Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [112]
PLOT SUMMARY: JONAH
The prophet Jonah is commanded by God to go to Nineveh, the wicked capital city of the Assyrians, to preach repentance. Instead, Jonah attempts to run away, booking passage on a ship going to Tarshish in southern Spain, the farthest known earthly point to which a man could then travel. When a storm comes up, the frightened sailors believe someone on board is responsible for making the gods angry. They throw Jonah overboard at his own request. Swallowed by “a great fish,” Jonah prays in its belly for three days and nights. Obviously sick of this praying man, the fish vomits Jonah out on dry land and he is again commanded by God to go to Nineveh and preach to the people there, calling them to give up their wicked ways. Jonah does as he is told and the Assyrian people, even though the are not Jews, repent and are spared by God.
Everybody is happy with this turn of events but Jonah. He was hoping for a little fire and brimstone to come raining down on Nineveh. In a lesser known conclusion to this tale, Jonah sits under a bush, or large gourd, to get some shade. God sends a worm to attack the bush. So Jonah is left sitting in the hot sun, angry about the loss of his shade. God tells him, “You’re concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor…. 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, and also much cattle?” (Jon. 4:10-11)
In other words, the God of Jonah is no longer presented as the God of vengeance on Israel’s enemies but as a caring, loving Creator concerned for everything he has made in the world. The God of Jonah has come a long way from the days of Noah.
For Jews and Christians alike, the story of Jonah and the “great fish” who swallowed him illustrates God’s universal mercy. Even the sinners of Nineveh, the most awful place on earth, are worthy of forgiveness and salvation if they repent. Other Jewish commentators saw the tale of the reluctant Jonah as a parable about the unwillingness of Jews to proclaim God’s Word to Gentiles, so it has also been cited to underscore the significance of taking God’s message to the entire world, even to the least likely listeners, a message that has since been applied to Christians as well. In Christian tradition, the three days in the fish’s belly are also viewed as symbolic of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Jesus himself compared his entombment with Jonah’s confinement “in the belly of the sea monster” (see Matt. 12:39-41).
A GODLESS BOOK
ESTHER
Haman…the enemy of all the Jews, had plotted against the Jews to destroy them, and had cast Pur—that is “the lot”—to crush and destroy them; but when Esther came before the king, he gave orders in writing that the plot he had devised against the Jews should come upon his own head, and that he and his sons should be hanged on the gallows. Therefore these days are called Purim, from the word Pur. (Esther 9:24-26)
Known to Jewish readers as the source of the Purim festival—and unfamiliar to many Christians—the book of Esther has a distinction shared with only one other Bible book. It never mentions God. The Lord sits this one out.
Set in the time of the Persian empire, it is the story of a brave Jewish heroine, Esther (Hadassah in Hebrew), who saves her people from a genocidal plot. As scripture, Esther was a latecomer to the Hebrew canon. The rabbis who fixed the canon of official Hebrew scriptures debated well into the fourth century CE whether this story, essentially a Hebrew Grimms’ fairy tale, belongs with the rest of the divine books. Not only is God a “no-show,” but the book contains few elements typical of most other biblical books. There are no laws, miracles, prayers, or mention of Jerusalem. It’s not even a very moral story, concluding with a bloodbath in which more than seventy-five thousand Persian enemies of the Jews