The Prophet Who Ran Away

The word of the Lord came to a prophet named Jonah, and it said: “Get up and go to Nineveh, that great city, and preach against it — because the cry of its wickedness has come up to me.” Now Nineveh was the capital of Assyria, and Assyria was the empire that had eaten the northern kingdom alive and marched its people away. To Jonah, being sent to preach to Nineveh was like being sent to warn the people who had burned your village. So Jonah got up and went — in the opposite direction. Nineveh was inland to the east; Jonah went down to the sea at Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish, which was about as far west as anybody knew how to go, and paid his fare and got on board, to get away from the Lord. But the Lord threw a great wind onto the sea, and there was such a storm that the ship was ready to break in pieces. And every sailor on board cried out to his own god, and they threw the cargo overboard to lighten her — and Jonah had gone down into the hold and was fast asleep, snoring. And the captain came down and shook him and said, “What are you doing, snoring? Get up and call on your God! Perhaps he will think of us, and we shall not drown.”

And up on deck the sailors said to each other: somebody on this ship has brought this on us — let us cast lots and find out who. So they threw the lots, and the lot fell on Jonah. And they crowded round him, all shouting at once: “Tell us — who has brought this trouble on us? What is your work? Where do you come from? What country, what people?” And Jonah said, “I am a servant of the Lord. I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.” He said it standing on the sea, in a storm. And the sailors were terrified, and said, ‘What have you done?’ — because by now he had told them he was running away from that God. And the sea was getting worse every minute. And they said, ‘What are we to do with you, to make the sea quiet down?’ And Jonah said, “Pick me up and throw me into the sea, and it will go quiet for you. I know it is my fault that this great storm has come on you.” And those foreign sailors would not do it. They put their backs into the oars and rowed for the shore with everything they had, trying to save the life of the man who had brought the storm — and they could not, because the sea kept rising against them. So at last they cried out to the Lord, “Please, Lord, do not let us die for this man’s life, and do not hold us guilty of innocent blood — for you, Lord, have done what you wanted.” And they picked Jonah up and put him over the side. And the sea stopped raging. And those sailors stood on a suddenly quiet deck and were filled with awe of the Lord, and made him an offering, and made him promises. Jonah ran away from God and accidentally led a whole shipful of strangers to him on the way.

And the Lord had a great fish ready, and it swallowed Jonah. And Jonah was inside that fish three days and three nights. And in there — in the dark, in the sea, inside a fish — he prayed. He said, “I cried to the Lord out of my trouble, and he heard me. Out of the belly of Hades I shouted, and you heard my voice. The waters closed over me, and the deep went round me, and the seaweed was wrapped about my head. I went down to the bottoms of the mountains, and the bars of the earth shut behind me for ever — and you brought my life up out of the pit, Lord my God. When my soul was fainting away from me, I remembered the Lord. Rescue belongs to the Lord.” And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it put Jonah out on the dry land.

And the word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time — the very same words as the first time. Get up. Go to Nineveh. Preach. And this time Jonah went. Nineveh was so big that it took three days to walk across, and he went one day’s walk into the middle of it and preached a very short sermon: “Three days more, and Nineveh will be overthrown.” No mercy in it, and no way out offered. Just the sentence. And the people of Nineveh believed God. They called a fast, and everybody from the greatest of them to the smallest put on sackcloth. And the word came to the king of Nineveh himself, and he got down off his throne and took off his royal robe and put on sackcloth and sat in ashes. And he sent out an order through the city, from himself and his nobles: nobody is to eat anything or drink anything — not the people, and not the cattle, and not the sheep or the oxen either. Let everybody, and every animal, be covered in sackcloth. Let them cry out to God as hard as they can. And let every one of them turn back from the wicked road he is on, and from the violence that is in his hands. And then the king said the most hopeful thing anybody in that city could say: “Who knows? God may change his mind and turn from his burning anger, and we shall not be destroyed.” And God saw what they did — that they turned back from their wicked ways — and he changed his mind about the harm he had said he would do to them. And he did not do it.

And Jonah was furious. The city was saved, and the prophet was so angry he could not see straight. And he prayed: “Lord — is this not exactly what I said back home? This is why I ran away to Tarshish in the first place! Because I knew you. I knew that you are kind and full of pity, slow to get angry, and so full of mercy that you change your mind about doing harm. Now, Lord, take my life away from me — because it is better for me to die than to live.” He did not run away because he thought God would fail. He ran away because he was afraid God would forgive them. He did not want them forgiven. He wanted them burned. And the Lord said, “Are you as angry as all that?” And Jonah did not answer. He walked out of the city and sat down on the hill east of it and built himself a little shelter, and sat in the shade of it to see what would happen to the city — still hoping, after everything, for fire.

And God, who is very patient, taught him with a plant. He made a gourd vine grow up over Jonah’s head to be a shade for him and take away his discomfort, and Jonah was delighted with that gourd — happier than he had been about anything yet. And at dawn the next day God sent a worm, and it bit through the gourd, and the plant withered. And when the sun came up God sent a burning east wind, and the sun beat down on Jonah’s head until he was faint, and he said again that he wanted to die. And God said, “Are you as angry as all that, about the gourd?” And Jonah said, “Yes. I am angry enough to die.” And then God said, “You felt sorry for a gourd, which you did not work for and did not grow; it came up in a night and it died in a night. And should I not feel sorry for Nineveh, that great city — where there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left, and a great many animals as well?” And that is the end.