cast the tackle of the ship into the sea, to lighten it from upon them.
But Jonah had gone down to the bottom of the ship and lay fast asleep.
And the captain of the ship[1519] came to him, and said to him, What
art thou doing asleep? Up, call on thy God; peradventure the God will
be gracious to us, that we perish not. And they said every man to his
neighbour, Come, and let us cast lots, that we may know for whose sake
is this evil_ come _upon us. So they cast lots, and the lot fell on
Jonah. And they said to him, Tell us now,[1520] what is thy business,
and whence comest thou? what is thy land, and from what people art
thou? And he said to them, A Hebrew am I, and a worshipper of the God
of Heaven,[1521] who made the sea and the dry land. And the men feared
greatly, and said to him, What is this thou hast done? (for they knew
he was fleeing from the face of Jehovah, because he had told them). And
they said to him, What are we to do to thee that the sea cease_ raging
_against us? For the sea was surging higher and higher. And he said,
Take me and throw me into the sea; so shall the sea cease_ raging
_against you: for I am sure that it is on my account that this great
tempest is_ risen _upon you. And the men laboured[1522] with the oars
to bring the ship to land, and they could not, for the sea grew more
and more stormy against them. So they called on Jehovah and said,
Jehovah, let us not perish, we pray Thee, for the life of this man,
neither bring innocent blood upon us: for Thou art Jehovah, Thou doest
as Thou pleasest. Then they took up Jonah and cast him into the sea,
and the sea stilled from its raging. But the men were in great awe of
Jehovah, and sacrificed to Him and vowed vows._
How very real it is and how very noble! We see the storm, and then we
forget the storm in the joy of that generous contest between heathen
and Hebrew. But the glory of the passage is the change in Jonah
himself. It has been called his punishment and the conversion of the
heathen. Rather it is his own conversion. He meets again not only God,
but the truth from which he fled. He not only meets that truth, but he
offers his life for it.
The art is consummate. The writer will first reduce the prophet and the
heathen whom he abhors to the elements of their common humanity. As men
have sometimes seen upon a mass of wreckage or on an ice-floe a number
of wild animals, by nature foes to each other, reduced to peace through
their common danger, so we descry the prophet and his natural enemies
upon the strained and breaking ship. In the midst of the storm they are
equally helpless, and they cast for all the lot which has no respect
of persons. But from this the story passes quickly, to show how Jonah
feels not only the human kinship of these heathen with himself, but
their susceptibility to the knowledge of his God. They pray to Jehovah
as the God of the sea and the dry land; while we may be sure that the
prophet’s confession, and the story of his own relation to that God,
forms as powerful an exhortation to repentance as any he could have
preached in Niniveh. At least it produces the effects which he has
dreaded. In these sailors he sees heathen turned to the fear of the
Lord. All that he has fled to avoid happens there before his eyes and
through his own mediation.
The climax is reached, however, neither when Jonah feels his common
humanity with the heathen nor when he discovers their awe of his God,
but when in order to secure for them God’s sparing mercies he offers
his own life instead. _Take me up and cast me into the sea; so shall
the sea cease from_ raging _against you._ After their pity for him
has wrestled for a time with his honest entreaties, he becomes their
sacrifice.
* * * * *
In all this story perhaps the most instructive passages are those which
lay bare to us the method of God’s revelation. When we were children
this was shown to us in pictures of angels bending from heaven to guide
Isaiah’s pen, or to cry Jonah’s commission to him through a trumpet.
And when we grew older, although we learned to dispense with that
machinery, yet its infection remained, and our conception of the whole
process was mechanical still. We thought of the prophets as of another
order of things; we released them from our own laws of life and
thought, and we paid the penalty by losing all interest in them. But
the prophets were human, and their inspiration came through experience.
The source of it, as this story shows, was God. Partly from His
guidance of their nation, partly through close communion with Himself,
they received new convictions of His character. Yet they did not
receive these mechanically. They spake neither at the bidding of
angels, nor like heathen prophets in trance or ecstasy, but as _they
were moved by the Holy Ghost_. And the Spirit worked upon them first as
the influence of God’s character,[1523] and second through the
experience of life. God and life—these are all the postulates for
revelation.
At first Jonah fled from the truth, at last he laid down his life for
it. So God still forces us to the acceptance of new light and the
performance of strange duties. Men turn from these, because of sloth
or prejudice, but in the end they have to face them, and then at what
a cost! In youth they shirk a self-denial to which in some storm of
later life they have to bend with heavier, and often hopeless, hearts.
For their narrow prejudices and refusals, God punishes them by bringing
them into pain that stings, or into responsibility for others that
shames, these out of them. The drama of life is thus intensified in
interest and beauty; characters emerge heroic and sublime.
“But, oh the labour,
O prince, the pain!”
Sometimes the neglected duty is at last achieved only at the cost of
a man’s breath; and the truth, which might have been the bride of his
youth and his comrade through a long life, is recognised by him only in
the features of Death.
FOOTNOTES:
[1511] iv. 2.
[1512] For the grace of God had been the most formative influence in
the early religion of Israel (see Vol. I., p. 19), and Amos, only
thirty years after Jonah, emphasised the moral equality of Israel and
the Gentiles before the one God of righteousness. Given these two
premisses of God’s essential grace and the moral responsibility of the
heathen to Him, and the conclusion could never have been far away that
in the end His essential grace must reach the heathen too. Indeed in
sayings not later than the eighth century it is foretold that Israel
shall become a blessing to the whole world. Our author, then, may have
been guilty of no anachronism in imputing such a foreboding to Jonah.
[1513] Second Isaiah. See chap. lx.
[1514] See the author’s _Hist. Geog. of the Holy Land_, pp. 131-134.
[1515] Heb. _them_.
[1516] So LXX.: Heb. _a great wind_.
[1517] Heb. _on the sea_.
[1518] Lit. _reckoned_ or _thought_.
[1519] Heb. _ropes_.
[1520] The words _for whose sake is this evil_ come _upon us_ do not
occur in LXX. and are unnecessary.
[1521] Wellhausen suspects this form of the Divine title.
[1522] Heb. _dug_.
[1523] _I knew how Thou art a God gracious._
CHAPTER XXXVI
_THE GREAT FISH AND WHAT IT MEANS—THE PSALM_
JONAH ii
At this point in the tale appears the Great Fish. _And Jehovah prepared
a great fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the fish
three days and three nights._
After the very natural story which we have followed, this verse
obtrudes itself with a shock of unreality and grotesqueness. What an
anticlimax! say some; what a clumsy intrusion! So it is if Jonah be
taken as an individual. But if we keep in mind that he stands here, not
for himself, but for his nation, the difficulty and the grotesqueness
disappear. It is Israel’s ill-will to the heathen, Israel’s refusal
of her mission, Israel’s embarkation on the stormy sea of the world’s
politics, which we have had described as Jonah’s. Upon her flight
from God’s will there followed her Exile, and from her Exile, which
was for a set period, she came back to her own land, a people still,
and still God’s servant to the heathen. How was the author to express
this national death and resurrection? In conformity with the popular
language of his time, he had described Israel’s turning from God’s will
by her embarkation on a stormy sea, always the symbol of the prophets
for the tossing heathen world that was ready to engulf her; and now
to express her exile and return he sought metaphors in the same rich
poetry of the popular imagination.
To the Israelite who watched from his hills that stormy coast on which
the waves hardly ever cease to break in their impotent restlessness,
the sea was a symbol of arrogance and futile defiance to the will of
God. The popular mythology of the Semites had filled it with turbulent
monsters, snakes and dragons who wallowed like its own waves, helpless
against the bounds set to them, or rose to wage war against the gods
in heaven and the great lights which they had created; but a god slays
them and casts their carcases for meat and drink to the thirsty people
of the desert.[1524] It is a symbol of the perpetual war between light
and darkness; the dragons are the clouds, the slayer the sun. A
variant form, which approaches closely to that of Jonah’s great fish,
is still found in Palestine. In May 1891 I witnessed at Hasbeya, on the
western skirts of Hermon, an eclipse of the moon. When the shadow began
to creep across her disc, there rose from the village a hideous din of
drums, metal pots and planks of wood beaten together; guns were fired,
and there was much shouting. I was told that this was done to terrify
the great fish which was swallowing the moon, and to make him disgorge
her.
Now these purely natural myths were applied by the prophets and poets
of the Old Testament to the illustration, not only of Jehovah’s
sovereignty over the storm and the night, but of His conquest of the
heathen powers who had enslaved His people.[1525] Isaiah had heard
in the sea the confusion and rage of the peoples against the bulwark
which Jehovah set around Israel;[1526] but it is chiefly from the
time of the Exile onward that the myths themselves, with their cruel
monsters and the prey of these, are applied to the great heathen
powers and their captive, Israel. One prophet explicitly describes the
Exile of Israel as the swallowing of the nation by the monster, the
Babylonian tyrant, whom God forces at last to disgorge its prey. Israel
says:[1527] _Nebuchadrezzar the king of Babylon hath devoured me[1528]
and crushed me,[1528] ... he hath swallowed me up like the Dragon,
filling his belly, from my delights he hath cast me out_. But Jehovah
replies:[1529] _I will punish Bel in Babylon, and I will bring out of
his mouth that which he hath swallowed.... My people, go ye out of the
midst of her._
It has been justly remarked by Canon Cheyne that this passage may be
considered as the intervening link between the original form of the
myth and the application of it made in the story of Jonah.[1530] To
this the objection might be offered that in the story of Jonah the
_great fish_ is not actually represented as the means of the prophet’s
temporary destruction, like the monster in Jeremiah li., but rather as
the vessel of his deliverance.[1531] This is true, yet it only means
that our author has still further adapted the very plastic material
offered him by this much transformed myth. But we do not depend for our
proof upon the comparison of a single passage. Let the student of the
Book of Jonah read carefully the many passages of the Old Testament, in
which the sea or its monsters rage in vain against Jehovah, or are
harnessed and led about by Him; or still more those passages in which
His conquest of these monsters is made to figure His conquest of the
heathen powers,[1532]—and the conclusion will appear irresistible that
the story of the _great fish_ and of Jonah the type of Israel is drawn
from the same source. Such a solution of the problem has one great
advantage. It relieves us of the grotesqueness which attaches to the
literal conception of the story, and of the necessity of those painful
efforts for accounting for a miracle which have distorted the
common-sense and even the orthodoxy of so many commentators of the
book.[1533] We are dealing, let us remember, with poetry—a poetry
inspired by one of the most sublime truths of the Old Testament, but
whose figures are drawn from the legends and myths of the people to
whom it is addressed. To treat this as prose is not only to sin against
the common-sense which God has given us, but against the simple and
obvious intention of the author. It is blindness both to reason and to
Scripture.
These views are confirmed by an examination of the Psalm or Prayer
which is put into Jonah’s mouth while he is yet in the fish. We have
already seen what grounds there are for believing that the Psalm
belongs to the author’s own plan, and from the beginning appeared just
where it does now.[1534] But we may also point out how, in consistence
with its context, this is a Psalm, not of an individual Israelite,
but of the nation as a whole. It is largely drawn from the national
liturgy.[1535] It is full of cries which we know, though they are
expressed in the singular number, to have been used of the whole
people, or at least of that pious portion of them, who were Israel
indeed. True that in the original portion of the Psalm, and by far its
most beautiful verses, we seem to have the description of a drowning
man swept to the bottom of the sea. But even here, the colossal scenery
and the magnificent hyperbole of the language suit not the experience
of an individual, but the extremities of that vast gulf of exile into
which a whole nation was plunged. It is a nation’s carcase which rolls
upon those infernal tides that swirl among the roots of mountains and
behind the barred gates of earth. Finally, vv. 9 and 10 are obviously
a contrast, not between the individual prophet and the heathen, but
between the true Israel, who in exile preserve their loyalty to
Jehovah, and those Jews who, forsaking their _covenant-love_, lapse
to idolatry. We find many parallels to this in exilic and post-exilic
literature.
_And Jonah prayed to Jehovah his God from the belly of the fish, and
said:—_
_I cried out of my anguish to Jehovah, and He answered me;
From the belly of Inferno I sought help—Thou heardest my voice.
For Thou hadst[1536] cast me into the depth, to the heart
of the seas, and the flood rolled around me;
All Thy breakers and billows went over me.
Then I said, I am hurled from Thy sight:
How[1537] shall I ever again look towards Thy holy temple?
Waters enwrapped me to the soul; the Deep rolled around me;
The tangle was bound about my head.
I was gone down to the roots of the hills;
Earth _and_ her bars were behind me for ever.
But Thou broughtest my life up from destruction,
Jehovah my God!
When my soul fainted upon me, I remembered Jehovah,
And my prayer came in unto Thee, to Thy holy temple.
They that observe the idols of vanity,
They forsake their covenant-love.
But to the sound of praise I will sacrifice to Thee;
What I have vowed I will perform.
Salvation is Jehovah’s._
_And Jehovah spake to the fish, and it threw up Jonah on the dry land._
FOOTNOTES:
[1524] For the Babylonian myths see Sayce’s Hibbert Lectures; George
Smith’s _Assyrian Discoveries_; and Gunkel, _Schöpfung u. Chaos_.
[1525] Passages in which this class of myths are taken in a physical
sense are Job iii. 8, vii. 12, xxvi. 12, 13, etc., etc.; and passages
in which it is applied politically are Isa. xxvii. 1, li. 9; Jer. li.
34, 44; Psalm lxxiv., etc. See Gunkel, _Schöpfung u. Chaos_.
[1526] Chap. xvii. 12-14.
[1527] Jer. li. 34.
[1528] Heb. margin, LXX. and Syr.; Heb. text _us_.
[1529] Jer. li. 44, 45.
[1530] Cheyne, _Theol. Rev._, XIV. See above, p. 503.
[1531] See above, p. 511, on the Psalm of Jonah.
[1532] Above, p. 525, n. 1525.
[1533] It is very interesting to notice how many commentators (_e.g._
Pusey, and the English edition of Lange) who take the story in its
individual meaning, and therefore as miraculous, immediately try to
minimise the miracle by quoting stories of great fishes who have
swallowed men, and even men in armour, whole, and in one case at least
have vomited them up alive!
[1534] See above, pp. 511 f.
[1535] See above, p. 511, nn. 1500, 1501.
[1536] The grammar, which usually expresses result, more literally
runs, _And Thou didst cast me_; but after the preceding verse it must
be taken not as expressing consequence but cause.
[1537] Read אֵיךְ for אַךְ, and with the LXX. take the sentence
interrogatively.
CHAPTER XXXVII
_THE REPENTANCE OF THE CITY_
JONAH iii
Having learned, through suffering, his moral kinship with the heathen,
and having offered his life for some of them, Jonah receives a second
command to go to Niniveh. He obeys, but with his prejudice as strong
as though it had never been humbled, nor met by Gentile nobleness.
The first part of his story appears to have no consequences in the
second.[1538] But this is consistent with the writer’s purpose to treat
Jonah as if he were Israel. For, upon their return from Exile, and in
spite of all their new knowledge of themselves and the world, Israel
continued to cherish their old grudge against the Gentiles.
_And the word of Jehovah came to Jonah the second time, saying, Up, go
to Niniveh, the great city, and call unto her with the call which I
shall tell thee. And Jonah arose and went to Niniveh, as Jehovah said.
Now Niniveh was a city great before God, three days’ journey_ through
and through.[1539] _And Jonah began by going through the city one day’s
journey, and he cried and said, Forty[1540] days more and Niniveh shall
be overturned_.
Opposite to Mosul, the well-known emporium of trade on the right bank
of the Upper Tigris, two high artificial mounds now lift themselves
from the otherwise level plain. The more northerly takes the name of
Kujundschik, or “little lamb,” after the Turkish village which couches
pleasantly upon its north-eastern slope. The other is called in the
popular dialect Nebi Yunus, “Prophet Jonah,” after a mosque dedicated
to him, which used to be a Christian church; but the official name
is Niniveh. These two mounds are bound to each other on the west by
a broad brick wall, which extends beyond them both, and is connected
north and south by other walls, with a circumference in all of about
nine English miles. The interval, including the mounds, was covered
with buildings, whose ruins still enable us to form some idea of
what was for centuries the wonder of the world. Upon terraces and
substructions of enormous breadth rose storied palaces, arsenals,
barracks, libraries and temples. A lavish water system spread in all
directions from canals with massive embankments and sluices. Gardens
were lifted into mid-air, filled with rich plants and rare and
beautiful animals. Alabaster, silver, gold and precious stones relieved
the dull masses of brick and flashed sunlight from every frieze and
battlement. The surrounding walls were so broad that chariots could
roll abreast on them. The gates, and especially the river gates, were
very massive.[1541]
All this was Niniveh proper, whose glory the Hebrews envied and over
whose fall more than one of their prophets exult. But this was not the
Niniveh to which our author saw Jonah come. Beyond the walls were great
suburbs,[1542] and beyond the suburbs other towns, league upon league
of dwellings, so closely set upon the plain as to form one vast complex
of population, which is known to Scripture as _The Great City_.[1543]
To judge from the ruins which still cover the ground,[1544] the
circumference must have been about sixty miles, or three days’ journey.
It is these nameless leagues of common dwellings which roll before
us in the story. None of those glories of Niniveh are mentioned, of
which other prophets speak, but the only proofs offered to us of the
city’s greatness are its extent and its population.[1545] Jonah is sent
to three days, not of mighty buildings, but of homes and families, to
the Niniveh, not of kings and their glories, but of men, women and
children, _besides much cattle_. The palaces and temples he may pass in
an hour or two, but from sunrise to sunset he treads the dim drab mazes
where the people dwell.
When we open our hearts for heroic witness to the truth there rush upon
them glowing memories of Moses before Pharaoh, of Elijah before Ahab,
of Stephen before the Sanhedrim, of Paul upon Areopagus, of Galileo
before the Inquisition, of Luther at the Diet. But it takes a greater
heroism to face the people than a king, to convert a nation than to
persuade a senate. Princes and assemblies of the wise stimulate the
imagination; they drive to bay all the nobler passions of a solitary
man. But there is nothing to help the heart, and therefore its courage
is all the greater, which bears witness before those endless masses, in
monotone of life and colour, that now paralyse the imagination like
long stretches of sand when the sea is out, and again terrify it like
the resistless rush of the flood beneath a hopeless evening sky.
It is, then, with an art most fitted to his high purpose that our
author—unlike all other prophets, whose aim was different—presents
to us, not the description of a great military power: king, nobles
and armed battalions: but the vision of those monotonous millions. He
strips his country’s foes of everything foreign, everything provocative
of envy and hatred, and unfolds them to Israel only in their teeming
humanity.[1546]
His next step is still more grand. For this teeming humanity he claims
the universal human possibility of repentance—that and nothing more.
Under every form and character of human life, beneath all needs and all
habits, deeper than despair and more native to man than sin itself,
lies the power of the heart to turn. It was this and not hope that
remained at the bottom of Pandora’s Box when every other gift had fled.
For this is the indispensable secret of hope. It lies in every heart,
needing indeed some dream of Divine mercy, however far and vague, to
rouse it; but when roused, neither ignorance of God, nor pride, nor
long obduracy of evil may withstand it. It takes command of the whole
nature of a man, and speeds from heart to heart with a violence, that
like pain and death spares neither age nor rank nor degree of culture.
This primal human right is all our author claims for the men of
Niniveh. He has been blamed for telling us an impossible thing, that a
whole city should be converted at the call of a single stranger; and
others have started up in his defence and quoted cases in which large
Oriental populations have actually been stirred by the preaching of an
alien in race and religion; and then it has been replied, “Granted the
possibility, granted the fact in other cases, yet where in history have
we any trace of this alleged conversion of all Niniveh?” and some
scoff, “How could a Hebrew have made himself articulate in one day to
those Assyrian multitudes?”
How long, O Lord, must Thy poetry suffer from those who can only treat
it as prose? On whatever side they stand, sceptical or orthodox, they
are equally pedants, quenchers of the spiritual, creators of unbelief.
Our author, let us once for all understand, makes no attempt to record
an historical conversion of this vast heathen city. For its men he
claims only the primary human possibility of repentance; expressing
himself not in this general abstract way, but as Orientals, to whom an
illustration is ever a proof, love to have it done—by story or parable.
With magnificent reserve he has not gone further; but only told
into the prejudiced faces of his people, that out there, beyond the
Covenant, in the great world lying in darkness, there live, not beings
created for ignorance and hostility to God, elect for destruction, but
men with consciences and hearts, able to turn at His Word and to hope
in His Mercy—that to the farthest ends of the world, and even on the
high places of unrighteousness, Word and Mercy work just as they do
within the Covenant.
The fashion in which the repentance of Niniveh is described is natural
to the time of the writer. It is a national repentance, of course, and
though swelling upwards from the people, it is confirmed and organised
by the authorities: for we are still in the Old Dispensation, when
the picture of a complete and thorough repentance could hardly be
otherwise conceived. And the beasts are made to share its observance,
as in the Orient they always shared and still share in funeral pomp and
trappings.[1547] It may have been, in addition, a personal pleasure
to our writer to record the part of the animals in the movement. See
how, later on, he tells us that for their sake also God had pity upon
Niniveh.
_And the men of Niniveh believed upon God, and cried a fast, and from
the greatest of them to the least of them they put on sackcloth. And
word came to the king of Niniveh, and he rose off his throne, and cast
his mantle from upon him, and dressed in sackcloth and sat in the dust.
And he sent criers to say in Niniveh:—_
_By Order of the King and his Nobles, thus:—Man and Beast, Oxen and
Sheep, shall not taste anything, neither eat nor drink water. But let
them clothe themselves[1548] in sackcloth, both man and beast, and call
upon God with power, and turn every man from his evil way and from
every wrong which they have in hand. Who knoweth but that God may[1549]
relent and turn from the fierceness of His wrath, that we perish
not?_[1550]
_And God saw their doings, how they turned from their evil way; and God
relented of the evil which He said He would do to them, and did it
not._
FOOTNOTES:
[1538] Only in iii. 1, _second time_, and in iv. 2 are there any
references from the second to the first part of the book.
[1539] The diameter rather than the circumference seems intended by the
writer, if we can judge by his sending the prophet _one day’s journey
through the city_. Some, however, take the circumference as meant, and
this agrees with the computation of sixty English miles as the girth of
the greater Niniveh described below.
[1540] LXX. Codd. B, etc., read _three days_; other Codd. have the
_forty_ of the Heb. text.
[1541] For a more detailed description of Niniveh see above on the Book
of Nahum, pp. 98 ff.
[1542] רחבות עיר, Gen. x. 11.
[1543] Gen. x. 12, according to which the Great City included, besides
Niniveh, at least Resen and Kelach.
[1544] And taking the present Kujundschik, Nimrud, Khorsabad and
Balawat as the four corners of the district.
[1545] iii. 2, iv. 11.
[1546] Compare the Book of Jonah, for instance, with the Book of Nahum.
[1547] Cf. Herod. IX. 24; Joel i. 18; Virgil, _Eclogue_ V., _Æneid_ XI.
89 ff.; Plutarch, _Alex._ 72.
[1548] LXX.: _and they did clothe themselves in sackcloth_, and so on.
[1549] So LXX. Heb. text: _may turn and relent, and turn_.
[1550] The alleged discrepancies in this account have been already
noticed. As the text stands the fast and mourning are proclaimed and
actually begun before word reaches the king and his proclamation of
fast and mourning goes forth. The discrepancies might be removed by
transferring the words in ver. 6, _and they cried a fast, and from the
greatest of them, to the least they clothed themselves in sackcloth_,
to the end of ver. 8, with a לאמר or ויאמרו to introduce ver. 9. But,
as said above (pp. 499, 510, n. 1499), it is more probable that the
text as it stands was original, and that the inconsistencies in the
order of the narrative are due to its being a tale or parable.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
_ISRAEL’S JEALOUSY OF JEHOVAH_
JONAH iv
Having illustrated the truth, that the Gentiles are capable of
repentance unto life, the Book now describes the effect of their escape
upon Jonah, and closes by revealing God’s full heart upon the matter.
Jonah is very angry that Niniveh has been spared. Is this (as some say)
because his own word has not been fulfilled? In Israel there was an
accepted rule that a prophet should be judged by the issue of his
predictions: _If thou say in thine heart, How shall we know the word
which Jehovah hath not spoken?—when a prophet speaketh in the name of
Jehovah, if the thing follow not nor come to pass, that is the thing
which Jehovah hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken
presumptuously, thou shalt have no reverence for him_.[1551] Was it
this that stung Jonah? Did he ask for death because men would say of
him that when he predicted Niniveh’s overthrow he was false and had not
God’s word? Of such fears there is no trace in the story. Jonah never
doubts that his word came from Jehovah, nor dreads that other men will
doubt. There is absolutely no hint of anxiety as to his professional
reputation. But, on the contrary, Jonah says that from the first he had
the foreboding, grounded upon his knowledge of God’s character, that
Niniveh would be spared, and that it was from this issue he shrank and
fled to go to Tarshish. In short he could not, either then or now,
master his conviction that the heathen should be destroyed. His grief,
though foolish, is not selfish. He is angry, not at the baffling of his
word, but at God’s forbearance with the foes and tyrants of Israel.
Now, as in all else, so in this, Jonah is the type of his people. If we
can judge from their literature after the Exile, they were not troubled
by the nonfulfilment of prophecy, except as one item of what was the
problem of their faith—the continued prosperity of the Gentiles.
And this was not, what it appears to be in some Psalms, only an
intellectual problem or an offence to their sense of justice. Nor could
they meet it always, as some of their prophets did, with a supreme
intellectual scorn of the heathen, and in the proud confidence that
they themselves were the favourites of God. For the knowledge that God
was infinitely gracious haunted their pride; and from the very heart of
their faith arose a jealous fear that He would show His grace to others
than themselves. To us it may be difficult to understand this temper.
We have not been trained to believe ourselves an elect people; nor
have we suffered at the hands of the heathen. Yet, at least, we have
contemporaries and fellow-Christians among whom we may find still alive
many of the feelings against which the Book of Jonah was written. Take
the Oriental Churches of to-day. Centuries of oppression have created
in them an awful hatred of the infidel, beneath whose power they are
hardly suffered to live. The barest justice calls for the overthrow of
their oppressors. That these share a common humanity with themselves is
a sense they have nearly lost. For centuries they have had no spiritual
intercourse with them; to try to convert a Mohammedan has been for
twelve hundred years a capital crime. It is not wonderful that Eastern
Christians should have long lost power to believe in the conversion of
infidels, and to feel that anything is due but their destruction. The
present writer once asked a cultured and devout layman of the Greek
Church, Why then did God create so many Mohammedans? The answer came
hot and fast: To fill up Hell! Analogous to this were the feelings of
the Jews towards the peoples who had conquered and oppressed them. But
the jealousy already alluded to aggravated these feelings to a rigour
no Christian can ever share. What right had God to extend to their
oppressors His love for a people who alone had witnessed and suffered
for Him, to whom He had bound Himself by so many exclusive promises,
whom He had called His Bride, His Darling, His Only One? And yet the
more Israel dwelt upon that Love the more they were afraid of it. God
had been so gracious and so long-suffering to themselves that they
could not trust Him not to show these mercies to others. In which case,
what was the use of their uniqueness and privilege? What worth was
their living any more? Israel might as well perish.
It is this subtle story of Israel’s jealousy of Jehovah, and Jehovah’s
gentle treatment of it, which we follow in the last chapter of the
book. The chapter starts from Jonah’s confession of a fear of the
results of God’s lovingkindness and from his persuasion that, as this
spread to the heathen, the life of His servant spent in opposition to
the heathen was a worthless life; and the chapter closes with God’s own
vindication of His Love to His jealous prophet.
_It was a great grief to Jonah, and he was angered; and he prayed
to Jehovah and said: Ah now, Jehovah, while I was still upon mine
own ground, at the time that I prepared to flee to Tarshish, was
not this my word, that I knew Thee to be a God gracious and tender,
long-suffering and plenteous in love, relenting of evil? And now,
Jehovah, take, I pray Thee, my life from me, for for me death is better
than life._
In this impatience of life as well as in some subsequent traits, the
story of Jonah reflects that of Elijah. But the difference between the
two prophets was this, that while Elijah was very jealous _for_
Jehovah, Jonah was very jealous _of_ Him. Jonah could not bear to see
the love promised to Israel alone, and cherished by her, bestowed
equally upon her heathen oppressors. And he behaved after the manner of
jealousy and of the heart that thinks itself insulted. He withdrew, and
sulked in solitude, and would take no responsibility nor further
interest in his work. Such men are best treated by a caustic
gentleness, a little humour, a little rallying, a leaving to nature,
and a taking unawares in their own confessed prejudices. All these—I
dare to think even the humour—are present in God’s treatment of Jonah.
This is very natural and very beautiful. Twice the Divine Voice speaks
with a soft sarcasm: _Art thou very angry?_[1552] Then Jonah’s
affections, turned from man and God, are allowed their course with a
bit of nature, the fresh and green companion of his solitude; and then
when all his pity for this has been roused by its destruction, that
very pity is employed to awaken his sympathy with God’s compassion for
the great city, and he is shown how he has denied to God the same
natural affection which he confesses to be so strong in himself. But
why try further to expound so clear and obvious an argument?
_But Jehovah said, Art thou_ so _very angry?_ Jonah would not
answer—how lifelike is his silence at this point!—_but went out from
the city and sat down before it,[1553] and made him there a booth and
dwelt beneath it in the shade, till he should see what happened in the
city. And Jehovah God prepared a gourd,[1554] and it grew up above
Jonah to be a shadow over his head....[1555] And Jonah rejoiced in the
gourd with a great joy. But as dawn came up the next day God prepared a
worm, and _this_[1556] wounded the gourd, that it perished. And it came
to pass, when the sun rose, that God prepared a dry east-wind,[1557]
and the sun smote on Jonah’s head, so that he was faint, and begged for
himself that he might die,[1558] saying, Better my dying than my
living! And God said unto Jonah, Art thou so very angry about the
gourd? And he said, I am very angry—even unto death! And Jehovah said:
Thou carest for a gourd for which thou hast not travailed, nor hast
thou brought it up, a thing that came in a night and in a night has
perished.[1559] And shall I not care for Niniveh, the Great City,[1560]
in which there are more than twelve times ten thousand human beings who
know not their right hand from their left, besides much cattle?_
God has vindicated His love to the jealousy of those who thought that
it was theirs alone. And we are left with this grand vague vision of
the immeasurable city, with its multitude of innocent children and
cattle, and God’s compassion brooding over all.
FOOTNOTES:
[1551] Deut. xviii. 21, 22.
[1552] The Hebrew may be translated either, first, _Doest thou well to
be angry?_ or second, _Art thou very angry?_ Our versions both prefer
the _first_, though they put the _second_ in the margin. The LXX. take
the _second_. That the second is the right one is not only proved by
its greater suitableness, but by Jonah’s answer to the question, _I am
very angry, yea, even unto death_.
[1553] Heb. _the city_.
[1554] קִיקָיון, the Egyptian kiki, the Ricinus or Palma Christi. See
above, p. 498, n. 1473.
[1555] Heb. adds _to save him from his evil_, perhaps a gloss.
[1556] Heb. _it_.
[1557] חֲרִישִׁית. The Targum implies a _quiet_, i.e. _sweltering_,
_east wind_. Hitzig thinks that the name is derived from the season of
ploughing and some modern proverbs appear to bear this out: _an autumn
east wind_. LXX. συγκαίων Siegfried-Stade: _a cutting east wind_, as if
from חרשׁ. Steiner emends to חריסית, as if from חֶרֶס = _the piercing_, a
poetic name of the sun; and Böhme, _Z.A.T.W._, VII. 256, to חרירית,
from חרר, _to glow_. Köhler (_Theol. Rev._, XVI., p. 143) compares חֶרֶשׁ,
_dried clay_.
[1558] Heb.: _begged his life, that he might die_.
[1559] Heb.: _which was the son of a night, and son of a night has
perished_.
[1560] Gen. x. 12.
INDEX OF PROPHETS
HABAKKUK, Introduction, 115;
Chaps. i.—ii. 4, 129;
ii. 5-20, 143;
iii., 149.
HAGGAI, Introduction, 225;
Chap. i., 236;
ii. 1-9, 241;
ii. 10-19, 244;
ii. 20-23, 250.
JOEL, Introduction, 375;
Chaps. i.—ii. 17, 398;
ii. 18-32, 418;
iii., 431.
JONAH, Introduction, 493;
Chap. i., 514;
ii., 523;
iii., 529;
iv., 536.
“MALACHI,” Introduction, 331;
Chap. i. 2-5, 349;
i. 6-14, 352;
ii. 1-9, 360;
ii. 10-16, 363;
ii. 17—iii. 5, 365;
iii. 6-12, 367;
iii. 13—iv. 2 (Eng.; iii. 13-21 Heb.), 369;
iv. 3-5 (Eng.; iii. 22-24 Heb.), 371.
NAHUM, Introduction, 77;
Chap. i., 90;
ii., iii., 96.
OBADIAH, Introduction, 163;
vv. 1-21, 173, 177.
ZECHARIAH (i.—viii.), Introduction, 255;
Chap. i. 1-6, 267;
i. 7-17, 283;
i. 18-21 (Eng.; ii. 1-4 Heb.), 286;
ii. 1-5 (Eng.; ii. 5-9 Heb.), 287;
iii., 292;
iv., 297;
v. 1-4, 301;
v. 5-11, 303;
vi. 1-8, 305;
vi. 9-15, 307;
vii., 320;
viii., 323.
“ZECHARIAH” (ix.—xiv.), Introduction, 449;
Chap. ix. 1-8, 463;
ix. 9-12, 466;
ix. 13-17, 467;
x. 1, 2, 469;
x. 3-12, 470;
xi. 1-3, 473;
xi. 4-17, 473;
xii. 1-7, 478;
xii. 8—xiii. 6, 481;
xiii. 7-9, 473, 477;
xiv., 485.
ZEPHANIAH, Introduction, 35;
Chaps. i.—ii. 3, 46;
ii. 4-15, 61;
iii. 1-13, 67;
iii. 14-20, 67, 73.
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