Jonah 4 · NIVAC

Original Meaning

Jonah’s Anger with Yahweh (4:1–5)

JONAH FULFILLED HIS calling to Nineveh only under the threat of his own death. Now that his original suspicion concerning Nineveh’s survival has been confirmed, Jonah fully expresses his anger with Yahweh’s focused compassion (4:1–5).

The first verse uses strong language in Hebrew to express “greatly displeased.” Using the words for “evil” and “calamity” (raʿah, raʿaʿ ), this verse can also be translated, “To Jonah it was a disaster, a great disaster. He became angry.” Jonah is angry that Yahweh has had compassion on the evil Ninevites, repentance or not. For him, it is a disaster that they have averted disaster.1 In 1:12 he demonstrated that he would rather die in the sea than suggest to the sailors that they turn around and return him to Joppa so that he can complete Yahweh’s call to him. He has not wanted the Ninevites to survive in any circumstance.

Jonah is filled with burning anger. “He became angry” is expressed in Hebrew by the word ḥarah (“burning,” as with fire); it can also be translated “was inflamed.” This verb is used five times in Jonah:

3:9: “Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish.”

4:1: But Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry.

4:4: But the LORD replied, “Have you any right to be angry?”

4:9a: But God said to Jonah, “Do you have a right to be angry about the vine?”

4:9b: “I do,” he said. “I am angry enough to die.”

Jonah’s out-of-control anger over Nineveh’s repentance and God’s forgiveness is best understood in reference to Nineveh’s historical evil. Jonah’s anger is a reflection of Yahweh’s anger (3:9) over Nineveh’s wickedness. But Jonah’s anger also stands in contrast to Yahweh’s, for he does not believe that their evil should be forgiven. He cannot accept Micah 7:18b: “You do not stay angry forever but delight to show mercy.” Jonah explains his anger in Jonah 4:2:

“O LORD, is this not what I said when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.”

This verse carries the richness of Jonah’s relationship to Yahweh combined with his disputation against Yahweh. Jonah begins his prayer by crying out with the same petition form that the sailors used in 1:14 (ʾannah, “I plead, please, O”), perhaps indicating that Yahweh’s ways are as foreign to him as to the sailors. Jonah knows that Yahweh is gracious, compassionate, slow to anger, and abounding in love; he relents from sending calamity. But Jonah does not understand why this should be shared with the evil Ninevites. He suspected that they would repent and that Yahweh would relent, but he doesn’t like it and does not want to be part of this forgiveness. More than this, he does not approve of Yahweh’s intent or action.

A key to understanding this verse is found in the Hebrew behind the words, “I was so quick [qiddamti] to flee to Tarshish.” The verb qadam in the Piel means “I anticipated” or “I was in front” of the action. It is an advantage for a prophet to know how things will turn out! Jonah is admitting here that he understood the players and the events. His complaint against Yahweh is that he does not like the way of Yahweh’s plan for Nineveh.

Jonah goes on: “I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.” This familiar five-point description of the true God places Jonah in a long line of important Old Testament witnesses (see discussion of the other biblical witnesses in the Bridging Contexts section). (1) “Gracious” or “merciful” derives from a Hebrew word (ḥannun) that appears thirteen times in the Old Testament and is used only of God. God illustrated the meaning of the word in his law against taking collateral for a loan to a poor person2 in Exodus 22:26–27:

If you take your neighbor’s cloak as a pledge, return it to him by sunset, because his cloak is the only covering he has for his body. What else will he sleep in? When he cries out to me, I will hear, for I am gracious.3

(2) Yahweh is also compassionate. The primary meaning of this word is “to be soft like a womb.” It is illustrated in the soft compassion of a mother for her child in the womb. The Ninevites (like the sailors) hoped what Jonah has known all along: God is compassionate. The sailors and the Ninevites are a sharp critique on the prophet who selfishly guards this knowledge.

Sailors:	Maybe he will take notice of us, and we will not perish (1:6b).
Ninevite king:	Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish (3:9).
Jonah:	I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God (4:2b).

(3) Yahweh is slow to anger. The Hebrew expression means “forbear, continue long, be patient, postpone anger, tarry long.” Proverbs 16:32 translates the phrase, “Better a patient man [one slow to anger] than a warrior.” Jonah disagrees that Yahweh should be patient any longer.

(4) Yahweh is abounding in love. This is the more intense word for love in Hebrew (ḥesed) and is best understood as God’s “unrelenting love,” which is God’s covenant commitment to his people. With this unrelenting love he binds himself to his promises to them. It is translated in modern Hebrew as “grace” but most often in the English Bible as “steadfast love.” Psalm 136 declares in each of its twenty-six verses that this loyal love of God “endures forever.”

God gave Hosea a marriage metaphor to illustrate this kind of abounding love. Note Hosea 2:19: “I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, in love and compassion.” He tells Hosea to marry a prostitute and to be faithful to her as an example of God’s faithfulness to a faithless people: “The LORD said to me, ‘Go, show your love to your wife again, though she is loved by another and is an adulteress. Love her as the LORD loves the Israelites, though they turn to other gods and love the sacred raisin cakes’” (Hos. 3:1).

The nearest equivalent word in the New Testament is agape, translated “unconditional love.” Both God’s Old Testament “covenant” love and God’s New Testament agape communicate God’s unrelenting love for his creation and his people. Both expressions of love will unconditionally receive the repentant sinner into reconciliation with God. The unconditional love of Jesus reveals this love more fully and radically than the Old Testament (in his incarnation, death, and bodily resurrection), but it is the same love of the Father in each case.

(5) Yahweh is “a God who relents from sending calamity.” “Relents” (naḥam) is discussed at length elsewhere (see Bridging Contexts section of ch. 3). It is one of the two kinds of God’s compassion in this verse. “Compassionate God” (raḥam) is a gentle womb-like compassion of God for his good creation; naḥam is an agonizing compassion of God in relation to a sinful humanity. Jonah quotes God’s reputation (see Ex. 34:6–7) for agonizing over sending calamity, even to a wicked people such as the Ninevites (cf. Jonah 3:9–10).

Jonah has had enough of Yahweh’s grace, compassion, slowness to anger, love, and relenting toward the wicked. He wants no part of this dangerous game. He therefore says, “Now, O LORD, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live” (4:3). Jonah is distraught. He had been the agent of Yahweh’s forgiveness to the enemy of his own people. Rather than seeing their just destruction, he has seen their repentance. Would anyone in Israel understand what he had done? Dying was better than living, if the enemy lived.

Jonah has believed this from the beginning (see 1:12). He repeats the refrain later (4:8–9), that he would rather die than be a party to this compassion. Typical of biblical relations with God, the prophet does not hesitate to express his deepest reservations and disagreement. He is confident enough in Yahweh’s mercy to him that he is ready to die in it. He cannot live, however, with the social reality of the forgiven Ninevites living in that mercy. These simultaneous realities (his confidence in and his objection to God’s mercy) present us with the complexity of faith in a Lord who cannot be tamed and whose mercy and forgiveness cannot be controlled. All who attempt to limit God’s gracious action share Jonah’s protest: Let me die now, your grace is too abundant. I want only the grace that has come to me.4

But Yahweh replies, “Have you any right to be angry?” (Jonah 4:4). This question is the most important in the book of Jonah. Yahweh wants to know if Jonah’s anger results in any good.5 “Any right” here means “Is it causing good [ṭob] that you burn with anger?” This is a moral question more than a legal one. Jonah does not answer this question but simply walks away from the conversation. God is seeking to engage him in his distress, but Jonah is not ready to talk. (He does answer that question when it is asked again in 4:9.) Cain was asked a similar question (Gen. 4:6) about his anger. He did not answer, but instead went out and killed his brother, Abel. Jonah is at a similar point of moral decision in relation to God.

In Jonah 4:5 the reader learns that up to this point Jonah is still in Nineveh. His prayer to Yahweh and Yahweh’s response (4:2–4) have been spoken in the city. This may imply that the Ninevites hear Jonah’s prayer, listening in on the classic confession of faith concerning Yahweh’s reputation in Judah. “O LORD, is this not what I said when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity” (4:2). Jonah’s words in their hearing would have been a further prophecy to the Ninevites in their understanding of Yahweh. They would have learned that their repentance was accepted. Jonah’s prayer is the best news a prophet could deliver (compare this with Isa. 40:1–2).

Thus, “Jonah went out and sat down at a place east of the city. There he made himself a shelter, sat in its shade and waited to see what would happen to the city” (Jonah 4:5). Jonah hopes that God will still destroy the city, in spite of the Ninevites’ repentance. He goes to a hill east of the city to wait out the “forty days” (3:4). He waits to see whether the Ninevites’ repentance and God’s mercy will hold sway. God does not relieve him of his struggle of faith by taking his life as requested (4:3). In the midst of his protest, he leaves both his life and Nineveh in God’s hand.

Jonah makes himself a shelter (sukkah). This shelter was reminiscent of shelters built in the desert by the Hebrew people as they wandered for forty years. God commanded that these shelters be built every year as a remembrance (the Feast of Booths, Tabernacles, Ingathering, or sukkoth) of God’s provision for his people during those years of wandering (Lev. 23:39–43; see Ex. 23:16; 34:22; Deut. 16:13–15). In Zechariah 14:16 the Feast of Booths is to be the celebration for the ingathering of all nations to Jerusalem to worship God.

Thus, the presence of an Israelite prophet sitting in a temporary shelter (sukkah) evokes themes of the past. It also evokes the theme of Zechariah, begun here in the book of Jonah, that Yahweh is concerned about extending the blessing of his presence to all the cultures of the world and to the whole creation. Jonah waits to see the result of this attempt by Yahweh to extend that blessing to Israel’s near neighbor, Nineveh.

Vine, Worm, and Wind (4:6–8)

Bridging Contexts

THE CENTER OF the debate in Jonah 4 pits Jonah’s perspective on strict justice against God’s compassion for even the most heinous sinners. Jonah’s last substantive statement in this chapter summarizes his perspective: “That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity” (4:2b).

Commonsense logic prevails in Jonah’s perspective. The wicked should pay for their crimes, not be forgiven. Jonah’s issue with God is an enduring issue. The Assyrians deserved punishment for their war crimes. This logic was widely shared then and is still commonplace among those who have suffered the sort of terror that Israel suffered at the hands of the Ninevites. When agents of terror apologize or even repent of their wrongdoing, victims and witnesses are not usually impressed. God does not suggest that justice should not or will not eventually be done. He simply argues that he would rather forgive and take the risks of letting evil persist in the world. This is a difficult dilemma for all people of faith.

The parallel themes in chapters 2 and 4 help us understand the enduring problem of trusting/not trusting God for the future. God sends the fish (in ch. 2) and the vine (ch. 4) to rescue/comfort Jonah, and he is grateful in both cases. God’s forgiveness saves Nineveh from destruction, but Jonah thinks of Nineveh’s rescue as a threat, more like the worm and the wind that oppress him. He gives thanks for his own rescue but is angry over Nineveh’s deliverance. He does not want to rely on God for the future, in spite of the evidence that God’s grace is wide enough to continue to care for him and the Ninevites.

The missing response is Jonah’s thanks for Nineveh’s repentance. He could have been thankful that Yahweh let him participate in this work of salvation. As with the fish, he could have been grateful that he was “engulfed” and overwhelmed by Nineveh’s unusual response. He would then have given thanks that he could be included in the surprising grace of the enemy’s reconciliation to God. A true parallel between the chapters would include Jonah’s recognition of God’s grace in the midst of trouble (the belly of the fish and Nineveh’s continuance as a world power). He cannot give that witness, but his failure invites us to consider whether we can.

A witness for God. The anchor of faith expressed in 4:2 is an enduring witness to Jonah’s God. Seven places in the Old Testament use the creed: “You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love.” These attributes of Yahweh’s character are used together in a variety of circumstances to build up the believer. Consider the following witnesses to what has been called an Old Testament confession of faith or creed concerning God.11

(1) The first use of this revelation of God is Yahweh’s self-description to Moses after he forgave the people for the worship of the golden calf. They have been redeemed by God’s decision to declare his unchanging reputation before them and the world:

And [the LORD] passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, “The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished.” (Ex. 34:6–7a)

(2) The prophet Joel warns of the coming judgment but reminds the people that it is not too late to repent, because of God’s reputation. “Rend your heart and not your garments. Return to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, and he relents from sending calamity” (Joel 2:13).

(3) David expresses his joy at Yahweh’s forgiveness of his sin, declaring that “as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us” (Ps. 103:12). He knows this because of God’s historic reputation: “The LORD is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love” (Ps. 103:8).

(4) Likewise, in Psalm 145 David declares pure praise to the Creator and Redeemer for his works and salvation. After introducing this theme, he begins his description of Yahweh’s great gifts with this creed: “The LORD is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love” (Ps. 145:8).

(5) After the people returned from exile in Babylon and rebuilt the wall of Jerusalem, they gathered to rededicate themselves in confession to live faithfully before God. Ezra the priest reminded them of the many ways their forbears had rebelled and suffered the severe consequences of sin, yet God had not abandoned them. He reminded them of the more than thousand-year history of Yahweh’s faithfulness to them, even in judgment. Their confidence that God would receive their repentance and renew his covenant that day was based on the creed: “But you are a forgiving God, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love. Therefore you did not desert them” (Neh. 9:17b).

(6) The psalmist too knew that though the arrogant were attacking him for his failings, Yahweh would still receive him. “But you, O Lord, are a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness” (Ps. 86:15).

(7) Finally, Jonah recites this reputation to God as the primary reason for his discontent. He is not faithless in doing so. Rather, he invites the reader to consider the radical implications of such a God. It means that evil will endure longer on the earth, for God is slow to anger. It means that God’s grace, love, and compassion will be extended to the rebellious, wayward, and even the violent in the world.

God does not respond to Jonah by declaring that the wicked will meet their just reward (as they will). Rather, he affirms his reputation by assuring Jonah of his care for the ignorant wicked, even for the cattle! Jonah’s complaint helps us to consider the full burden of believing and serving such a God. It means that the world will be a place where the potential for great evil will remain, precisely because God hopes for the salvation of the wicked. This is a complex faith that challenges even the true prophet of God, and it continues to challenge believers to trust God more completely for the future.12

A timeless attitude: “I am angry enough to die.” “Now, O LORD, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live” (Jonah 4:3). Jonah looks to death three times as a way out of his disagreement with Yahweh. He never attempts to take his own life, but he does ask the sailors (1:12) and Yahweh (twice) to take it (4:3, 9). Why does Jonah despair so completely? Even with God as his counselor, his attitude toward life seems resolutely despondent.

Jonah has good reasons for this attitude. The order of the world as he knows it is coming apart. All the foundational convictions of his world view are being challenged. Fundamentally, his theology about God is crumbling through his experience and conversation with God. His depressive attitude settles like sediment. He does not want to let go of his formulations about the character of God. If even a true prophet of God lived with illusions about who God is, how much more cautious might we be in our formulations about how God should act. Jonah’s disposition is based on at least six related perspectives.

1. God should not be the kind of God who forgives violently evil people, even if they repent. Evil should be punished, not forgiven.

2. Justice, to be just, requires that people suffer the full consequences of their actions, whether they are repentant or not. Nineveh has to be destroyed in order for justice to prevail.

3. Nineveh has been too evil to effect a true repentance and receive forgiveness. Nineveh cannot be truly repentant. Even if they could be, forgiveness cannot effectively begin a new life for them.

4. People need to be able to trust in a consistent, God-given, cosmic order. Trust in an ultimate structure of the moral universe is necessary for faith in God and ethical living.

5. Living faithfully loses its positive value if evil people are forgiven through simple repentance. Struggling daily to obey God’s law looks foolish when forgiveness is given freely.

6. The triumph of evil living is flaunted if the evil escape judgment in the last days (they were given forty days) through repentance. This flaunting is too much for the victims of evil actions and those who are weary of those who are evil escaping punishment.

Jonah’s perspectives on God’s actions have some merit. God was “slow to anger” with him and engaged his concerns from God’s perspective. God did not judge Jonah’s attitude harshly but worked toward maintaining the relationship. He attempted to help him out of his theology and into God’s dilemma: God loves all his creation, even what has become wicked.

Is Jonah a foolish prophet or in serious distress? Scholars have argued a wide range of interpretations of Jonah the prophet along this spectrum:

Anti-prophet: Some argue that Jonah represents the end of prophecy in Israel. Prophecy did, of course, come to an end in the fifth century B.C. This interpretation sees Jonah’s struggle to speak a word as a representing the cessation of the direct speech of God to Israel and her neighbors.

Foolish prophet: Jonah is sometimes held up to ridicule as a foolish prophet. The reader looks at his actions from above and sees the irony of his running from the God of the sea, on the sea. He thanks God from within the slime of a fish’s belly. He complains about grace. Finally he is absurd in wanting to die over a withered plant, while oddly not caring about the 120,000 lives in Nineveh. He seems foolish and pathetic.

Comic figure: Jonah can make us laugh. He is comic in the classical Greek fifth century B.C. sense.13 Jonah seems comic. He is more than funny. By his dramatic responses he entertains but also invites the reader to a deeper level of understanding. This designation may not be helpful to those living in an entertainment-oriented society. Comedy in Western societies generally has deteriorated into amusement only. If “Jonah, the comedy” is only amusing, the joke is unfortunately on the uninformed reader, not on Jonah.

True prophet: Jonah acts the way he does for reasons that are given, but they are not expanded in the text. His actions are related to the social and political circumstances of his historical setting. He seems like an anti-prophet, yet he stands firmly in the prophetic tradition (protest, conversation with God, struggles with the content of the revelation). He seems foolish because he is caught in a life-and-death struggle, is a witness to atrocities, and is deeply convicted of his religious views on justice. When the reader does not share these kinds of experiences, Jonah and his perspective can be incomprehensible; he seems comic, but only in the classical sense of the satirical, political, and social comic who must grapple with how to respond to the violently wicked. Jonah is a true prophet. He is involved in a true struggle, a struggle we would rather not admit, since it is our unresolved struggle as well. It is a struggle to participate in the dialogue, to own up to the fact that there is a true struggle in God and in us.

Yahweh does make some progress with Jonah by refocusing his emotions. At the beginning of Jonah 4, Jonah is angry that someone (Ninevites) didn’t die. At the end he is angry that something (the vine) did die. This tiny window is the opening that Yahweh creates in Jonah’s emotions to help him understand the Creator’s perspective.

God has often used nonhuman agents to “provide” a way of understanding for people of the Bible. God communicated his intent by or through various birds, fish, and mammals. Balaam’s donkey spoke to him (Num. 22:22–33). In the Elijah/Elisha narratives, ravens (1 Kings 17:4–6), lions (1 Kings 20:35–36), and two bears (2 Kings 2:23–25) were all used to reveal God’s will. A dove landed on Jesus and remained there after his baptism by John (Matt. 3:16; Mark 1:10; Luke 3:22; John 1:32). A storm did Jesus’ bidding to teach the disciples on the Sea of Galilee (Matt. 8:26–27; Mark 4:39–41). A fish carried a coin for Jesus’ and Peter’s Roman tax (Matt. 17:25–27). Jonah’s vine, worm, and “scorching east wind” likewise teach. Each of these incidents is in the tradition of God’s use of the nonhuman creation to accomplish or to teach his intent in the world.14

People who cannot tell their right hand from their left. The key to Jonah’s special contribution to the canon is found in God’s question about the people of Nineveh: “But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?” (Jonah 4:11).

Commentators do not agree on the object of God’s concern. Who are the people “who cannot tell their right from their left”? Some have suggested that this means young children who have literally not yet learned the difference between their two hands (as in Deut. 1:39).15 Others suggest that the figure of speech means that the Ninevites lack a developed ethical discernment, or they lack knowledge of God’s law and therefore are not responsible for their actions; they are “virtual children.”16 Certainly the Ninevites are helpless in their ignorance (cf. the Israelites in Amos 7:2, 5).17 But in Jonah they are also rational people, who are responsible for their actions and are quick to repent. We miss the point of God’s question if we limit the expression “right hand from their left” to helplessness. The expression means all of the Ninevites who are ignorant, but still responsible.

God’s point is that they are capable and responsible, but are ignorant in their culture of sin. This is why repentance, not education, is necessary. They don’t know their right from their left because they have a developed and rational culture of violence. Commentators forget that Hitler’s Germany was the product of the great philosophical traditions of the West. It was rational and “responsible”—and entirely ignorant of the reality of God at the same time. The expression “right from left” does not mean “innocent,” “children,” or “ignorant” of rational and moral reasoning. It means “ignorant of God in their culture of violence.” Their crisis, in God’s eyes, is that they are both ignorant and responsible.

If Jonah is taken seriously as a prophet of God, then his opinion and perspective must be taken seriously.18 Jonah’s anger is about embarking on the mission to the Ninevites at all, even to warn them about destruction. Warning gives them the opportunity to enter into a protective relationship with God, which Jonah believes they cannot possibly keep. He fears they will remain a threat. A lasting repentance is rarely possible when a culture is permeated by violent structures. A radical transformation of the culture is necessary. Jonah knows it can’t last.

Moreover, when the scribes included this book in the scroll of the twelve minor prophets, they knew it hadn’t lasted. The canonical original meaning assumes that we know that. If we know that their repentance did not hold, then Jonah’s prophetic dialogue with Yahweh must be taken seriously. God wants to know whether we understand that the risks of reaching the rebellious are worth the possibility of transforming a culture and an enemy into friends of God.

Contemporary Significance

APPLICATIONS. We can make many significant applications of Jonah 4. (1) God’s love for the whole creation is placed in front of the reader in the final question of the book (“Should I not be concerned…?”). A city distant from Israel, filled with ignorant people (and all its cattle), is placed before us as a primary object of God’s concern and love. The answer to God’s question is left open for us, but the answer God seeks from Jonah and from us is clearly, “Yes.” God’s intention is for all to know his love, insider and outsider alike. We are called to affirm his intention and to participate in the communication of his concern and love.19

(2) Another significant application is our common human experience of protection and exposure in relation to God.20 So many of our actions to protect or shield ourselves from life are vain attempts to ward off catastrophe or trouble. Only God can save. Jonah seeks safety in the belly of a ship but finds it only in God’s fish. He seeks protection by building a shelter, but God’s plant gives him true shade. When the plant is killed, he will finally talk with God about his anger and listens to God’s concern for the protection and salvation of all creation.

Seeking protection apart from God leads to false security because life is fragile and unpredictable. Jonah constantly searches for shelter, and each shelter (ship, fish, hut, plant) fails him in the end, even when provided by God.21 Jonah even seeks shelter inside his narrow worldview and narrow theology, both of which God deconstructs for him. We all rightly seek security and salvation in life and protection from death. Only when we fully rely on the God of Scripture and do not substitute his provisions (or our own provision) for the source of our security will we integrate this message of Jonah in our lives. Only then will we be able to live securely between the false protection of “very happy” (4:6) and “angry enough to die” (4:9).

(3) Jonah 4 also serves as a primer on human anger.22 Jonah becomes angry (4:1), God is “slow” to anger (4:2), and God asks twice whether it is good for Jonah to be angry (cf. comments on translating “good” instead of “Is it right” at 4:4). God asks questions about anger, but he does not condemn it. He provides a model for counseling angry people and for dealing with personal issues of anger. God invites a conversation about the value of anger. Jonah knows that his anger leads to death, but he cannot let it go (see comments on the “psychophysical language” of the Hebrew “burning of the nostrils”).23

God does not insist that Jonah let his anger go; he simply raises the question. Then he offers the opportunity to work through the issues in a conversation about the plant, worm, and vine. He leads him to see his capacity for compassion (for the plant) as an avenue beyond his anger. This gives Jonah the option of moving beyond his self-absorption and self-justification by inviting him on a journey of faith in God. Even God turns from destroying Nineveh to have compassion on them (3:9–10).24 The discussion is not resolved, but it remains open for Jonah and for the reader to participate in answering the final question. God’s love for the whole creation is a better context for understanding our own salvation as well.

(4) Jonah’s “concern” is the opening God takes to teach about God’s own motivations (cf. references to God’s being “concerned” in 4:10 and 11). His invitation is for us to understand and act in accord with his way in the world. “Concern” means “to take action with tears flowing down the cheeks” (see comments on 4:10–11). This kind of “concern” is “suffering action.”

Here God takes upon himself the evil of Nineveh. He bears the weight of its violence, the pain of a thousand plundered cities, including Israel’s. God chooses to suffer in place of Nineveh. His tears flow instead of theirs. Someday he may even choose to die.25

Nowhere in the Old Testament is God’s struggle with concern or pity for the repentant wicked more transparent. But note how Hosea 11:5–9 also dramatically demonstrates Yahweh’s struggle with punishment and forgiveness of his wayward people. The same theme is echoed in Jesus’ words over Jerusalem in Matthew 23:37–39 (cf. Luke 13:34–35):

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing. Look, your house is left to you desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”

Jesus preached repentance from sin and returning to God during his ministry and struggled when people would not believe (Matt. 4:17; 11:20). His cry to Jerusalem does not end in despair but declares that they will say, “Blessed is he.…” Peter and Paul also carried a message of repentance and faith to the Jews and the Gentiles with mixed success (Acts 2:38; 20; 21). The significance of Jonah 4 is how it elucidates, in a real historical context, our struggle with the wicked who repent. The wicked who repent are often not converted for long. God’s mercy to them seems extravagant and ultimately wasted. God works with Jonah (and us) to help us understand his way in the world and the extent of his love for the whole creation.

Human communities, including most world religious communities, are governed by means of a consistent application of well-defined rules of obligation and responsibility and consequential rewards and punishments. Biblical writers acknowledge the order and “grain of the universe” and its ordering by a just Judge of all the earth.26 Jonah the prophet shares this tradition. His word is to be taken seriously as part and parcel of the divine revelation of the book. His opinions about justice echo a long and strong biblical tradition (cf. Ex. 21:23–25; Lev. 24:17–21; Ps. 92:6–9).

Jonah’s view of strict justice is not nullified by the book. It is upheld, particularly when we consider that the prophet was right. Nineveh was destroyed. The Ninevites’ repentance did not hold very long. By the time the book made it into its final form (fifth century B.C.) and into the final biblical canon (A.D. 90), Nineveh was a distant memory (destroyed early in the seventh century B.C.).

God’s argument for a more compassionate justice, based in a love for his wayward and ignorant creation (Jonah 4:11), is not a refutation of the creational order of reward and punishment but an additional revelation concerning God’s ways in the world. God does not abandon his word of judgment on the wicked or his word of blessing for the obedient. He simply demonstrates that the blessing for the obedient is founded on his unrelenting love. The obedient are already recipients of the grace of his law and the blessings and power that accompany keeping and guarding that law in life. That same grace is demonstrated in a new and outrageous way toward the ignorant and violent rebels of Nineveh.

The extension of grace to the rebellious is not a repudiation of cosmic justice but the freedom of God to deliver unpredictably the unlikely creature. This radical grace is the hope of all cultures that turn in arrogance from the Creator. It is also the hope of the faithful law-keeper who is ignorant that God’s grace and mercy undergird every law’s intent, every righteous action, every inherited tradition, and every life that is open to its Creator. The grace is the same though its shape is different.

God’s openness to all who repent is seen in the Jewish tradition of the Afternoon Service on the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur). After the reading of the book of Jonah, the service supplies a response to Yahweh’s final question (“Should I not pity Nineveh”), using the words of the prophet Micah in Micah 7:18–20:27

Who is a God like you,

who pardons sin and forgives the transgression

of the remnant of his inheritance?

You do not stay angry forever

but delight to show mercy.

You will again have compassion on us;

you will tread our sins underfoot

and hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea.

You will be true to Jacob,

and show mercy to Abraham,

as you pledged on oath to our fathers

in days long ago.

With these words the congregation acknowledges that they, Jonah, and the Ninevites are all in the same basic relationship to Yahweh. All must accept Yahweh’s forgiveness and compassion, recognizing that they also need it. All should turn and praise God for the lightening of iniquity’s heavy burden of guilt.

Endings. In Christian readings, the book of Jonah ends with an open question (Jonah 4:11). The rhetorical force of such an ending is comparable to the original ending of the gospel Mark: “They said nothing to anyone because they were afraid” (Mark 16:8). In each case the reader is confronted with the possibility that this may be the end. But the open endings hook the reader with their disequilibrium. The Gospel does not end with “no one” hearing. Two millennia later we have heard.28 As we know from the other Gospels, someone told somebody! Mark’s ending challenges us with the fact that for the resurrection of Jesus to transform the world, the news must be spoken. We cannot be silent. So with Jonah, the open question is not the end of the story. We are challenged to consider that God’s concern must also be our concern.

If the theme in Jonah 1 is down (1:3, 5), and for chapter 3 is upside down (3:4), the theme in chapter 4 is inside out. Jonah, God’s chosen prophet, is at odds with Yahweh, while the evil Ninevites have received Yahweh’s approval for their repentance. From Jonah’s perspective, grace is being turned inside out. The alternative to his anger is for him to be turned inside out. His anger echoes Cain’s anger with Abel over his favor with Yahweh. Genesis 4 and Jonah 4 have a similar vocabulary. In each text God asks Cain/Jonah a question about their anger (ḥarah; Gen. 4:6–7; Jonah 4:4). God asks them to consider “right” (ṭob) from God’s perspective (Gen. 4:7; Jonah 4:4). In each case “he went out … and lived/sat … east” (Gen. 4:16; Jonah 4:5).

These similarities invite a comparison of themes. Cain did not like Yahweh’s decision to favor his brother. God asked Cain the question, “Why are you angry?… If you do what is right, will you not be accepted?” (Gen. 4:6–7). Cain, like Jonah, was so angry he wanted to see the favored one(s) die (Gen. 4:8). Since Jonah cannot annihilate the Ninevites himself, he wants death for himself, and says so three times (Jonah 4:3, 8, 9). At stake in both cases is the deep-seated human desire to limit and control God’s favor for one’s own political or economic advantage. Jonah mirrors Cain’s murder in another twisted form, that is, in the desire for his own death.

Commonsense justice. The commonsense view of (strict) justice is more deeply ingrained in us than we care to admit. Jesus makes it the subject of his parable on the workers in the field and their compensation (Matt. 20:1–16). “No fair” is a typical response of children to benefits given to another at an adult’s discretion. More weightily, many reject God or the idea of a beneficent God precisely because he allows evil people to work their abuses and crimes on humanity without just recompense or punishment. The typical statement is, “I cannot believe in a God who would allow.…” Common sense tells us that in an ordered and good creation, those guilty of abuse and violence should be brought to strict justice.

Wickedness thrives in the world exactly because the Judge of all the earth does not execute the full weight of the law on them. If the Judge judged justly, only those who lived well, in peace with their neighbors, in honesty in their relationships, and in the fear of Yahweh, would thrive and know salvation. Yet the wicked not only thrive, but God also forgives them when they turn to him. This is a double insult to commonsense justice. Common sense argues that God risks weakening the authority of the law by diminishing the consequences of unjust living and the fear of sin. Second, common sense argues that God’s delay in punishing the wicked weakens the positive incentive for living a good life, since mercy is freely given.

These problems are ancient and are not “solved.” Malachi faced the same issues in his opponents’ hard questions:29

You have wearied the LORD with your words.

“How have we wearied him?” you ask.

By saying, “All who do evil are good in the eyes of the LORD, and he is pleased with them” or “Where is the God of justice?” (Mal. 2:17)

“You have said harsh things against me,” says the LORD.

“Yet you ask, ‘What have we said against you?’

“You have said, ‘It is futile to serve God. What did we gain by carrying out his requirements and going about like mourners before the LORD Almighty? But now we call the arrogant blessed. Certainly the evildoers prosper, and even those who challenge God escape.’” (Mal. 3:13–15; italics added in both quotes)

God’s random reversals, long-suffering (slowness to anger), delay of the final judgment, freedom and the mystery of forgiveness in setting sinners free, and mysterious wedding of mercy and justice elude the lost. The alternative to strict justice that God offers Nineveh (and to which Jonah objects) is not only compassion. It is certainly not weakness. It is the preaching of judgment, followed by repentance (not simply confession), and it results in God’s compassion.

This concept of forgiveness is deemed ridiculous by other religions. A Hindu professor of European history once impartially presented the Reformers’ preaching of salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ in Romans. Then he offered his opinion on the matter of salvation by faith in anything. “It is ridiculous and absurd. This is meaningless. Faith is nothing. Salvation comes by how you live.” Islam carries the same conviction. Repentance is possible, but the final judgment is based on weighing the good in one’s life against the bad. If the good weighs more, one enters paradise.30

These religious views of salvation are extensions of human common sense about the way the world should be and how God should judge. God’s message to Jonah invites him into a new understanding of God in relation to the world. According to “common sense,” God errs on the side of compassion toward those who are furthest from him and his intent for his creation.

Why God allows wickedness. What is the timeless truth of Jonah’s dialogue with Yahweh? It is Yahweh’s answer to the timeless question, “Why does God allow wickedness and violence to persist in the world?” God goes to great lengths and trouble to allow for the unlikely and random possibility of the reversal of the violent through repentance. This truth is not presented simply or abstractly but through Jonah’s great struggle in a real and difficult historical setting. Four observations help to demonstrate the weight and import of this struggle.

(1) The power of violent terror is a real threat. Like modern states that sponsor terrorism, Nineveh reigned by terrorizing vulnerable noncombatants and innocents. Nineveh’s intentional terror campaign included public displays of human body parts, active slave marketing, and a public pride in their torture techniques. The power of violent terror is not an abstract wickedness. The legitimacy of Jonah’s argument with God is that Nineveh’s salvation from destruction (through his preaching) will result in more terrorism in the towns and cities of Israel.

Jonah prefers that Nineveh be destroyed for two reasons: He does not think that they can sustain their repentance (i.e., they will return to their evil ways), and he does not think that such people should be forgiven, even if they do repent. Jonah has good arguments that are grounded in biblical tradition and sustained by the actual historical results. It is God’s previous policy to protect the innocent, especially his chosen, and to destroy the oppressor (the whole of the pentateuchal narrative and early prophets maintain this tradition).

Jonah is also correct in his fear that Nineveh’s repentance will not hold. Nahum’s oracle of the fall of Nineveh follows close on the heels of Jonah’s protest. Nineveh returns, at least within one generation, to its culture of violent terror. That the book of Jonah was kept in the canon is a testimony to the integrity and cogency of his argument as a prophet in dialogue with God. Jonah is correct: If God allows the Ninevites to survive, they will terrorize the earth again. Jonah does not want to participate in this kind of certain future. His only recourse is to protest against God’s course of action by running. His journey on the sea is a prophetic protest against what is, from a human perspective, God’s deeply flawed policy. God allows violent cultures to persist in the world. Jonah does not think this is just.

(2) God’s side of the dialogue is not about what is just. God does not deny that the Ninevites are violent and deserve destruction. He sends Jonah to announce their judgment and doom. Strict justice remains the standard even when it is delayed or unevenly applied in time. The unrepentant wrong will receive their due consequences and wages. Later (612 B.C.) God does send Babylon to destroy Nineveh for their return to grievous violence against his people.

God does not argue with Jonah about redefining the terms of human justice. God’s argument in the case of Nineveh as well as in the world is that he allows for the seemingly random possibility of human reversal through repentance. Repentance is the open door for the reversal of lives of wicked and ignorant violence. God cites his love for his creation (Jonah 4:11) as his primary warrant for this seemingly random and unlikely possibility.

(3) We are not God, and the text is not about the ethics of human justice. Forceful human action is never an option in Jonah and is never discussed. God is the subject of the timeless truth. Without a doubt, Israel would have destroyed Nineveh to protect its boundaries with force (as it did in the days of David and Solomon). The question concerns whether God should execute strict justice or risk the possibility of the violent repenting. In either case, God has numbered the days of Nineveh’s violence. If they do not repent, they will die a violent death. If they do repent, it will be the “death” of their culture of violence. In either case they are “overturned.” The point is that God allows for either case. Peter echoes this truth when he writes, “The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9).

(4) We are God’s emissaries of reconciliation. God insists that his prophet participate in the either-case scenario. The two cases are not collapsed into one case of forgiving without repentance. The participatory risk is to declare the possibility of forgiveness to those who do not deserve it and will, in the short or the long run, abuse it (Assyrian history does not record their encounter with Jonah or any repentance). In the midst of this call to participate in the unlikely random risk of forgiving, Jonah is allowed to voice his objections and even to run from his obligation. The timeless grace of the matter is that God brings him to participate in the wonder of God’s ways in the world, even when Jonah is not sure it is a good idea.

Uriel Simon cites the following midrash that demonstrates “the measured and rationed justice inscribed in the Torah, the prophetic books, Psalms, and Proverbs on the one hand, and divine mercy, which reveals the goodness and righteousness of the living God, on the other:31

They asked the Torah: “How is the sinner to be punished?” It replied, “Let him bring a sacrifice and he will be pardoned.”

They asked the prophecy: “How is the sinner to be punished?” It replied, “The person who sins … he shall die” (Ezek. 18:4).

They asked the David: “How is the sinner to be punished?” He replied, “May sinners disappear from the earth and the wicked be no more” (Ps. 104:35).

They asked Wisdom: “How is the sinner to be punished?” It replied, “Misfortune pursues sinners” (Prov. 13:21).

They asked the Holy One Blessed be He: “How is the sinner to be punished?” He replied, “Let him do repentance, and I will accept it, as it is written: ‘Good and upright is the LORD [therefore He shows sinners the way]’” (Ps. 25:8).

Where is the hope for those living in cultures of terror? It is not in sacrifice, or in death, or in giving up, or in misfortune. It is, according to the God of Israel, in repentance and following the way of Yahweh. Everyone will be overthrown, one way or the other.

God’s perspective is pity on all the ignorant (Ninevites and Jonah). Jonah is included in the ignorant, for God must instruct him with the question, “Should not I pity 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?” Let us pray to be overthrown according to the witness of the prophet Jeremiah:

They will be like a well-watered garden,

and they will sorrow no more.

Then maidens will dance and be glad,

young men and old as well.

I will turn [hapak] their mourning into gladness;

I will give them comfort and joy instead of sorrow. (Jer. 31:12b–13)

May his prophecy be fulfilled in our day as we pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” We know that the prophecy and his kingdom will come with or without our prayer. We pray, however, that this prophecy will come to us and overthrow us and our presumptions, that the kingdom might be his in our midst.

Overthrow us, O God, this day. We are like Saul in our leadership; turn us into new people with a heart for your peace. We are like the Assyrians, boastful in power; turn us to repentance of our reliance on terror. And Lord, we are like Jonah, hesitant to extend your deliverance to our enemies; speak to us as we sit on the hillside in safety, that we might learn from you for all our decisions. We are like the hardened rock; turn us into streams of living water. Overthrow us for the sake of your creation and for the sake of your gospel in the world. Amen.

Original Meaning

Vine, Worm, and Wind (4:6–8)

GOD SEEKS ANOTHER entrance into the conversation with Jonah, this time through the “school” of creation. Yahweh provides an object lesson in order to demonstrate his compassion. Jonah has made a shelter for himself (4:5), but it is apparently not good enough to provide shade from the sun. God appoints “a vine” to shade Jonah, “a worm” to destroy the shade, and “a scorching east wind” to persuade Jonah to speak again. It works. In these three verses Jonah goes from his previous anger to happiness and back to anger. By then he is ready to listen to God again.

“The LORD God” (yahweh ʾelohim) provides the shade Jonah needs. Note how at each of the crucial junctures in the book of Jonah, the whole title “LORD God” is used.6

1:9: He answered, “I am a Hebrew and I worship the LORD, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the land.”

2:1: From inside the fish Jonah prayed to the LORD his God.

2:6: “To the roots of the mountains I sank down; the earth beneath barred me in forever. But you brought my life up from the pit, O LORD my God.”

4:6: Then the LORD God provided a vine and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort, and Jonah was very happy about the vine.

When “the LORD God” provides a vine to grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head and so ease his discomfort, Jonah is happy (4:6). God ordains the nonhuman creation to call Jonah back into conversation and understanding. Ordinary things (a fish, a vine, a plant, a worm, a sultry wind) are assigned to teach Jonah. The fish protected Jonah from the water. The plant protected him from the sun. The fish returned him to his calling, on dry land. The worm dried or withered the plant, and the scorching wind brought Jonah back into conversation with God. All the nonhuman agents provided or appointed by God bring Jonah back to his calling.

Jonah’s head was wrapped in weeds (2:5), shaded (4:6), and scorched by the sun (4:8). The fish was Jonah’s first deliverance, and the vine was his second deliverance. The fish delivered physical safety and the vine physical ease. The vine also eased Jonah out of his evil temper and into a new hearing of God’s perspective on the recent events in Nineveh. The expression “to ease his discomfort” is (lit.) “to deliver him from his calamity [raʿah].” The Hebrew text invites a three-way comparison between Jonah’s first calamity in the storm (and deliverance), Nineveh’s pending calamity (and deliverance), and Jonah’s trouble with the sun.

1:7: Then the sailors said to each other, “Come, let us cast lots to find out who is responsible for this calamity [raʿah]. They cast lots and the lot fell on Jonah.

3:10b: He had compassion and did not bring upon them the destruction [raʿah] he had threatened.

4:6: Then the LORD God provided a vine and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort [raʿah], and Jonah was very happy about the vine.

Jonah was very happy about his first deliverance from “calamity” in the sea (2:9). He was also very happy about his deliverance from the “discomfort” (4:6) of the sun. He was not at all happy, however, about the Ninevites’ deliverance from their “destruction” (4:1–3). Yahweh uses this contrast in his final question to Jonah (see 4:11).

A grub that God also “provides” kills the shade-giving vine that has made Jonah so joyful. The “withered” (dried up) vine is an echo (for Jonah’s Hebrew audience) of the “dry land” of Jonah’s early confession of faith (1:9: “I worship the LORD … who made the sea and the land.”). It also echoes the “dry land” toward which the sailors desperately rowed (see comments on “dry land” at 1:13) and onto which Jonah was vomited (2:10). The “withering” signals God’s action toward Jonah’s deliverance, just as the dry land was previously a place of deliverance.

“When the sun rose, God provided a scorching east wind, and the sun blazed on Jonah’s head so that he grew faint” (4:8a). The wind, also provided by God, “blazes” hot (like Jonah’s previous anger in 4:1, 4, 9) on Jonah’s head (cf. 4:6) until he has a sunstroke. He wants to die (lit., “he asked his life to die,” 4:8b). If Yahweh will not take his life, he hopes his life will just fail. This comment, to no one in particular, leads into the second round of the same conversation between Jonah and Yahweh in chapter 4. Jonah repeats the petulant comment that ended his previous conversation with the LORD (see italics):

4:3: “Now, O LORD, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.”

4:4: But the LORD replied, “Have you any right to be angry?”

4:8b: He wanted to die, and said, “It would be better for me to die than to live.”

4:9: But God said to Jonah, “Do you have a right to be angry about the vine?” “I do,” he said. “I am angry enough to die.”

Jonah has been presented with the “school of creation” and has not learned anything. Yahweh now proceeds to explain things to him (4:9–11). This time Jonah does not walk away but responds to Yahweh.

Yahweh Reasons with Jonah concerning Anger (4:9–11)