This modern commentary on the book of Jonah was given as a sermon for the Day of Atonement by Ernst Simon a year ago to the congregation of Emeth V’Emunah in Jerusalem. The translation from the German is by Felix Giovanelli.
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Now the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the son of Amittai, saying,
“Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim against it; for their wickedness is come up before me.“
Jonah rose up [all obedience? No] to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord, and went down to Joppa, and found a ship going to Tarshish: so he paid the fare thereof, and went down into it, to go with them unto Tarshish, from the presence of the Lord.
Thus begins the book of Jonah, which we will draw upon when, several hours from now, we shall be reading the customary passage from the prophets at afternoon service, but which we now would like to expound with you. For our common study period we shall avail ourselves of the old exegetical Midrash Jonah as well as of the Biblical text. At the very outset the former puts the question that irresistibly occurs to all: “Why is Jonah in flight?” We shall seek to answer it but not at the very outset. Another question has prior claim, namely: “Whither and how does this man, this Hebrew prophet, flee from the presence of the Lord? What are the stations of his flight?”
The first station is the amorphous element, the sea, in whose bosom the figures of Creation become indistinguishable. The Midrash hints that perhaps Jonah flees straight into the tempest which has been raging for the two days he has been waiting on the coast of Joppa for a ship. A leaky ship, unable to cope with the mountainous waves, noses about and comes back to port. Jonah boards it, mistaking the vouchsafed postponement of its sailing as a sign of divine sanction of his flight. He sets his mind at ease with the thought that in contrast with earth and heaven, which in Holy Writ are closely bound up with God’s Glory (“Heaven echoes forth His glory”; “The Earth is filled with His glory”), the sea furnishes no corresponding ground-text for God’s teaching. He is therefore in a great hurry to get aboard, and as zealously bent on flight as Abraham was to obey the Divine command to bind up Isaac: Abraham himself saddled the ass for the journey, and, analogously, Jonah pays the whole fare in advance or, as the Midrash emphasizes, actually buys the ship outright in order, as it were, to flee God’s earth for a domain of his own.
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The second station of the flight is Tarshish, Spanish Tarsessos, at the other end of the inhabited world. Jonah wants a remote spot where neither he nor his God are known. To be sure, the Lord God rules there also, but his Revelation is without effect so far away; Jonah harbors the hope that his obligations as a prophet will not be binding on him there. Such is the convincing interpretation placed on this point by Professor Yehezkel Kaufmann in his monumental History of Jewish Belief. We might add that Jonah is in flight from the Creation already revealed to one presumably still hidden.
Jonah, however, does not reach the second—and as far as he is concerned, final—station. Such a station would lie on the same plane as coast and sea. But whoever flees God’s presence cannot persevere on the old plane of his own being: falling, he must fall deeper and deeper; the direction of flight is necessarily downward. When the tempest is unleashed Jonah, who readily recognizes it as the consequence of his own acts, cannot endure its sight: “He was gone down into the innermost parts of the ship,” as far down as possible. Instead of being on the dry land of glory, or on the open sea, he is now enclosed in a man-made structure which completely cuts him off from the view of creation. Later on, in the outskirts of redeemed Nineveh, he will prepare himself another structure, in this case a booth to keep out the sun, which God will supplement with an over-hanging gum tree that Jonah may not be scorched by the sun-drenched exhalation of His grace. The ship’s hold, then, is the third station of his flight.
“And he lay, and was fast asleep.” This means that Jonah has completely removed himself from the operations of conscience and mental life. Having renounced the visible and audible world, he also wills to take no mental or moral notice of the cries of the seamen, their anxious striving to lighten the ship and save it by jettisoning its cargo. His sleep is a flight.
There, in the very midst of the fourth station of his flight, a second summons reaches him, beginning exactly as did the first with the exhortation: “Arise!” The first time the Lord’s voice was intended to wake him up to his prophet’s responsibilities, to keep him from sleeping on the job, so to speak—but in vain, as we know. In order to recall him from his spiritual and corporeal sleep (actually a flight), God now resorts to a human voice, that of the shipmaster, whom the Zohar of course interprets as the personification of “Good Impulse.”
It suffices for us, in keeping with the text, to view the shipmaster as the representative of responsible, wakeful life when confronted with the fugitive powers of sleep. Like a Dutch uncle, the shipmaster lectures the prophet: “What meanest thou that thou sleepest? Arise, call upon thy God. If so it be that God will think upon us, that we perish not.” We shall return later to this “if so it be,” this “perhaps,” which the heathen seaman addresses to the Jewish prophet. The Midrash points up the shipmaster’s address by having him say: “Thou sleepest whilst we stand suspended twixt life and death.”
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At This point there is a noteworthy lacuna in the narrative. We are not privy to Jonah’s answer or to his reaction to the ship master’s exhortation. Obviously Jonah remains silent and in all likelihood does not stir once from his sleeping posture in order not to have to see the contorted face of the anguished man who is imploring his help. Yet it is not only from him that Jonah withholds an answer. While all the seamen are vainly appealing to their respective gods for help—according to the Midrash representatives of all the seventy pagan peoples were aboard, along with their idols—the heathen captain has called upon Jonah to pray to his, Jonah’s own God. But Jonah remains mute. Only his body is now awake—his soul remains inert: he cannot pray. This stubborn silence is the fifth station of his flight from God. His muteness has the consequence of discouraging the seamen altogether from their prayers and obliging them to resort to the magic of lot-casting. The drawing of lots “works”—for magic is indeed the technology of ancient heathendom just as technology is the magic of modern heathendom. Both, practically speaking, are equally effective in their respective spheres of action: the lot is cast to determine “for whose cause this evil is upon us,” and it falls on Jonah.
Again he refuses to pray although he probably has a presentiment that even now a repentant prayer from him would be taken as evidence of a return to God. To be sure, he proudly acknowledges his origins: “I am a Hebrew.” He also proclaims himself Godfearing: “I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who hath made the sea and the dry land.” But he does not profess love of God, and later we shall see why he does not. Anticipating somewhat, one cannot really pray to a God who is merely recognized and feared; so instead, he proposes murder to the mortally terrified heathens: his own. And he invites them to be priests on the sea altar of their cruel gods. “Take me up and cast me forth into the sea, so shall the sea be calm unto you.” As he himself persists in remaining still, the sea can be stilled only by the sacrifice of his life. So Jonah is at the point of reaching the sixth station of his flight from God: death, the voluntary death of which his sleep was a prefiguration.
But now something quite remarkable occurs. The pagans recoil from the act proposed. They row as hard as they can to make land. In vain. So they begin to pray to Jonah’s God, whom by now they sense as the true God of Creation. Even this proves vain. According to the Midrash—which closely follows the lines traced by the Biblical account without ever changing the direction of its thrust in the slightest—before they finally work Jonah’s will, which perforce they consider to be God’s, they try every half-way’ measure possible. “They cast him forth into the sea up to his knees and the sea ceased from her raging; they drew him back up again unto themselves and the sea wrought and was tempestuous against them. They cast him forth into the sea up to his navel and the sea ceased from her raging; and they drew him back up unto themselves and the sea wrought and was tempestuous against them. Until at last they cast him forth altogether.” According, again, to the Biblical text, they are repentant and they beg the God to whom they have made sacrifice not to reckon the blood of a man who may be innocent on their heads. Jonah, who had resisted being sent to Nineveh to call it to penitence (a mission whose success he dreads, as we shall see), lives through a floating Nineveh on this heathen ship.
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At This point his flight—in all its absurdity and frustration—seems to be finally at an end. The journey from his home to the sea, his mental fixation on the other end of the world, the descent into the hold, his sleep, his stubborn silence, his self-extinction—such have been his six stations. But God, not allowing him really to die, “had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.” How does he spend these days and nights? On this head the Old Testament is silent but the Midrash, ever faithful to its techniques, fills in the gaps. Singled out for emphasis is the fact that even now Jonah does not pray. He still pursues his flight, past the seemingly final station, death, which he has of course failed to reach as a result of God’s chastising mercy. We may speak then of a seventh station of his flight, situated beyond death.
The Midrashic interpretation bases itself on the singularity that the Old Testament first employs the masculine form for the word “fish,” namely dag, and later the feminine form, daga. This grammatical anomaly is dramatized, as it were, by the Midrash. Jonah is first swallowed up by a male fish in whose belly he can move about so freely as not to feel circumscribed. The phosphorescent eyes of the sea monster serve as windows opening up for him on the world below. He sees the secrets of Creation: “The great stream out of which issue the waters of Ocean; the path across the Red Sea through which the children of Israel fled; the seven hills on which stand Jerusalem; the keystone of the world where stand and pray the sons of Korah.” These grandiose visions of the Midrash suggest the nature of the seventh station of this creature in flight from God’s presence.
Jonah is seeking refuge in metaphysical curiosity, in the rapt contemplation of the prehistoric world of myth, in a detachment of himself from all accountability in the realms of belief and action, in a non-accountability which has put even death behind it without yet acknowledging the faith that lies ahead. But there at the “keystone of the world” stand the sons of that Korah whom once the earth had swallowed up even as the sea has engulfed Jonah. And they are praying.
At long last Jonah, too, begins to pray but, to take a cue from the Midrash, he does not make the right prayer. Just as his flight caused him to fall deeper and deeper from one station to the next, his return cannot be accomplished at a leap but must take the form of a step-by-step ascent. A rigorous architectonic movement organizes the Book of Jonah, and its Midrashic interpretation, in the polar opposites of Fall and Ascent, Flight and Return. This same organizing movement presides over the repentance of Nineveh, which starts with an initial popular swell and rises from below to engulf the king himself.
Again according to the Midrash, Jonah’s return begins with a prayer drawn from the 13 9th Psalm:
Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in the nether world, behold, thou art there.
If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;
Even there would thy hand lead me, and thy right hand would hold me.
Despite the fact that this prayer seems grounded on Jonah’s own experience, God finds it insufficient. The theoretic acknowledgment that his flight from Him was ill-conceived is not deemed a true return.
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So Jonah tries a second time. He sends up a long hymn to God’s omniscience: “Thou searchest out the ways of the whole world and thou understandest every heart; the thoughts of all thy creatures have been thy thoughts, and every secret is to thee an open book.” But this prayer too is nugatory, utterly wide of the mark. God does not seem to set great store by abstract praise of Himself, even if it contains a real insight into the fact that the Divine Mind prefigures all human discovery and is in fact what enables such discovery. Jonah must learn to pray better than that.
The Midrash has him make a third attempt, this time in the words of Hannah as set down in the second chapter of the First Book of Samuel. In our religious usage, the prayer, at first inaudible, of the simple, pious woman who, imploring the Lord to send her a son, could only move her lips but not make her voice heard, serves as the prophet’s text for the First Day of the New Year of our Sacred Calendar. Year after year we celebrate the triumph of Hannah over the incomprehension, the spiritual deafness of the High Priest Eli; he, able to recognize the content of faith only in the traditional formulas in which he has been taught to repose confidence, mistakes her breaking forth into prayer as drunkenness. With us, the religious revolt against ceremonial formula has itself become a ceremony: a hazardous undertaking which must be chanced again and again, and is doomed to miscarry again and again. Similarly, Jonah’s prayer miscarries. The Midrash has him pray with Hannah’s words, but at the same time he expects too much from them, since they have by now been congealed in ritual: “A man recalled from the dead wilt thou be named—behold, my soul reached even unto death—callest thou me back to life!”
This prayer is near to being the right one, but the very hazard of that nearness makes him falter; he does not stand his ground against its exhalation. He does say quite legitimately: I. He is at last speaking of his own need, his own death. That might suffice for one who had never fled God’s presence, but for Jonah it avails not. In him there is still the false security of the fallen prophet who is confident he can administer God’s word as he might an earthly possession. Even God’s Mercy and Grace are not something to which man is entitled by right. Jonah must learn to pray better than that!
His fourth prayer in the Midrash is identical with the closing verse of his prayer in the second chapter of the Book of Jonah. Only now does he finally say: “But I will sacrifice unto thee with the voice of thanksgiving; that which I have vowed I will pay.” Following on the three prayers preceding-acknowledgment of the ill-conception of his flight, abstract praise of God, reliance upon God’s Grace as something automatically guaranteed, each of which marks a stage in his ascent—we witness the final emergence of the Prayer of Return: promise of active obedience. In making this promise, Jonah has found for the first time the voice of love of the Divine: he speaks of thanksgiving.
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At Last we are in a position to grasp the . import of the first question put by the Midrash, already mentioned above, and which we have adopted as our second question : “Why does Jonah flee?” And again the words of the Midrash are instructive if not necessarily final. The purification of Nineveh from evil is represented by the Midrash as the third prophetic commission entrusted to Jonah. It also represents him as having once acted as a successful prophet of good tidings to Jerusalem, and on another occasion as having failed in his capacity as a prophet of woe to that city, where he is now regarded as a false prophet. In the Midrash Jonah reviews his past: “It is not enough that I am called a false prophet in Israel; the peoples of the world will also call me a false prophet.” But again it is Yehezkel Kaufmann who has seen and said the decisive thing. Whereas other prophets who flee their divine mission, like Elijah, or refuse to accept it, like Jeremiah, do so because fearing failure, Jonah, uniquely enough, fears success! He fears the success of a summons to penitence that will call forth God’s Grace. Jonah is in flight from God’s mercy and he courts His sternness. On that account God does not chastise him by His sternness, which would of course confirm Jonah in his purposes, but by His mercy, which puts Jonah in an untenable position and constrains him to return. The Midrash underscores this point with a broad and ingenuous sensuousness. The second fish in which Jonah is finally swallowed up is so confining that he is moved to the right prayer. It is the female daga, which teems with maternal life, with thousands of small sea creatures that throng about the captive prophet. The fugitive from God who embraced death, and that metaphysical curiosity which extends past and beyond death, is harassed so much by this proliferation of creaturely life that he is constrained to return.
God’s mission to Nineveh is laid upon Jonah a second time—and for the third time Jonah hears the injunction: “Arise!”—this time from God again. But Jonah spends a full day traveling in the huge city before carrying out his mission. We may interpret this fresh lacuna in the Biblical account as signifying a deliberate postponement of the mission. For Jonah had yearned through the long hours, days, and years preceding the full return for a certitude which only a stern God can bestow. But God’s love and commiseration depend upon a sign that reads: “Perhaps.” We will remember that the heathen shipmaster sought in vain to spell it out for Jonah: “If so it be that God will think upon us. . . .” Similarly, the Ninevites say: “Who knoweth if God will turn and repent, and turn away from his fierce anger, that we perish or not?” Only through love of God can God himself enable us to come to Him. Whoever merely fears God denies himself love of the Divine, makes it impossible for himself to experience it. This was known to Amos, who was probably a contemporary of the historical Jonah to whom our book is ascribed—to Amos who fled neither the High Priest nor God, and left us the teaching: “Hate the evil, and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate: it may be that the Lord God of Hosts will be gracious unto the remnant of Joseph.”
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