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From: Jonah 4:1-11

Jonah’s sense of grievance

[1] But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. [2] And he prayed to
the Lord and said, “I pray thee, Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my
country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that thou art a
gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and
repentest of evil. [3] Therefore now, O Lord, take my life from me, I beseech thee,
for it is better for me to die than to live.” [4] And the Lord said, “Do you do well
to be angry?” [5] Then Jonah went out of the city and sat to the east of the city,
and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, till he should
see what would become of the city.

[6] And the Lord God appointed a plan, and made it come up over Jonah, that it
might be a shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort. So Jonah was
exceedingly glad because of the plant. [7] But when dawn came up the next day,
God appointed a worm which attacked the plant, so that it withered. [8] When
the sun rose, God appointed a sultry east wind, and the sun beat upon the head
of Jonah so that he was faint; and he asked that he might die, and said, “It is
better for me to die than to live.”

God corrects Jonah and justifies his taking pity on Nineveh

[9] But God said to Jonah, “Do you do well to be angry for the plant?” And he
said, “I do well to be angry, angry enough to die.” [10] And the Lord said, “You
pity the plant, for which you did not labour, nor did you make it grow, which came
into being in a night, and perished in a night. [11] And should not I pity Nineveh,
that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand per-
sons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?”

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Commentary:

4:1-11. The Ninevites repent, and God refrains from pursuing his course of ac-
tion. The book could end here, if its message were simply that God’s salvation
extends to the Gentiles as well. However, the dialogue that now takes place be-
tween Jonah and the Lord gives an unexpected twist to the story and enriches it
from the doctrinal point of view: it shows the full extent of God’s mercy; it tells
us why some prophetical oracles did not come true, even though they were the
utterances of genuine prophets; and it explains, in a definitive way, the reasons
behind God’s actions.

As in the rest of the book, the message lies in the characters themselves, parti-
cularly Jonah. He preached in Nineveh, but all the indications are that he did not
expect to have any effect. Indeed, even though he has seen that God has deci-
ded to forgive Nineveh, deep down he may feel that that will not last: the Nine-
vites will go back to their old ways, or God has simply delayed punishing them.
So, he takes up a position outside the city “to see what would become of (it)”
(v. 5). At first sight, Jonah’s anger (vv. 1-4, 8-9) seems almost grotesque; but
there is justification for it. To distinguish true from false prophecy, Deuteronomy
gave the following criterion: “when a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if
the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word which the Lord has
not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously, you need not be afraid
of him” (Deut 18:22). Therefore, as Jonah sees things, the Lord’s decision to pu-
nish Nineveh and then his reversal of it amounted to saying that Jonah was not
a true prophet.

The question raised here is a complex one and it deserves more than a superfi-
cial reply; hence the text’s insistence on the mercy of the Lord. When Jonah
earlier fled from God, even though he knew him to be the Lord, who created the
sea and the dry land (cf. 1:9), he knew that clemency and compassion were
essential traits of the Lord (cf. Ex 34:6-7); and he knows the same now (v. 4),
but he is unwilling to experience it in real life. Therefore, God uses this “castor-
oil plant” to give him a lesson about his mercy – a practical as well as a theore-
tical lesson. The plant is, in the first place, an additional proof of god’s mercy: it
makes Jonah comfortable and soothes his anger (v. 6). But then the episode of
the plant becomes a kind of parable. If Jonah pities the plant which relieved his
discomfort (v. 10), why should God not take pity on those Ninevites? One could
think (as Jonah did) that enough was enough: a show of penance cannot dis-
guise the fact that Nineveh has always been a wicked city (cf. 1:2). And it is at
this point that the Lord gives further justification for his desire to forgive. The fact
of the matter is that the Ninevites did evil because they knew no better (they did
not know their right hand from their left: cf. Eccles 10:2) and there are more than
120,000 of them (literally, twelve times ten thousand), that is, a symbolic num-
ber suggesting that the Ninevites are more like the chosen people than Jonah
might think.

In this connexion, apropos the number of Ninevites, St John Chrysostom com-
ments: “This great number is mentioned for a particular reason: every prayer,
when it is offered in the company of many voices, has enormous power” (”De
incomprehensible Dei natura”, 3).

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Source: “The Navarre Bible: Text and Commentaries”. Biblical text from the
Revised Standard Version and New Vulgate. Commentaries by members of
the Faculty of Theology, University of Navarre, Spain.

Published by Four Courts Press, Kill Lane, Blackrock, Co. Dublin, Ireland, and
by Scepter Publishers in the United States.