The reader feels as if the passage is missing an introduction. What is clear is that these verses are not the beginnings of a relationship between God and Jonah. Rather, the reader feels as if they have stumbled onto the scene of a domestic row. For reasons as yet unknown to us, God’s request is repulsive to Jonah, and silently he walks out on God only to be relentlessly pursued.
It is worth noting Jonah’s silence, whom we know nothing about and who breaks his silence when asked the questions (that are both the Sailors’ and the readers’): ‘What is your occupation? Where do you come from? What is your Country?’ by defining himself only in his relationship to God.
His going ‘down’ to Joppa and ‘down’ to the hold of the ship, and falling to sleep should signal to us his depression, which also makes itself known in his description of life in chapter two (‘The waters closed in over me; the deep surrounded me; weeds were wrapped around my head at the roots of the mountains. I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me for ever’).
Yet his sleep also signals the peace he feels, temporarily away from God during his attempted escape. When he is awoken to the violent rages of his lover, he quickly assumes his victimisation and tells the others it is his fault. He does not beg for his life but rather knows that he must be thrown into his fate at the hands of God. The sailors, although uncomfortable with their role as complicitors with God’s violence, eventually step aside to let God do as he pleases. Witnessing the brutality of God, the men are, conversely, inspired and they ‘make vows’ to this new god of fear and violence, who has so much power.
God does not kill Jonah. Instead, mercifully, God gives Jonah time to think about what he has done, imprisoning him within the belly of a fish where Jonah, caught, flatters God and denigrates himself, promising to pay what he has vowed.
Once pacified God demands again that Jonah convey to Nineveh God’s violent plans to destroy them. His will now broken, Jonah does as he is told. Nineveh, in similar style to Jonah, does whatever it takes to please God and God smugly assumes power over them.
Jonah is angry over his complicity in making Nineveh God’s victim and has proven right his earlier hunch that God wouldn’t really go through with his threats. Accusing God of being all talk and power games Jonah decides he doesn’t want any further part of it, and asks to be killed, perhaps challenging God to deliver on an earlier threat that isn’t documented in the text.
Again, Jonah walks away from God and sets himself up at a distance to see how God will treat Nineveh. But God is still only really interested in Jonah and, following him, performs his husbandly duties by providing shelter for Jonah and for a while it makes Jonah happy. Seemingly God cannot stand to see Jonah happy and so he takes away the shelter, making the conditions much worse for Jonah, so that again, Jonah asks to be killed. ‘It is better for me to die than to live’, he says, betraying his feelings of worthlessness.
God says Jonah has no right to be angry, that Jonah has done nothing to deserve the home that he has come to enjoy. Just as Jonah cares about his new home, God says, so God cares about Nineveh. And with the mention of this, his abundant new victim/mistress, the passage ends.
Conclusions
I have painted God here as a jealous and violent husband, whose abuse of Jonah is both physical and emotional. Nineveh is situated as a new mistress whom Jonah is forced to entrap, but whom God is only interested in as a ploy to torment Jonah with further.
We see within the text Jonah’s confusion between wanting to please God and wanting to be rid of him. We see strength and defiance in Jonah’s actions as well as submission and deference.
What is the benefit of reading Jonah in this way?
It gives us a picture of domestic violence within the bible for readers to identify with and react against. We understand Jonah as brave victim rather than rebeller. The text ends (literally) with a question mark which allows the reader to write their own reading of whether Jonah manages to escape the manipulation of God.
It challenges the notion that God is always ‘right’ within the text. Should God be threatening nations with ‘calamity’ and why can he only save them with the help of a prophet? Should he have manipulated Jonah as he did?
Identifying an abusive God reminds us of the famous feminist claim that a substitutionary understanding of the crucifixion is tantamount to a God of child abuse. In fact, Jesus refers to himself as the new Jonah (Matthew 12.41) and we see the parallels in the story of the calming of the storm and the significance of three days in the belly of the fish. Just as a non-violent understanding of the atonement sees Jesus as rejecting and subverting violence so this reading of Jonah can be seen as a challenge to an understanding of God that is predicated on violence and dominance. Jesus/Jonah show up our desire for a gloriously powerful God.
The redemption of the text lies not only in the inclusion of an experience that is often marginalised but in the explicitness with which we can conclude that a violent God is unacceptable and that the ‘real’ God of Jonah/Jesus is wholly other to this.
Becky Worthley
