Jonah’s Anger at Yahweh’s Compassion

Would you be angry if God saved your fiercest enemies? Would it displease you if God showed mercy to them? As astonishing as that response would seem, that’s exactly how Jonah responded when God spared the Ninevites from imminent judgment. This didn’t take Jonah by surprise though as he seems to anticipate this act of God’s mercy. Instead, it made him angry. However, God confronts Jonah’s angry response to his compassion in the final scene of the book. Let’s look at this fascinating chapter with some help from the Oxford Bible Commentary.

Jonah 4:1–3

“But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord and said, ‘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, for I knew that you are a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from punishment. And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.’”

This nationalism, however, has not yet been cured, for Jonah is hurt and angry at the non-fulfilment of his prediction (vv. 1-3) and, in a rebuke to his God reminiscent of Jeremiah’s daring accusations (e.g. 20:7), he claims that from the beginning he had known that God’s proverbial compassion (Ex 34:6–7) detracted from his justice. Unfulfilled prophecy is a problem addressed by biblical writers in a number of places, but it is unwarranted to see it as the principal subject-matter of the book, the climax of which (4:11) is about God’s universal compassion. Like Elijah (1 Kings 19:4) he prays for death, but his reasons are less noble than Elijah’s, being marked by selfpity and petulance.

There is also a hint of sheer exhaustion in v. 5, which some have thought to transfer between 3:4 and 5 as it suits that context well, whereas here it interrupts the narrative sequence (God himself is about to create a shelter for him, v. 6) and we have already been told (3:10) what Jonah is here waiting to learn. No surviving manuscript or version makes the transposition, however, and if accepted it would be a copying error at a very early stage of the story’s literary transmission.

Jonah 4:4–11

“And the Lord said, ‘Is it right for you to be angry?’ Then Jonah went out of the city and sat down east of the city and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, waiting to see what would become of the city.”

“The Lord God appointed a bush and made it come up over Jonah, to give shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort, so Jonah was very happy about the bush. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the bush, so that it withered. When the sun rose, God prepared a sultry east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die. He said, ‘It is better for me to die than to live.’”

“But God said to Jonah, ‘Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?’ And he said, ‘Yes, angry enough to die.’ Then the Lord said, ‘You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about 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 many animals?’”

God, however, challenges Jonah to review his attitude (v. 4), and, being Lord both of the sea and of the dry land by Jonah’s own admission (1:9), now uses the fruits of the dry land (‘a bush’, v. 6, which translates a Heb. word of uncertain meaning, though attested in Assyrian also; and a worm, v. 7) as he had earlier used a creature of the sea, to teach Jonah a lesson. the lesson was that Jonah cared more about his pleasure in the sheltering plant which he had not cultivated than about God’s concern for a huge city of people and their livestock which he had cared about for years (vv. 9-11).

God’s Mercy and Compassion

As claimed for Assyrian kings (and attested on their building inscriptions), the Lord is the good shepherd of all his sheep, as the Hebrew kings themselves recognized (e.g. Ps 23), and Jonah here, like Jesus’ followers in Jn 10:16, needs to learn he has sheep in other folds also.

Their sin is born of ignorance (‘who do not know their right hand from their left’, v. 11), and their repentance was welcome to a merciful God. Such theology is also present in the NT (e.g. Lk 23:34 ‘Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing’; 1 Tim 1:13 ‘I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief’), and implied in Ezek 18:28 ‘because they considered and turned away from all the transgressions that they had committed, they shall surely live; they shall not die’, where the word ‘considered’ implies seeing the truth of the situation at last.

The prophet’s task, as that of all God’s people, is simply to speak his message wherever he may be sent. the outcome, so the book of Jonah is telling its readers, is God’s responsibility, and his alone. As another Jewish writer with a similar theological problem was led to conclude, ‘O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgements and how inscrutable his ways! “For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counsellor?”’ (Rom 11:33-4, cf. Isa 40:13).

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