This blog series is taken, more or less as is, from my latest book\u00a0<\/em>How The Bible Actually Works<\/a>. You can read the first posts in this serieshere<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0here<\/a> and here<\/a>.<\/p>\n The book of Jonah<\/a> tells the famous story of the prophet Jonah who wanted nothing to do with his divinely given assignment\u2014to go to the city of Nineveh and cry out against it for its wickedness (1:2), which is to say, give the city a chance to repent. Nineveh, by the way, was the capital of Assyria, which sacked the northern kingdom, Israel, in 722 BCE and continued to harass the southern kingdom, Judah, throughout the seventh century BCE until the Babylonians gained control of the region.<\/p>\n The Assyrian army was relentless and nearly invincible So Jonah wanted nothing to do with these godless This little incident caused Jonah to reconsider his The prophet, Nahum, however, tells another story about what God thinks of the Ninevites: he hates them. Nahum, in fact, celebrates the demise of Nineveh and interprets it as an act of God. The book concludes: There is no assuaging your hurt, your wound is mortal. All who hear the news about you clap their hands over you. For who has ever escaped your endless cruelty? (3:19). Translation: God destroyed Nineveh and everyone cheers as if it were the golden goal in the World Cup finals.<\/p>\n Jonah and Nahum clearly see the matter of God\u2019s attitude Nahum lived at the time of the fall of Nineveh and, Jonah, however, as most every biblical scholar thinks, was The author knew as well as everyone else that Nineveh and And then there\u2019s the whole \u201cJonah swallowed by a fish\u201d It\u2019s a parable to challenge its readers to reimagine<\/em> a God bigger than the one they were familiar with.<\/p>\n The writer of Jonah, living sometime after the exile, And so the writer of Jonah told a story of God\u2019s Travel broadens, as they say. Coming into contact with I\u2019d like to think\u2014and in fact, I do think\u2014that the portrait of God in Jonah is closer to what God is like: that God does not rejoice in wiping people out, but desires to commune with people of every tribe and nation. <\/p>\n But that\u2019s just me. Without a moment\u2019s hesitation, I will But the more important point to raise is that the very I may be wrong in how I process what God is like, of course, but I am not wrong because I process what God is like. Our diverse Bible demands that we employ wisdom when we read it. It keeps reminding us that we too need to accept our sacred responsibility to sense how God is present in our here and now. <\/p>\n Looking for more? Continue the conversation and grab a copy of\u00a0How the Bible Actually Works.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nand (judging from Assyrian artwork) impaled and skinned those who resisted.
\nWho\u2014with any active sense of justice\u2014would want to give them a chance to repent
\nof their wicked ways?! They need to be wiped off the face of the earth. Why in
\nheaven\u2019s name would God show any compassion to our enemies who mean to destroy
\nus?<\/p>\n
\nwarmongering bullies for fear they might actually listen and repent. To escape
\nGod, Jonah boarded a ship heading the exact opposite direction, but when storms
\nthreatened to sink the vessel, Jonah confessed to the crew that he was
\nresponsible for unleashing God\u2019s wrath on them; if they simply tossed him
\noverboard, they would survive, which they eagerly did. And this is where a
\nlarge fish swallows Jonah, which for some reason is thought to make for a great
\nchildren\u2019s story, though that isn\u2019t at all what we\u2019re interested in here.<\/p>\n
\ndecision, so when the fish vomited him up onto the shore, he headed to
\nNineveh\u2014but still copping an attitude. He begrudgingly delivered the shortest
\nand most negative sales pitch ever, Forty more days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown
\n(3:4), and then stomped away. Despite his efforts to subvert God\u2019s will,
\nJonah\u2019s worst fears were realized: the people and the king repented, and so God changed his mind
\nabout the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do
\nit (3:10). Ugh. Could this day get any worse?<\/p>\n
\ntoward the Ninevites differently, and the reason is \u2026 Wait for it \u2026 they were written at
\ndifferent times and under different circumstances for different purposes.<\/p>\n
\nhistorically speaking, he was right. Nineveh fell to the Babylonians in 612 BCE
\nand, as all prophets do, Nahum interpreted the event as an act of God. <\/p>\n
\nwritten in the postexilic period, after (perhaps generations after) the return
\nfrom Babylonian exile in 538 BCE. And this author doesn\u2019t seem to be in the
\nleast bit interested in recording history.<\/p>\n
\nthe Assyrian Empire had actually fallen and never repented. Had the Assyrians
\nactually repented, it would have amounted to a mass shift in religious
\ncommitment and political strategy, which would have been big news (\u201cAssyrians
\nbow the knee to Israel\u2019s God. Hostilities cease. Film at 11:00\u201d). But nothing
\nof the sort is known from any ancient record, Assyrian or otherwise. It strains
\ncredulity.<\/p>\n
\npart of the story. Jonah remains there for three days as the fish descends
\ndown, down, even entering the abode of the dead, which the Bible calls Sheol.
\nThese strike me as the kinds of details a writer, including an ancient one,
\nwould put into a story to ensure that his readers knew they were dealing with
\nsomething other than history. <\/p>\nThe book of Jonah isn\u2019t a history lesson. <\/h2>\n
\nwrote to a community that would have understood his point. While in Babylonian
\ncaptivity, the Judahites no doubt got to know their hosts quite well. They
\nraised children and buried relatives there. Familiarity breeds acceptance, and
\nwhen the Persians gave the all-clear for the Judahites to return home (539 BCE),
\nmany actually decided to stay behind. In fact, Babylon would become a center of
\nJewish life and thought for the next thousand years. (The Babylonian Talmud,
\nthe authoritative book of Judaism, was produced there.)<\/p>\n
\nexpansive mercy for non-Israelites; in other words, maybe God cares for other
\npeople too. And the author uses as his illustration a clearly fictionalized
\naccount of their long-gone ancient foe to express his newfound belief, or at
\nleast hope, that God is more inclusive than they were giving him credit for.<\/p>\n
\ndifferent people and cultures cannot help but affect our view of ourselves, the
\nworld we live in\u2014and God. Both Nahum and Jonah are works of wisdom, of
\nreimaging God to make sense of current experience in the here and now.<\/p>\n
\nsay that I favor one story over the other, because it makes more sense to me,
\nas that sense is informed by other experiences that I and those I know have had
\nof God and especially given what I understand of God in my time and place as a
\nChristian.<\/p>\n
\npresence of both Nahum and Jonah in our Bible forces us all<\/em> to ponder what God is like in our here and now just as these authors did.\n<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/thebiblefornormalpeople.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/ENNS_HowBibleActuallyWorks2_3D.png\")
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