Staging Jonah

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For a long time, I wanted to write a play about the comic, contentious, absurd, salvific relationship between God and us—to present a comic Everyman locked in mortal (salvific) combat with Yahweh. But I got nowhere with the idea and let it lie, until one night I read through some of the Minor Prophets and came across the Book of Jonah. My preconceptions about the book were, in retrospect, utterly ordinary and rather embarrassing. I knew the story: The guy gets swallowed by a fish, and there was something about a miraculous plant as well. But this time, armed with a copy of the Oxford Study Edition of the New English Bible, everything changed.

The introduction suggested the story was a satire, an attack on a Jewish purity movement, represented in part by Ezra and Nehemiah. Jonah, in this reading, is a believer par excellence, utterly antagonistic to other peoples of the Middle East; and Yahweh, in His mercy, makes a fool of him in the course of the story. The author was protesting the limited, parochial vision of the purity movement and insisting that Yahweh was the merciful ruler over all humanity. The Book of Jonah was satire, folk tale and theology all rolled into one. And, it struck me, it was also eminently stageable. This was the story I was looking for.

For the next two years, in the margins of a life spent teaching college and raising children, I worked on the play. This entailed thinking through the story from the perspective of every character in it (and a few I added for good measure). What does Yahweh think about Jonah? Why send him to save Nineveh? How does the Ship’s Captain see Jonah? Why do the Ninevehites so unexpectedly reform? What is Yahweh trying to prove by His parlor trick with the bean plant? And how could the answers, whatever they were, be presented on stage?

I practiced, in effect, a two-year-long guerrilla exegesis on the text in the interest of comic theatre, and became more and more impressed by the depth, wit, sophistication and sheer sanity of the biblical account. Here was the work of a comic artist as wise and whimsical as his Greek near-contemporary, Aristophanes.

The author of Jonah obviously delighted in stories of the prophets, just as Cervantes loved the chivalric romances he parodied in Don Quixote. Behind many an incident in Jonah lurks another prophet’s adventure, usually exaggerated to the nth degree or drolly stood on its head. Take, for example, the lightning-quick, slam-bang opening of the book:

“Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai, saying, ‘Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it, for their wickedness has come up before me.’ But Jonah set out to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.”

Almost every prophet begins his career by trying to get out of it. Moses complains of being “thick of speech” (Exodus 4:10), Jeremiah worries that he’s too young (Jeremiah 1:6), Isaiah’s lips are not clean (Isaiah 6:5), and so on. Jonah doesn’t even stand to parley; he’s simply out of there. You almost see the dust and leaves flutter up in his wake. The phrase “reluctant prophet” is nearly a tautology in the Bible, but Jonah carries such reluctance to its logical extreme: immediate, terrified flight.

Jonah keeps running, reaches Joppa, pays his passage and heads off across the Mediterranean in the other direction from Nineveh. Now, as a good Jew, Jonah realizes that Yahweh is omniscient and omnipresent. “I am a Hebrew,” he tells the ship’s sailors. “I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.” But that knowledge doesn’t help. Jonah, even as he speaks these words, is trying to escape, by sea and dry land, the Creator of both! The dreadful inescapability of God, described in such harrowing terms in the Psalms, here becomes a bit of vaudeville. We watch, as if from heaven, this poor jittery truant scurrying here and there over the Mediterranean world, looking for a place to hide from the Eye of Omniscience.

More than once in my play I tried to highlight the sublime silliness of his attempt to flee. After Jonah has been commanded to denounce Nineveh and has decided to flee his home, he asks his wife Rachel (my creation) where he should hide:

Rachel: I don’t know. Across town at cousin Yacob’s.
Jonah: That blabbermouth? As soon as I arrived there, he’d thank God for my safe arrival, and blow my cover…

Much of the comedy of the Book of Jonah lies in Jonah’s search for cover. We see in Jonah our own flights from God, played out with absurd literalness. Jonah’s vulnerability to God comes across here as 023comic rather than as terrifying, however, because it is matched by an insistence on God’s mercy. Yahweh means Jonah well, just as He means the Ninevehites well, though Jonah is too terrified and bigoted to see it. We imagine Yahweh less as hurling thunderbolts than as rolling His eyes, wondering when this pathetic little man will calm down.

The scene on shipboard is funny and touching. Nineveh is dying for its sins, Yahweh really must get Jonah to the city, and the only way is to “let loose a hurricane” on the ship Jonah has taken. Jonah, for his part, treats these sailors shabbily. He knows better than to flee Yahweh; he knows (or should) that he’s a “marked man.” Yet he sails with the ship, climbs into the hold—and falls asleep! The Captain rouses him with a fine couple of lines: “What are you doing sound asleep? Get up, call on your God! Perhaps the god will spare us a thought so we will not perish.” You have to admire the grim, salty humor of that. It’s pathetic and hard-boiled at once, and I quoted it outright in my script. No use even trying to say that better.

A nobler Jonah would confess his fault at this point rather than put the lives of the sailors at risk, but he 025doesn’t. Instead, he keeps mum until Yahweh puts the finger on him through the casting of lots. Even then, rather than repenting his disobedience and accepting his prophetic mission, Jonah petulantly insists on being thrown overboard. Then comes a twist to make you feel better about humanity: “[T]he men rowed hard to bring the ship back to land, but they could not, for the sea grew more and more stormy against them.” By his cowardice and deceit Jonah has nearly gotten them all killed, and in response they make a valiant effort to save his life! This is forgiveness of a high order. But here’s the irony: Their act of mercy (saving Jonah) would, if successful, derail Yahweh’s greater act of mercy (saving Nineveh) and He has to stop them! Yahweh intensifies the storm until he gives these brave, generous sailors no choice. With painful reluctance, they drop Jonah into the sea, “and the sea ceased from its raging.”

It’s funniest, and makes most narrative sense, if you imagine it as just that fast, too. No gradual lessening of wind and swell, but sudden miraculous calm. (It staged wonderfully.) “Then the men feared the Lord even more, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.” This likable crew, who earlier cried out to their own gods for help, now turn their loyalties to Yahweh, foreshadowing Jonah’s greater success in Nineveh.

The story, in its usual double-time, follows Jonah into the drink. “But the Lord provided a large fish to swallow up Jonah.” The event itself verges on farce while the language could hardly be more matter-of-fact: It’s the sort of blandly outrageous comment beloved by satirists from Swift to Kafka.

For my part, I can’t help feeling what a painfully undignified rescue this is. Saving His refractory prophet by sending an outsized tuna to swallow him strikes me as both merciful and degrading. The writer, I suspect, once more let his eye wander to the legends of the Great Prophets. I tried to capture these allusions in a speech of Jonah’s, once he realizes where he is:

Jonah: This is disgusting! Weren’t…weren’t You listening! I said drown me, kill me, be done with me! I could live with that. But this! This! Elijah, sure! For him You send a flaming chariot. For Jonah, though, what? A fish!? Jonah the Prophet carried away in his chariot of slime? Is this Your idea of a joke?

It’s certainly somebody’s idea of a joke, and a good one at that. But it’s also more, for it introduces the most ambiguous, complex and lyrical passage in the story. For the first time, Jonah addresses God directly,^a and the strikingly beautiful prayer he utters reads like a psalm: It brings a depth of emotion to the story that is in utter contrast with the whimsical narration before and after. The passage opens with a vivid evocation of the experience of drowning:

“You cast me into the deep,
into the heart of the seas…

The waters closed in over me;
the deep surrounded me;

Weeds were wrapped around my head at the roots of the mountains.”

More important, however, the passage symbolizes the dark night of the soul: the moment when one is brought to a stand, forced to review one’s life, and finds oneself on the road to perdition. Only then is it possible to repent and turn once more to the light. The belly of the fish, instantly understood by Jonah as “the belly of Sheol,” is his Inferno, his journey to the underworld, from which he will arise with fresh resolution and purpose.

Having enriched the coloring of his tale with this burst of poetry, the author shifts back to mock epic with characteristic abruptness: “Then the Lord spoke to the fish, and it spewed Jonah out upon the dry land.” The symbolic creature becomes once more a big slimy fish that swallowed something it could not digest, with the usual consequences. The author turns Jonah back into a figure of fun before springing Yahweh’s final trap on him.

We are told that for the second time “the word of the Lord came to Jonah.” Encouraged, Jonah marches across Assyria and into the heart of Nineveh, which the author has blown up to epic proportions (“three days’ walk across,” or a bit bigger than the almost equally mythical Los Angeles). There he announces the message entrusted to him by Yahweh: “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” What pleasure this must have given Jonah! To be in on a major destruction, a replay of Sodom and Gomorrah, and to be the one chosen to announce the catastrophe! Jonah now gets to indulge in that most delicious of prophetic pleasures, announcing the imminent, fiery 027doom of one’s enemies. Writing this speech for Jonah was great fun. I read through Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel and Amos and stitched together a pastiche of prophetic invective. I had, of course, more material than I could use, and all of it of volcanic ferocity. Since I portrayed Jonah as an admirer of the stormier prophets, it made sense to grant him the gift of rebuke.

So what happens? “[T]he people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.” Or as Jonah, in my play, later tells his wife: “The bastards repented!” These fierce, luxurious, oppressive, violent, lascivious Assyrians turn to Yahweh (Israel’s Yahweh!) and say they’re sorry! As the King’s proclamation is worded, even the beasts are to fast, be covered with sackcloth, and “cry mightily to God” (in itself a pretty picture).

The conversion is as sudden and complete as the calming of the storm, and no less miraculous. Earlier in the story, the sailors abandon their pagan gods and turn to Yahweh for help. The Ninevehites pick up where the sailors leave off, their King all but quoting the Ship’s Captain: “Who knows, God may yet relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish.” We are watching a replay on a much grander scale of Jonah’s earlier unwitting success. What he feels when he sees the Ninevehites turning from their sins beggars description. In staging the scene, there were hardly any coherent lines I could write for Jonah; I could only imagine him spluttering with astonishment.

Jonah’s amazement quickly turns to rage at Yahweh’s next move: “God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.” After Jonah risks his life denouncing Nineveh and foretelling its doom, God jerks the rug out from under him by suspending the sentence! No character in literature has ever been set up so completely. Jonah has seen waves blown up to mountainous proportions, found himself in the guts of a giant fish and watched the nastiest city in the Fertile Crescent melt in piety—but Yahweh forgives them, the possibility never entered his mind!

Yahweh treats Jonah much as the Prodigal Son’s father treats the older brother, the “good” brother, and Jonah reacts like that famously grumpy sibling (Luke 15:29–30). He goes into a furious pout, as he did on the ship when his guilt was revealed. Again he demands that God kill him: “And now, O Lord, please take my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.” He even twists God’s mercy into the reason for his disobedience: “O Lord! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning.” But this, of course, is nonsense. Jonah’s fury has made him childish, which is perhaps why, despite his bad behavior, he’s still so endearing.

Jonah’s anger runs even deeper than this, though, to really disturbing levels. He wants Nineveh destroyed. He hates these people, and he’s seething because God won’t, well, nuke them. By the end Yahweh has to inform him that there are 120,000 people in Nineveh—which, as I reminded the actors, was about the number of people killed in the Hiroshima atomic blast. If there were any real danger of Jonah’s changing God’s mind on this point, the story would turn dark indeed.^b Instead, Yahweh performs a final act of mercy; He tries to induce Jonah to give up his wrath.

Yahweh has been on a mission of mercy from the start, for that is His nature. Jonah admits this, though with sneering contempt: “I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.” Jonah rattles this off like a nursery rhyme.^c Yet that old shopworn cliché is true—profoundly, urgently true—and God’s task is to convince Jonah that it is true of him as well.

It is the imperative to be merciful that lies behind the hocus-pocus with the bean plant. While Jonah is sitting by a road wondering what will happen to the city, God causes a bean plant to grow over Jonah and provide shade. The next day God conjures up a worm to attack and destroy the bush, throwing Jonah into another “Woe is me” fit. But, of course, He has His purposes, to convince Jonah of his own inclination to pity and compassion, his own startling complicity in the mercy of God.

Yahweh asks Jonah to know himself, which means, in this case, to know himself as compassionate, regardless of the pose he would like to adopt. Jonah 028wishes—or thinks he wishes—the destruction of Nineveh only because he has failed to realize what such destruction would mean. Here is a man calling for a massacre and pitying a plant!

With the superb narrative tact that shapes the entire story, the author leaves the question unanswered. Yahweh has the last word, and the word is a challenge: Will you see who you are and return to Me? That is to say, Will you forgive? It is a surprising ending in its way: poignant, haunting and perfectly controlled. The author is more concerned with our answer than with Jonah’s and so denies us the closure that a decision on Jonah’s part would afford.

For the longest time, I tried to come up with a way to use this ending in my script—and couldn’t do it. The deliberately open ending works beautifully on the page. It’s marvelous when the story is read aloud. But after ninety minutes of Jonah’s misadventures (those in the original and others I threw in), such an ending would have been a serious disappointment to theater-goers. I needed a definite decision, a “complete action” as Aristotle would say. The author fires his narrative arrow and boldly lets it vanish in mid-flight; I had to work out its trajectory and determine where it lands.

In the last scene of the play, then, Jonah returns to his home and tells Rachel of his adventures in Nineveh. When the Archangel Raphael arrives to congratulate Jonah on his success Jonah tears into him, presenting the victim’s case against the forgiveness of oppressors. The argument between Raphael and Jonah goes nowhere, until Raphael receives a command from God to let Jonah destroy the city if he chooses, as long as he does so with open eyes. Raphael brings King Sargon of Assyria, bound for execution, to Jonah’s house and places a sword in Jonah’s hands. If Jonah will behead Sargon right then and there, Raphael will carry out the destruction of Nineveh. Raphael even eggs Jonah on, noting that “Sargon ordered executions aplenty in his day. Many without trial. And many of them Jews.” Jonah, outraged anew, raises his sword to strike, and here, slightly abridged, is what follows:

Jonah: Then you will die!
Sargon: Jonah, I have children!
Rachel: Jonah, you do this and you’ll never come back! It’ll twist you like a sheet. You’ll spend the rest of your life telling yourself why this was right. And it’s not, Jonah. It’s not.
Jonah: But think what they did to us! How can I live with such people on the earth?
Rachel: (Quietly, in dead earnest) I think we’re going to have to.
(A moment later Jonah drops the sword, sparing both king and city.)

This goes beyond the original, of course, but I think in a direction consistent with both the story’s serious themes and its mock-epic plot. I can only hope the original ironist would approve. The author’s message, after all, is a strange one. We hear sso much about the wrath of God, about His judgment and punishment, it’s easy to build up a forbidding picture of Him. The ironist of the Book of Jonah assures us that we will be shocked by Yahweh, that we will find His judgments a “scandal,” but it will be His mercy that appalls us, not His wrath. He will punish no one unjustly, but neither will He punish everyone we think has it coming, not even those who cause us real harm. Kant suggested that the idea of the eternal punishment of the wicked was necessary to reconcile us to human life. If the author of Jonah is to be believed, we’d better look for other grounds.

22 For a long time, I wanted to write a play about the comic, contentious, absurd, salvific relationship between God and us—to present a comic Everyman locked in mortal (salvific) combat with Yahweh. But I got nowhere with the idea and let it lie, until one night I read through some of the Minor Prophets and came across the Book of Jonah. My preconceptions about the book were, in retrospect, utterly ordinary and rather embarrassing. I knew the story: The guy gets swallowed by a fish, and there was something about a miraculous plant as well. But this time, […]