05 - Jonah

V. JONAH.

Jonah, the son of Amittai, figures amongst the prophetical writers, but he was not one; he was only a seer, like Nathan, Elijah, Elisha, the prophet that came out of Judah, and many others. Like them, his inspiration was occasional, but taught him something of the mind of God (Jonah 4:1). His other predictions are lost for want of a chronicler, but a masterhand has recorded his great prophecy and the strange events that preceded and followed it. This little Hebrew seer suddenly received a grand and startling commission — to go to the banks of the Tigris and threaten the oldest, largest, and wickedest city in the world with speedy destruction for its sins. That still, small voice, which no mortal had ever defied, thrilled Jonah’s ear. Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before me.

Here was an honour for a petty seer. His betters would have received it with pious exultation. Samuel, or Nathan, Elijah, Elisha, John the Baptist, or Paul, would have risen like lions, and gone forth with strong faith and pious pride to thunder against great Nineveh. But this strange man received the order silently, and silently evaded it. He did not hang his head and object like poor crushed Moses, when the hot patriotism of his youth had been cooled into apathy by exile, familyties, and forty years’ intercourse with Midianitish bullocks. Jonah received the Divine command, quietly turned his back upon it and on Nineveh, fled to the seaport Joppa, and sailed in a ship for distant Tarshish. So imperfect was his inspiration at this time that he thought the hand of the God that ho served could not reach him on a foreign sea.

They got into blue water, and such was his confidence that he told the ship’s company he was flying from the tutelary God of Palestine. His hearers, no more enlightened than himself received his communication with no misgivings. But presently a mighty tempest from the Lord fell upon the sea, and the ship was in mortal danger. The mariners were terrified, and cried every man to his God, and, not trusting too much to that, threw the cargo overboard. But there was one man who did not share their apprehensions. He went quietly to sleep, and neither the roaring sea, the whistling wind, nor the poor, creaking, labouring ship disturbed him. And of all the people whose lives were in such peril, who was this one calm sleeper?

It was Jonah. But the shipmaster came to him, and shook him, and insisted on his calling on his God. But lo! the peril increased, and from the suddenness and violence of the storm, they began to suspect the anger of the gods against some person in that doomed vessel. So they cast lots to learn who was the culprit, and the lot fell on Jonah. Then they questioned him as to his country and occupation, hoping, somehow or other, to gather how he had offended heaven.

Then Jonah, who now realized his folly and the narrow views he had taken of Him who is omnipresent and almighty, replied, ’ I am an Hebrew; and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who hMh made the eea and the dry land’

Then the quaking mariners remembered he had told them he was flying from his God; and now behold that God, by his own confession, was not a local divinity, but the creator of sea and land.

Connecting this new revelation with the sudden tempest and their increasing peril, the men were in mortal fear, and put a terrible question to Jonah: What shall we do to you to save our own lives V

Then Jonah, faulty as his character was, shone out like the sun. No shirking; no craven subterfuges. He looked them in the face and said:

"What you must do is, lay hold on me, and cast me into the sea, so shall the sea be calm to you; for I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon you/

Thus did Jonah show himself a prophet and a man. Though terror-stricken, murderous ejies glared on him, and the fearful sea yawned and raged for him, he was so true and so just that he delivered his own doom unflinchingly.

Nobility begets nobility; and the partners of his peril could not bear to sacrifice a man in whom they saw no evil, but, on the contrary, justice, heroism, and self-sacrifice. The poor, honest fellows said, ’Anything but that,’ and chose rather to be wrecked on shore. Their ship, after all, was but a galley lightened of its cargo, so they got out their long oars and made a gallant efibrt to row their trireme ashore, and there leave her bones, but save their own lives and that self-sacrificing hero. This was not to be. Sixty hands labouring at those oars could not prevail against the one hand that hurled the raging sea at that labouring galley and drove her from the land. Then these doomed men resigned themselves to the will of Jonah’s God. They cried to Him most pathetically, ’We beseech thee, Lord, we beseech thee, let us not perish for this man’s lifa’ And on the other hand, they begged that if Jonah was innocent his blood might not be laid on them, since they had done all they could to learn the Divine wilL And when they had so prayed, they took up Jonah and cast him into the sea. No doubt, as that pale but unflinching face went down without a cry or murmur, they looked on awhile with horror and misgiving; but not for long; the sea subsided as if by magic. The waves were calmed, the wind abated, the vessel was saved. The rescued mariners worshipped the God of Jonah. To his late companions Jonah was lost for ever. But God chastises His rebellious servants — not destroys them. Some monster of the deep was sent to that ship’s side, and swallowed up Jonah as he sank.

It was a terrible punishment. Think of it! For all these things are skimmed so superficially that they never really come home to the mind, least of all to the mind that is bent on preaching doctrines and not on comprehending facts. The man found himself in a placa cold as death and dark as pitch; no room to move hand or foot. After the first shock of utter amazement, the sliminess, the smell, the water rushing through the fish’s gills, must have told him where he was. Oh, then conceive his horror! So he was not to die in the sea and there an end; but to lie in the belly of a great fish till he rotted away; or to be brought up within range of the creature’s teeth and gnawed away piecemeal and digested in fragments.

Take my word for it, the poor wretch passed many hours of agony, expecting a slow death of torment, and would have given the world to be vomited into the raging sea and perish by drowning — a mild and common death. But as the hours rolled on and death came no nearer, he began to hope a little, and to repent more and more. The man was soon crushed into that state of self-abasement and penitence, out of which a forgiving God often raises His faulty servants to great honour and happiness.

He prayed to God out of the fish’s belly, and said:

’ I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the Lord, and he heard me; out of the belly of hell cried 1, and thou heardest my voice. For thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas; and the floods compassed me about: all thy billows and thy waves passed over me. Then I said, I am cast out of thy sight; yet I will look again toward thy holy temple. The waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head. I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars was about me for ever: yet hast thou brought up my life from corruption, Lord my God. When my soul fainted within me I remembered the Lord: and my prayer came in unto thee, into thine holy temple. I will sacrifice unto thee with the voice of thanksgiving: I will pay that that I have vowed. Salvation is of the Lord. And the Lord spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land,’ Who was now the happiest man in all the world? Why, this forgiven sinner; this punished, humbled, rewarded rebel To him life was ten times sweeter; the sun shine, the shelly beach, the purple sea, with its myriad dimples and prismatic hues, ten times more lovely than to other men.

Lazarus was happy, returning from the grave to his beloved Master, and his darling sisters that wept on his neck for joy.

Happy was the widow’s only son, whom the Master, mighty yet tender, delivered with His own hand from his coflSn to his bereaved mother, wild with amazement and maternal love. But both these men came back from the neutral state of mere unconsciousness to daylight and the joys of life. Not so Jonah. He had been buried alive, and came back from the sickening horror of a living tomb, from a darkness and a death that he felt, to the warm bright sunshine, the glittering sand painted with radiant shells, the purple sea smiling myriad dimples and rainbowed with prismatic hues.

Whilst he gazed at these things with a rapture they had never yet created in him, and poured out his soul in gratitude, there came to him once more the still, small voice of his Master, clear, silvery, dispassionate, and divinely beautiful ’Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee.

Jonah now obeyed with alacrity and went to Nineveh, strong in his Divine commission.

Nineveh having perished about two centuries before Herodotus visited the Tigris, we have no better authority as to its size and population than the words of the Book of Jonah. We may, however, rely on the universal tradition that it was a city of vast size and magnificence, and three days’ journey in circuit by Jewish computation, or 480 Greek stadia which two measurements agree, being sixty English miles.

It was a brilliant and luxurious city, at the head of the world in general magnificence and in the fine arts. A rude Hebrew seer came from a country inferior m every mental quality but knowledge of God, and threatened this magnificent city with destruction in forty days, if the people did not repent their sins and turn to the true God. The thing to be expected was that the townspeople would laugh at him for a day or two, and then drag him through their gutters, or whip him through the streets with his prophecy pinned to his back in cuneiform letters. But Jonah, inspired by God, and being, so to speak, a prophet raised from the dead to do a great work, preached with supernatural power, and bowed these Assyrian hearts, from the throne to the cabin. The King of Nineveh, the greatest monarch of the day, rose up from his throne at the preaching of Jonah, laid his royal robe in the dust and sat on the ground in sackcloth and ashes, a picture of lowly penitence, and an example which all his people followed. They fasted, not by halves, but to the confines of torture. They tasted neither food nor drink, and they kept food and drink from their herds, their flocks, and their beasts of burden. They covered themselves and their cattle with sackcloth; they abstained from the sins that Jonah had denounced, and cried for mercy to the God of this Boanerges. Then Qod saw, pardoned, and spared.

Here was a triumph for Jonah — alone, and with no human help, he had terrified and converted the greatest city in the world. Even egotism, if humanized by benevolence, could have found gratification in this. But poor Jonah was all egotism. A witty Frenchman has defined an egotist as a character who will bum down another man’s house to cook himself two eggs. Jonah was quite up to the mark of this definition. He would have burned down a populous and penitent city to enjoy his one %%%y the amfywr propre of a seer.

He was sore displeased, and complained to the Lord. He even said — though I cannot say I quite beheve him — that this was the only reason why he had fled to Tarshish. He knew his prophecy would prove an empty menace, for said he, ’ I know that thou art a gracious God, and merciful slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil. / wiah I were dead, Now, if any one of us had been allowed to speak for God, we should have come down on this egotist like a sledge-hammer.

What! do you cast in God’s teeth that quality by which alone you have yourself escaped destruction? Retum, then, to the belly of that shark, and there, in the darkness of your eyes, let light visit your soul blinded by egotism.

Come, now — shall penitent Jonah and penitent Nineveh be destroyed for their repented sijis? or shall both be saved, and God be consistent, though man, Jonah included, is not? But God never talks like that. He is better than man at man’s best. Man forgives, but remembers, and sometimes even alludes. God, when He forgives, obliterates. It is so throughout the sacred books, and although neither the Hebrew writers nor any other writers can comprehend or describe the infinite God, yet they all reveal this fragment of His infinite nature with a consistency that bears the stamp of truth and excludes the idea of invention. When Jonah stood by the seaside saved from death, God did not say to him, ’ See what comes of resisting my will!’ He obliterated what He had forgiven, and merely repeated His command about Nineveh without an unkind word. And now that His wayward servant reproached Him with His weakness in forgiving penitent Chaldeans, He only said to him with more than maternal sweetness, Doest thou well to be angry?’ This did not melt the angry Jonah. He turned his back on the city, which he hated for not fulfilling his prediction punctually. He went out into the fields and sat down to see whether God would really be so cruel as to mortify Jonah and save 600, 000 people, not one of whom was Jonah.

God pitied His servant exposed to the midday heat, and prepared a gourd to comfort his aching head, and afterwards instruct his heart.

Then Jonah enjoyed great happiness. All the day he looked upon a wonder of natura A lovely gourd came up from the ground, growing slowly but perceptibly, and reared and expanded its huge succulent leaves till they formed a thick canopy over the head of the favoured prophet.

Then Jonah rejoiced in the impenetrable shade of this lovely plant, and began to be half reconciled to the prolonged existence of Nineveh.

Then the gourd entered on its second office. The Almighty, had planted a worm in the gourd, and the worm was enabled to destroy it as rapidly as it had grown.

Then did the sun and the hot wind beat on Jonah’s head, and he cried once more, as our foolish women do when things go wrong, ’ I wish I were dead.’

Then God said to Jonah, tenderly, Doest thou well to be angry?

Ungracious Jonah replied roughly, ’ I do well to be angry, even unto death.’

Then came the still, small voice, sweet yet clear, gentle yet mighty and penetrating, which no patriarch but Jonah ever resisted so long; and even he must yield to it at last. Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night, and should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than six score thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left; and also much cattle.

Now, if the reader of Jonah is curious to know whether he left Nineveh as great an egotist as he entered it, I can only give him one man’s opinion, but it is not a hasty one. In the first place, the Omniscient is not to be defeated; why should Jonah’s egotism resist Him to the end’ any more than Jonah’s flight baffled Him for more than a day or two?

Prima facie, the Almighty must conquer the heart of Jonah, since He knows the way to every heart.

Starting from this safe position, I ask myself why so faulty a man as Jonah was so honoured?

Clearly it was not because of his rebellious spirit, nor his egotism; but in spite of them.

Probably he was a man of pure life and morals; certainly he was the soul of truth. Why should not the God of truth select as a vehicle of prophecy the brave, truthful man, who, facing desperate men with the sea raging on him at his back, could say, The truth is, you must take me up and fling me into the sea; for with my just execution the storm will abate/ Jonah did not write the book, but he must have communicated the facts and the main particulars of the dialogue.

Now, no unconverted egotist tells a tale so fairly throughout, and the concluding dialogue so thoroughly against himself, as it is done in this book You read this dialogue between God and a man; and the writer is a man. A man yourself, you are shocked at the man, and you bless God.

Moreover, he has given God the last word and the best. Now, no unconverted egotist ever did that, nor ever will. The unconverted egotist is to be found in a thousand autobiographies; catch him givins: an opponent the last word, or the best!

I have little doubt, therefore, that Jonah went home a converted egotist, and that when he came to think quietly over it all, he yielded to Divine instruction, and that his character kept improving to the last day of his life. Of course I reject. the conventional theory that Jonah, being a prophet, had no personal weakness under his skin, and wished penitent Nineveh to be destroyed only because he feared for his own nation if it was left standing. If he foresaw the captivity at all, he must have known that the danger was to be from Babylon, after Nineveh had been centuries extinct. Long alter Jonah, Nahum threatened Nineveh, but did not fear it.

These skimmers forget that, if Jonah was faultless, God must have been imperfect, since God and he were in direct opposition; and that not once, but twice. The Book of Jonah is generally imderrated; one reason is, it is judged by commentators, who have never tried to tell an immortal story, so they underrate a man immeasurably their superior, since the able narrator is above the able commentator, and high as heaven above the conventional commentator, who is mad after types, and who follows his predecessors, who follow theirs, ut anser trahit anserem/ The truth is, that Jonah is the most beautiful story ever written in so small a compass.

Now, in writing it is condensation that declares the master; verbosity and garrulity have their day, but only hot-pressed narratives live for ever. The Book of Jonah is in forty-eight verses, or one thousand three hundred and twenty-eight English words.

Now, take one thousand three hundred and twenty ’eight words in our current narratives: how far do they carry you? Why, ten to one, you get to nothing at all but chatter, chatter, chatter. Even in those close models, Bobinson Crusoe,’ the ’Vicar of Wakefield,’ Candide,’

’Rasselas,’ one thousand three hundred and twenty-eight words do not carry the reader far; yet in the one thousand three hundred and twenty-eight words of Jonah you have a wealth of incident, and all the dialogue needed to carry on the grand and varied action. You have also character, not stationary, but growing just as Jonah’s grew, and a plot that would bear volumes, yet worked out without haste or crudity in one thousand three hundred and twenty-eight words.

Then, there is another thing. Only the great artists of the pen hit upon the perfect proportions of dialogue and narrative. With nineteen story-tellers out of twenty there is a weary excess of dialogue. Nor are all the sacred narratives so nicely proportioned as Jonah. In Job the narrative is so short as to be crude and uninteresting compared with the events handled, and the dialogue is excessive, and in some places false, since similar sentiments and even similar words are given to different speakers. In the Apocrypha, ’Judith’ and ’Tobit are literally massacred by verbosity and bungling; not so, however, in ’ Susannah and the Elders ’ — that is a masterpiece as far as it goes. To my mind, speaking merely as an artist, the Acts of the Apostles eclipses all human narratives, ’ Stellas exortns nti iBtherios sol? and in the Old Testament, Genesis, Samuel, Jonah, and Euth stand pre-eminent, and Jonah above sweet Ruth by the greater weight of the facts and the introduction of the Deity. And oh, the blindness of conventional critics, groping Hebrew records not for pearls of facts, but pebbles of dogma! They have failed to observe that the God of Jonah is the God of the New Testament. Yet it is so, and this great book connects the two Bibles, instead of contrasting them and sore perplexing every honest mind with a changeable Deity. No doubt the God of the New Testament can be found, or heavenly gUmpses of Him, in the Hebrew prophets. But how about the historians? The truculent writers of Joshua, Judges, and Samuel have surely now and then coloured the unchangeable God from their own minds and their own state of civilization. The Book of Jonah is not a book of prophecy, but just as much a history as Samuel; yet in the history of Jonah, written long before Isaiah, God is the God of the New Testament; the God we all hope to find in this world and the next Were there no other reason, every Christian may well cling to the Book of Jonah. As to the leading miracle which staggers some people who receive other miracles, these men are surely inconsistent There can be no scale of the miraculous. To infinite power it is no easier to pick up a pin than to stop all the planets in their courses for a time and then send them on again.

Say there never was a miracle and never will bo, and I differ with, but cannot confute, you. Deny the creation and the possibility of a re-creation or resurrection; call David a fool for saying, ’ It is he that hath made us and not we ourselves/ and... a wise man for suggesting that, on the contrary, molecules created themselves without a miracle, and we made ourselves out of molecules without a miracle; and although your theory contradicts experience as much as, and staggers credulity more than, any miracle that has ever been ascribed by Christians or Jews to infinite power, I admit it is consistent, though drolL But once grant the creation of a hundred thousand suns and a million planets, though we never in our short span saw one created; grant the creation of men, lions, fleas, and sea anemones, though all such creations are contrary to our experience; and it is a little too childish to draw back and say that our Creator and reCreator is only the Lord of flesh, and that fish are beyond His control.

Clearly, infinite power can create a new fish in Jewish waters, or despatch an old fish in the millionth of a second from the Pacific to the shores of Palestine.

Now to go from power to wisdom, is this miracle a childish one? does it smack of human invention?

What were the objects to be gained by it? A rebellious servant was to be crushed into submission, yet not destroyed. He was to feel the brief agony of death by drowning, then to be laid in a horrible dark prison tiU he repented, then to be restored to the world in a fit state of mind and body to take a long journey and threaten the greatest city in the world.

Tackle all those difficulties, effect all those just and wise objects, invent your own miracle, and perhaps when you compare it with Jonah’s, you will think very highly of the latter, and not so highly of the whole army of skimmers, who have discredited and sneered at a record they have never tried hard to comprehend:

’Facile judicat qui pauca considerafc.