Jonah and Nahum are literary neighbors, they live on the same block in the Bible, as it were, but they can be hard to find. Each book is only a few pages long, and flipping through the prophets you can easily fly from Obadiah to Habakkuk as though Jonah and Nahum weren’t there.
In addition to living close to each other in the same scriptural neighborhood, the two also share an intense relationship with a city, Nineveh. Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian empire, a middle eastern super power that destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel and held the southern kingdom of Judah as a vassal for almost one hundred years. In Israel’s imagination, Nineveh had become a symbol of violent oppression, and Nahum’s entire proclamation is infused with rage against the hated city.
Ah, city of bloodshed,
utterly treacherous,
full of violence,
where killing never stops!
Crack of whip and rattle of wheel,
galloping steed and bounding chariot!
Charging horsemen,
flashing swords and glittering spears!
Hosts of slain and heaps of corpses,
dead bodies without number—
they stumble over bodies.
Because of the countless harlotries of the harlot,
the winsome mistress of sorcery, [Nineveh]
who ensnared nations with her harlotries
and peoples with her sorcery,
I am going to deal with you—
declares the Lord of Hosts.[1]
I am going to deal with you; violence for violence. The city must fall. Toward the end of the 7th century BCE Nineveh was totally destroyed and never rebuilt. It’s easy to see how, for many people suffering under brutal regimes, the hated city’s fall from glory became a source of deep satisfaction. For those living under oppression, the prophetic proclamation of the Lord who declares, “I am going to deal with you” and brings down the mighty, has long been a source of hope.The book of Nahum ends with a question, directed at Nineveh: “All who hear the news about you clap their hands over you. For who has ever escaped your endless cruelty?”[2]
The book of Jonah also ends with a question, but it presents an utterly different narrative. It begins, “Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai, saying, ‘Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim judgment upon it; for their wickedness has come up before me.’”[3] And Jonah set out, but instead of heading North and eventually East for Nineveh, he went West as far as his feet would take him, until he arrived on the beach near today’s Tel Aviv where he dipped his toes into the water of the Mediterranean Sea. And apparently this wasn’t far enough. Jonah found a ship going to Tarshish, a port far beyond the horizon, at the end of the known world, as far away as he could from the presence of the Lord. Jonah ran away and got on a boat to go where God was not, only to find out that there was no such place. The Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and in the storm Jonah asked the frightened sailors to throw him overboard, and the Lord provided a great fish to swallow Jonah. And after three days, the fish vomited Jonah out upon the same beach where his sea adventure had begun.
There he was, covered all over with stinky fish slobber, and the word of the Lord came to him a second time. “Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.” And this time, Jonah went. Not a word is said about how he felt or what was going through his mind. All we’re left with to ponder as he makes his way to the city is the realization that it’s not merely really, really hard to escape God’s presence and call, but impossible — something I find both terrifying and immensely comforting.
Next thing we hear is Jonah, a day’s walk into the city, crying out, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” That’s just eight words in English, five in Hebrew. Without a question one of the shortest and least poetic prophetic utterances in all of scripture. Jonah doesn’t scold or accuse his audience nor does he give any reasons for his announcement, he just makes it. And not a word is said about what a hard assignment this was given the size of the city and its evil ways. No, Jonah makes his announcement and the people hear it and they repent like nobody’s ever seen: the whole city, from king to cattle, put on sackcloth and sit in ashes, fasting and praying. “Who knows?” we’re told the king wondered. “God may turn and relent and turn back from his wrath, so that we do not perish.” And God saw what they did, how they were turning back from their evil ways. And God renounced the punishment he had planned to bring upon them, and did not carry it out.
And Jonah? Jonah who just witnessed the most fantastic response anyone tasked to declare the word of the Lord on the face of the earth could ever even dream of? Jonah is angry. He does not like what he just saw, does not like it at all. “Isn’t this just what I said when I was still in my own country? That is why I fled beforehand to Tarshish. For I know that you are a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in kindness, and ready to relent from punishing these people.”[4] Jonah is so mad, he declares he would rather die than witness a moment longer how God extends to Israel’s enemies the very compassion Israel has always depended on for its own salvation. We know the feeling: let them taste relentless justice — and grant us your mercy. We know the feeling and we get to laugh at it, laughing at our silly selves as we laugh at silly Jonah.
Dr. King urged us not to forget that in the struggle for liberation from the powers of oppression,
the attack is directed against forces of evil rather than against persons who are caught in those forces. It is evil we are seeking to defeat, not the persons victimized by evil. Those of us who struggle against racial injustice must come to see that the basic tension is not between races. … The tension is at bottom between justice and injustice.[5]
It is so easy to confuse unjust systems with the people caught in them and to forget that when godless, sinful, violent systems fall — and fall they must — the people caught in them are human beings made in the image of God.
We are deeply divided, and it is easy to forget that we are not called to fight those on the other side of the divide, but that which divides us so deeply. We are called to dismantle the old walls and the unquestioned assumptions that separate us. We are called to step into Jonah’s shoes and walk into the city of bloodshed, into the heart of the system that eats people, and to tell the truth that such a city, such a nation cannot and will not stand. And we care called to step into the shoes of the Ninevites and listen to this nobody from nowhere who dares to tell us that our city, our nation cannot and will not stand. We are called to repent — to turn around, to turn to God and to each other, and to let the Spirit of truth inspire and empower us.
It is awfully easy to imagine vengeance and retribution, human or divine, and to say with Nahum, “All who hear the news about you clap their hands over you. For who has ever escaped your endless cruelty?” It is awfully easy until we have the courage to consider our own cruelty, our own lovelessness, our own entanglement in oppressive systems and structures, our own complete dependence on the mercy of God.
At the end of Jonah’s very curious story, God has the final word, and God leaves us with a question, “Should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left?”[6] Countless people who are so lost they don’t know their right hand from their left — those are my people, stuck in deadly myths of supremacy and inferiority, steeped in lies, and yearning to be free.
“All who hear the news about you clap their hands over you,” Nahum declares, imagining the applause after Nineveh’s fall. I am grateful for the hilarious and very serious counter testimony of Jonah who dares us to imagine, against his own inclinations, the world’s laughter and applause after Nineveh’s repentance. Laughing with the redeemed, I clap my hands, and this joy gives me the courage to hear the whole truth and to tell the truth and, again and again, to turn to the mercy of God.
[1] Nahum 3:1-5a
[2] Nahum 3:19
[3] See Jonah 1:1-2
[4] Jonah 4:2-3
[5] From an article in the Christian Century, 1957; reprinted in A Testament of Hope, 8.
[6] Jonah 4:11