JON

Jonah is a short story, completely fictional, which was written by a “liberal” during a time following the Babylonian Exile when proto-neocons were promoting Jewish exceptionalism. The moral of the story is that God’s forgiveness is available to everyone, not just the people of your own little group.

This moral is, of course, lost on evangelicals, who prefer to focus on the whale part, and insist it really happened exactly as written as evidence of God’s power to create miracles, and was not merely a plot device to keep the story moving along.

The plot of Jonah is simple.

God tells Jonah to go to the Assyrian city of Nineveh and preach repentance, for the end is nigh. Jonah gets on a ship to obey, but soon God realizes he’s really just making for a port in the Med rather than Nineveh so so he assails the ship with a storm. Jonah admits to the ship’s captain that he offended his God, so they toss him into Davey Jones’ locker and immediately the storm abates. A giant whale comes along, swallows Jonah, and steams all the way around Cape Horn, up the Persian Gulf, up the Shaat-al-Arab between Iraq and Iran, and spits him out on the bank of the Tigris nigh to Nineveh after only three days. Now God tells Jonah again, go and preach repentance unto the inhabitants of the city, or he’s gonna nuke it in forty days. Jonah complies this time, and to his great surprise the people of the city put on sackcloth and pour ashes on their heads and repent of their wickedness just like Jonah told them to do. That outcome pisses Jonah off exceedingly, because he was really there just to see the divine fireworks.

So Jonah goes off in a huff and pouts. Then God comes to him and says:

JONAH 4:11: “Should I not have compassion on Nineveh, the great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know the difference between their right and left hand, as well as many animals?”

This is one of the rare instances in the Bible where God is being funny, and it turns out he has a sarcastic wit. God is saying, in essence, “Even if you hold the lives of more than a hundred thousand little children as nought, think of all the cattle that would be lost!”