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Pie PROPHET. | ON AH 
 

 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 
 
 ASPECTS OF THE WAY 
 
 BEING MEDITATIONS AND 
 STUDIES IN THE LIFE OF 
 JESUS CHRIST 
 
 Crown 8vo. 68. nét. 
 a a eae a ea TES RITA SES. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS. 
 FETTER LANE, LONDON, E.C. 4 
 
 eR 
 
THE PROPHET JONAH: 
 The Book and the Sign 
 
 if Q 
 Ay 
 
 A. D. MARTIN “ 
 
 BY ‘ 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTORY NOTE 
 BY 
 ARTHUR S. PEAKE, m.a., p.p. 
 
 Rylands Professor of Biblical Exegesis in 
 the University of Manchester 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. LTD. 
 
 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON, E.C. 4 
 NEW YORK, TORONTO, 
 BOMBAY, CALCUTTA AND MADRAS 
 
 1926 
 

 
If wt may be permitted him in some 
 sense to receive 1t—to know of tt and 
 haply to rejoice in its measure of Truth 
 —this little book 1s given to 
 
 FREDERICK ARTHUR MARTIN, 
 
 2ND LIEUT. IN THE NOTTS. AND DERBY 
 REGIMENT, 
 
 who fell at Ypres on September 7th, 1915. 
 
 NUNQUAM ANTEA QUAM HODIE CARIOR 
 

 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 I. AUTHOR'S PREFACE a Ric Wes etait TREY cr I 
 II. INTRODUCTORY NOTE BY DR. PEAKE pein 3 
 
 TES MIS GLA TION ods) ier aint sg ulete tak ganeine hana 7 
 
 NOTE A: THE DIVINE NAME 1’ (YHWH) . 13 
 NOTE B: THE POEM IN CHAPTER II. . . 16 
 
 RAGA SAS A OPOLE- TALE 8 )\ 2 oc6:5) Giese wae eee 
 V. THE PURPOSE AND CHARACTER OF THE BOOK 31 
 
 VI. THE BOOK AS PROPAGANDA iis nT rele cap na 
 
 _VII. THE ANATOMY OF BIGOTRY Sy 2 weig A dun Ree 
 
 Mibersecian: OF JONAH eo oe i a 69 
 
 IX. THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST WHICH WAS IN THE AUTHOR 85 
 
 NOTE C: THE LITERAL INTERPRETATION . 99 
 
“ ka) SO ven 
 Ba yh rf z 
 
 
 
I 3 
 AUTHOR’S PREFACE 
 
 HE purpose of these studies is to offer to the general 
 
 reader an interpretation of the Book of Jonah in 
 harmony with the best scholarship of our time. They do 
 not, however, merely reproduce the opinions of others, 
 but on several points offer suggestions arising out of an 
 independent study of the Hebrew text. 
 
 I have to express my most grateful thanks to Professor 
 Peake, who not only has given me permission to utilise 
 two articles which I contributed in 1921 and 1923 to the 
 Holborn Review, so ably edited by him, but has also read 
 my manuscript, helped me by his counsel upon some of 
 _the problems involved, and written an introductory note. 
 My thanks are also due to his colleague, Professor W. L. 
 Wardle, M.A., D.D., who has read my translation and made 
 several comments thereon which I have been glad to adopt. 
 
 Messrs. Hodder & Stoughton have allowed me to re- 
 publish (considerably enlarged) a paper on the Sign of 
 Jonah which appeared in The Expositor, August, 1922, 
 then under the editorship of the late Sir W. Robertson 
 Nicoll. Mr. Humphrey Milford, of the Oxford University 
 Press, also has kindly permitted me to make use of an 
 article entitled, Is a-Christian Doctrine of Nationalism 
 possible ? which I wrote in 1921 for The Constructive 
 Quarterly. 
 
 AWD. IM, 
 
 DANBURY, 
 ESSEX, 
 

 
I] 
 INTRODUCTORY NOTE 
 
 T the request of the author I contribute a brief Intro- 
 duction to his book. Those who are familiar with 
 
 his Aspects of the Way will need no other recommendation 
 than this that the present book is by the same author. 
 The earlier volume showed that on so long-studied and so 
 well-worn a theme as the personality, the ministry and the 
 work of Jesus he had fresh and beautiful things to say. 
 And similarly he writes on the Book of Jonah in a manner 
 worthy of the theme. It is strange that some are so con- 
 cerned to defend the literal historicity of the book and to 
 make belief in it a touchstone of orthodoxy, that they fail 
 to put the emphasis in the right place, their zeal for signs 
 and wonders making them less sensitive than they might 
 be to spiritual values. And there are others who are so 
 obsessed by the portent that they profane by their ribald 
 mockery the Holy of Holies. For this book ranks with the 
 greatest things the Old Testament has contributed to the 
 literature of religion, with the autobiography of Hosea, 
 - with Jeremiah’s prophecy of the New Covenant, with the 
 close of the 73rd Psalm, with the fourth Servant poem 
 (Isa. lii, 13—liii, 12) of which we commonly speak as the 
 
 53rd chapter of Isaiah. And it is justly ranked so high «» 
 
 because it rises so nobly above all narrow patriotism and 
 all religious bigotry in its vindication of God’s universal 
 grace and in its generous assurance of the willingness of 
 the heathen to accept the truth and their readiness to heed 
 the call to repentance. 
 
4 THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 That the book is the record of events in the life of Jonah, 
 the prophet who predicted the splendid military successes 
 of Jeroboam II, seems improbable in the last degree. And 
 this not merely on account of the portents which it relates 
 but because its whole attitude reflects a reaction under the 
 influencé of the Second Isaiah against the dominant ten- 
 dencies of post-exilic Judaism. That an ancient legend 
 forms the basis of the story is, I believe, unlikely; still 
 more unlikely that Jonah actually went on a mission to 
 Nineveh. The case for treating the story as an allegory 
 in which Jonah stands for Israel and the episode of the fish 
 for the exile and the restoration, is stronger than such 
 interpreters as Sellin are willing to allow. But even if the 
 book be regarded as pure fiction, it is fiction of the highest 
 moral and religious value ; and in its pregnant brevity, its 
 vivid description, its narrative quality, its irony and its 
 tenderness, a literary gem of the first water. 
 
 I have read Mr. Martin’s study with admiration and deep 
 interest. J am impressed with the freshness of his observa- 
 tion, with the felicity of his expression, with the sympathetic 
 realisation of the situation, with the power of imaginative 
 reconstruction which he displays. The chapters on Jonah 
 as a Folk-tale and The Sign of Jonah seem to me specially 
 striking and suggestive. The searching dissection of 
 bigotry and the application of Christian principles to our. 
 grave international problems deserve the most careful 
 consideration. May he give us other books characterised 
 by the same charm and distinction of style, the same gift 
 of luminous exposition and keen analysis, the same power 
 of probing the conscience and bracing the will. 
 
 ARTHUR S$. PEAKE; 
 
Ill 
 
 TRANSLATION 
 

 
Til 
 
 TRANSLATION 
 
 1 eee 
 
 2. 
 
 4See Note A on p. 13. 
 
 Now the word of Yahweh* came to 
 Jonah, the son of Amuttat, saying, 
 Rise up, go to Nineveh, the Great 
 City, and denounce it; for their 
 
 . wickedness has affronted me. But 
 
 Jonah rose up to get away to Tar- 
 tessus from the presence of Yahweh : 
 and he went down to Jaffa, and 
 found a ship going to Tartessus : he 
 paid his passage and went down into 
 it to go with them to Tartessus from 
 the presence of Yahweh. But Yah- 
 weh hurled a great wind upon the 
 sea, so there was a great storm in the 
 sea, and the ship reckoned herself 
 doomed. Then the sailors were 
 afraid, and every man cried to lus 
 particular god ; and they hurled the 
 ship’s freightage into the sea, to abate 
 its anger with them. But Jonah had 
 gone into the vessel’s innermost part, 
 and was lying down fast asleep. And 
 the Captain came to him and said, 
 What do you mean by sleeping ? 
 get up and cry to your God ; perhaps 
 God will give a thought to us so that 
 
THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 7. 
 
 IO. 
 
 bi 
 
 I2. 
 
 ® 13. 
 
 14. 
 
 15. 
 
 we escape. And they said to one 
 another, Come, let us cast lots that. 
 we may find out on whose account 
 this disaster 1s upon us. So they 
 cast lots, and the lot fell upon Jonah. 
 And they said unto him, Tell us 
 please, on whose account this disaster 
 has come upon us. What 1s your 
 business ? And where do you come 
 from? What ts your country, and 
 what 1s your nationality ? And he 
 said unto them, A Hebrew am I, and 
 it1s Yahweh the God of Heaven whom 
 I vevere. Hemade both sea and land. 
 
 Then the men were terrified, and 
 they said to him, What crime have 
 you committed ? For the men knew 
 that it was from the presence of 
 Yahweh he was fleeing: he had 
 confessed 1t to them. Then they sard 
 to him, What shall we do to you to 
 calm the sea to us ? for the sea went 
 on raging. And he said to them, 
 Lift me up and throw me to the sea, 
 and the sea will be calm to you: for 
 well I know that tt 1s on my account 
 this great storm is come upon you. 
 But the men rowed desperately to get 
 the ship back to dry land. However, 
 they could not ; for the sea went on 
 raging against them. So they cried 
 unto Yahweh and said, Ah! now, 
 we beseech Thee, Yahweh, let us not 
 perish for taking this man’s life, and 
 lay not upon us innocent blood, for 
 Thou Thyself, Yahweh, hast done as 
 it pleased Thee. So they lifted up 
 
THE BOOK AND THE SIGN 9 
 
 16. 
 
 (Hebrew ii, 1) 17. 
 
 ee ee kt): WTO, 
 
 amaraod, 13) ell; 22, 
 
 1See Note B on p. 16. 
 
 B 
 
 Jonah and threw him into the sea ; 
 and the anger of the sea subsided. 
 Then the men had profound reverence 
 for Yahweh, and offered sacrifices to 
 Yahweh and made solemn vows. 
 Now Yahweh appointed a great fish 
 to swallow Jonah ; and Jonah was 
 in the belly of the fish three days and 
 
 . three nights. Then Jonah prayed 
 
 unto Yahweh, his God, from the belly 
 
 of the fish. And Yahweh spoke to 
 
 the fish and tt vomited up Jonah on 
 
 the dry land. 
 
 And he (Jonah) said, 
 
 I called from out my terrible straits 
 unto Yahweh, 
 
 And He responded to me. 
 
 Out of the womb of Sheol I cried for 
 help. 
 
 Thou heardest my voice. 
 
 For Thou hadst pitched me into ocean 
 depths, 
 
 the heart of the seas: 
 
 and the flood engulfed me. 
 
 All Thy breakers and Thy billows 
 passed over me. 
 
 . And I—I thought, I am driven from 
 
 Thy sight. 
 How shall I ever look again toward 
 Thy holy temple ? 
 Waters choked my breathing. 
 The deep rolled round me. 
 Seaweeds were wound about my head. 
 
 . To the bases of the mountains I sank, 
 
 To the land whose gates shut behind 
 one for ever. 
 
Io 
 
 THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 lil, 
 
 Yet Thou hast brought up my life 
 from the pit, 
 
 Yahweh my God. 
 
 When my soul fainted within me I 
 remembered Yahweh: 
 
 And my prayer came in unto Thee— 
 to Thy holy temple. 
 
 They that observe vaporous vanities 
 
 Forsake their own good God. 
 . But as for me, with the music of 
 
 thanksgiving 
 I will sacrifice to Thee. 
 What I have vowed I will perform. 
 Salvation belongs to Yahweh. 
 And the word of Yahweh came to 
 
 . Jonah the second time, saying, UP, 
 
 go to Nineveh, the Great City, and 
 proclaim against 1t the proclamation 
 
 . which I will tell thee. And Jonah 
 
 arose and went to Nineveh, in obe- 
 dience to Yahweh's word. Now 
 Nineveh was a city great even to God ! 
 Three days’ journey across! And 
 Jonah penetrated the city a day’s 
 journey, and he shouted and sard, 
 When three+ days are come and gone 
 
 . Nineveh shall be overthrown! And 
 
 the people of Nineveh believed in God, 
 and they proclaimed a fast, and put 
 on sackcloth from the greatest of them 
 
 « even to the most insignificant. And 
 
 the matter reached the king of Nine- 
 veh. He arose from his throne, and 
 he took off his royal robe, and 
 covered himself with sackcloth, and 
 
 1 The Greek version reads thus, not forty days, This is a more 
 likely rendering. 
 
THE BOOK AND THE SIGN vs 
 
 Oo. 
 
 Peer 
 
 at 
 4. 
 5. 
 
 satin ashes. And he had a proclam- 
 ation made through Nineveh : 
 By order of the king and hts 
 nobles! Oyez! Man and 
 beast, oxen and sheep shall not 
 taste anything. They shall not 
 feed. They shall not drink 
 water. But let man and beast 
 be covered with sackcloth, and let 
 them cry vehemently to God.- 
 Let them turn every one from his 
 evil way and from the violence 
 they are doing. Who knows but 
 that God may indeed turn and 
 repent, and turn from His burn- 
 ing anger, so that we escape ? 
 And God saw their doings that they 
 turned from ther evil way, and God 
 repented of the evil which He said He 
 would do to them, and He did it not. 
 But Jonah was very greatly dis- 
 pleased, and he blazed with anger 
 about it. And he prayed to Yahweh 
 and said, Ah! Yahweh, was not this 
 what I said when I was yet in my own 
 land ? Why, tt was because of this 
 I tried to forestall Thee by fleeing to 
 Tartessus, for I knew that Thou art a 
 gracious and pitying God, slow to 
 anger, and of large love, and repentant 
 of evil. Now then, Yahweh, pray 
 take my life from me, since for me 
 death 1s better than life. And Yah- 
 weh said, Are you very angry Pt 
 Then Jonah went out of the city, and 
 
 1The Hebrew having two possible renderings here, I follow the 
 one which agrees with the Greek version. 
 
I2 
 
 THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 Io, 
 
 If. 
 
 sat on its eastward side, and made for 
 himself there a booth, and sat under 
 it in the shade, until he should see 
 what might happen in the city. And 
 the God Yahweh ordained that a 
 gourd should come up above Jonah to 
 be a shadow over his head to deliver 
 him from his evil case. And Jonah 
 was very happy indeed about the 
 
 . gourd. But, the next day, in the 
 
 lifting of the morning dusk, God 
 appotnted a worm to attack the gourd, 
 
 . and it withered. And 1t fell out that 
 
 when the sun rose God appointed a 
 suliry east wind, and it attacked 
 Jonah’s head, so that he_swooned. 
 Then he asked for himself that he 
 might die. For me, he said, death 1s 
 
 . better than life. And God satd to 
 
 Jonah, Are you so very angry about 
 the gourd ? And he said, I am very 
 angry about tt: I could die with 
 anger! Then Yahweh said, You 
 have had a love for the gourd, which 
 you have not laboured at, or made to 
 grow. Child of a night it sprang up, 
 and child of a night tt perished. 
 And I—should not I have pity upon 
 Nineveh, the Great City, which has 
 in it more than twelve times ten 
 thousand persons, who do not know 
 how to distinguish their right hand 
 from their left, and also much cattle ? 
 
NOTE A 
 THE DIVINE NAME Ay (YHW4H) 
 
 HE English Revisers of the Old Testament state in 
 their preface that following the practice of the 
 Authorised Version they have substituted for “‘ the ineffable 
 Name,” which they call JEHOVAH, the title LORD or GOD 
 (printed in small capitals). There are objections, however, 
 to such a procedure. LorD is too general to be a true 
 equivalent for a personal name, and GOD is not much less 
 inadequate. As S. Paul wrote, There are gods many and 
 lords many (I Cor. viii, 5). All the distinctiveness of the 
 proper name of the God of Israel is lost if we are content 
 with such general terms. Moreover, LORD, as S. Paul 
 further remarks, is a title which Christians associate with 
 Jesus Christ. To apply one and the same title to the Being 
 whom the Hebrews regarded as their national deity, to 
 whom also, in certain epochs of their long history they did 
 not hesitate to ascribe some of the most appalling decrees 
 ever enunciated by any religion, and to Him who came as 
 the Representative of the Father and as the Messenger 
 of universal goodwill, is to telescope the several stages of 
 Revelation into that confusion of thought which is the 
 prolific cause of scepticism. 
 
 There are objections also to the word JEHOVAH. Most 
 readers are aware that the four letters which constitute 
 the whole of the name in Hebrew are all consonants; the 
 Hebrew people having ever been accustomed to write their 
 language without vowels and to insert the latter, when 
 required in public reading, according to an oral tradition. 
 
14 THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 Now the objection which philologists take to JEHOVAH is 
 that it is a hybrid, the vowels selected in order to pronounce 
 the name being those that belong properly to a totally 
 different collection of consonants. The objection is a 
 technical one but it should be respected. It must be con- 
 fessed, too, that the word thus queerly formed is not beau- 
 tiful, and such currency as it has had among Christians 
 has mostly been in association with somewhat narrow types 
 of piety. 
 
 It is impossible to discuss this matter, even in a brief 
 note, without alluding to the rendering adopted by Dr. 
 Moffatt in his very valuable New Translation. With evi- 
 dent hesitation this famous scholar has rendered Y H W H 
 by THE ETERNAL. The sonorous, almost onomatopceic 
 quality of the rendering suits wonderfully well in such a 
 passage as the. 23rd Psalm—The Eternal shepherds me, I lack 
 for nothing'—but one stumbles at this in Exodus-xxxii, 14, 
 So the Eternal changed his mind If the idea of an eternal 
 existence really belongs to the word—and this is still a 
 matter in dispute—it certainly cannot have been operative 
 in the bulk of the passages where it is found. The truth is 
 that the habits of religious people in speaking of the deities 
 they revere are not dissimilar from those they and all others 
 follow in speaking of their fellow men. Even with a know- 
 ledge of Greek, one does not necessarily think of the interests 
 of husbandry when speaking of king GEORGE (Greek, georgos, 
 a husbandman), although sometimes we may remember 
 that he exhibits at agricultural shows. In the same way 
 an ancient Divine name is, in common usage, a means of 
 identifying a person believed actually to exist, and in the 
 case before us of naming One who was ever overshadowing 
 men’s previous experience of Him with new revelations of 
 His character. 
 
 In view of all the uncertainty which still attaches to the 
 origin and purpose of the Name, I have ventured in this 
 little book to adopt the form which scholars generally 
 
 1 Moffatt. 
 
THE BOOK AND THE SIGN 15 
 
 approve, that given in the Oxford Lexicon, and in Peake’s 
 Commentary, and which Dr. Moffat in the preface to his 
 translation agrees is correct-—YAHWEH (pronounced 
 Yah-way, the first # having its full guttural force, with 
 almost but not quite the sound of ch as in the Scots word 
 loch). Because this is the true form of the word we should 
 surely try to give it currency. And it has a beauty of its 
 own, which is no small consideration ; for the value of a 
 name lies not merely in its appellative convenience, nor 
 simply in any meaning it may possibly register, but also 
 in the kind of sound with which it is spoken. There is a 
 suggestion of the indeterminate in the first syllable YAH— 
 which for ourselves invests the whole word with significance, 
 and may sometimes remind us, that whatever harshness 
 belonged to certain phases of Old Testament religion, there 
 was always an outlooking from it towards the Infinite and 
 a view of the processional quality of life. 
 
NOTE B 
 THE POEM IN CHAPTER II 
 
 AS the Hebrew text stands the poem contained in 
 chapter ii is the prayer of Jonah offered from within 
 
 the belly of the fish. An examination of the poem, however, 
 reveals the fact that it is a delightfully embellished thanks- 
 giving for a deliverance actually experienced. Some eminent 
 critics have suggested that there is no inconsistency here. 
 They regard the great fish as the actual instrument of 
 Jonah’s escape from death. That is difficult. If one were 
 dealing with the element opposite to water, one would be 
 inclined rather to quote the homely proverb, “‘ Out of the 
 frying-pan into the fire.’ For there are indications in the 
 Old Testament that the fear and dislike of the sea enter- 
 tained by the Hebrew people, though due in part to mere 
 unfamiliarity with its infinitely varying moods, was caused 
 also by belief in the existence of the creatures that lived in 
 its depths. There was the chaos-monster, Rahab, ever 
 insurgent against the Divine Being.1 There were other 
 monsters and great fish more tractable and yet terrifying 
 _ to the imagination. One of these was hardly likely to be 
 conceived of as an angel of deliverance for a drowning man. 
 Further, as we shall find when we come to discuss the pur- 
 pose of the Book of Jonah, the symbolic meaning of the great 
 fish and its swallowing of the prophet set forth not deli- 
 verance, but an undoubted calamity in Israel’s life.2 I con- 
 clude, therefore, that the intention of the author was 
 rather to suggest that Yahweh had now safely trapped his — 
 
 1 Job xxvi, 12. Jsaiah li, 9, etc. 
 2 See p. 33, and Dr. Peake’s Introductory Note. 
 
THE BOOK AND THE SIGN 17 
 
 erring servant, and held him at last at His sovereign dis- 
 posal. In such circumstances language of thanksgiving could 
 hardly be expected from Jonah. For this reason, and also 
 because the poem describes an escape from drowning 
 rather than from a sea-monster’s maw many modern 
 scholars treat it as an interpolation by another hand.? 
 I have not felt it necessary, however, to take this view. In 
 the first place, is it not highly probable that the author 
 would feel bound to place some lyrical outburst of thanks- 
 giving upon the prophet’s lips when actually ferra firma was 
 reached, as in the case of Hezekiah’s deliverance from 
 mortal sickness (Isaiah xxxviiil)? And the extremely 
 beautiful piety of the poem, its wistful outlooking towards 
 God, its humble thankfulness help to build up the climax 
 of the story by shewing how, even after not only deliverance 
 from death but spiritual renewal, old blind prejudices may 
 still persist and reassert their sway, just as Hezekiah’s 
 psalm of thanksgiving is followed immediately by a lapse 
 into worldly pride.2 Again, when we come later to the 
 interpretation of Jonah in terms of national history we 
 shall see the counterpart of all this in Israel’s life. 
 
 It is of course true that Jonah’s psalm does not reflect 
 very clearly Jonah’s terrible situation within the fish. To 
 have made it do this would have involved a disgusting 
 piece of realism such as one may read in that fourteenth 
 century alliterative version of Jonah entitled Patience, 
 recently reissued by Sir Israel Gollancz. One turns back 
 from this English paraphrase to the Hebrew original with 
 a new sense of the latter’s charm and delicacy of touch. 
 I believe the Hebrew writer deliberately allowed his imagina- 
 tion to escape a little from the framework of his narrative, 
 in order to make the suggestion of mortal peril as powerful 
 as possible without involving nauseous particulars. 
 
 At the same time, as already indicated, there is an un- 
 
 1See Peake’s Commentary in loc. and the International Critical 
 
 Commentary. 
 2 Isaiah xxxix, 
 
18 THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 doubted difficulty in representing the prayer of a man 
 swallowed by a sea-monster as a grateful retrospect of a 
 trouble passed away. A triumphant faith such as that 
 inculcated by our Lord, All things whatsoever ye pray and 
 ask for, believe that ye have received them, and ye shall have 
 them, is hardly to be looked for in the Old Testament, nor 
 would it be germane to the somewhat artistic character of 
 the psalm. 
 
 We notice, however, that the poem refers back (English 
 version II, 7) to a previous prayer offered while the pro- 
 phet lay in a fainting condition. It is possible to regard 
 this fainting prayer as that sent up from out the fish’s 
 belly, and by the slight rearrangement of the order of the 
 verses made in the translation, to read the hymn of chapter 
 ii as spoken after Jonah reached dry land. This is the 
 position adopted by some modern scholars and the one 
 which appeals most to my own judgement. 
 
 AS. Mark xi,°24. 
 
IV 
 
 JONAH AS A FOLK-TALE 
 
Jewish folk-love contains a large number of legends setting forth 
 the velations of man with his Maker. The character of many of these 
 legends has been indicated by Dy. Immanuel Olsvanger in his recent 
 essay CONTENTIONS WITH Gop (Hasefer Agency for Literature, 
 London). Quaint, expostulatory, daring, they disclose the common 
 mind of Isvael in many ages, many lands, as freely drawing upon 
 the tmagination for the elucidation of righteousness. They show us 
 how naturally such a story as Jonah would circulate orally, apart 
 from any currency tt might have in manuscript, and how the common 
 people of Isvael would delight the more readily in Jonah’s quarrel 
 with his God, because thereby the Divine goodness was the more won- 
 derfully vevealed. In this section, accordingly, the writer has attempted 
 by the aid of imagination to reproduce the primitive oral circulation 
 of the story of Jonah. 
 
IV 
 JONAH AS A FOLK-TALE 
 
 N an evening more than 2,000 years ago—it needs 
 not now to say how many more—a few shepherds 
 in the wilderness of Horeb pitched their black worsted 
 tents near a trickle of water that escaped from the moun- 
 tain’s side. They made ready their supper of camel-milk, 
 boiling it over a dung-fire, and baked oil-cake thereat, and 
 unpacked a handful of dates and some salt. The sun fell 
 swiftly. Stars broke through the purplish-blue heaven. 
 In the distance wild creatures howled from fear or hunger. 
 The tent’s warm protection was welcome for scantily clad 
 men, and as they sat beside a single dim lamp, after far- 
 separated labours and long silence, one told to another his 
 tale of the day’s simple adventures—the sight of a strayed 
 cormorant come up from distant sea-rocks, a_ basilisk 
 lurking amid the burning sands, dust of a far-off caravan 
 crawling from Egypt, and last, the counting of the sheep 
 as they passed down to the water and—thanks to the 
 Almighty—not one missing. 
 
 This night more yet was to be said. For of a sudden 
 came a stirring among the tethered camels. A dog barked 
 furiously. Herdsmen hastened in with news of a traveller 
 dimly discernible fifty yards away, crying out to them 
 that he might tarry for a night. 
 
 They brought him in and set salt and cakes before him 
 and such milk as was left; and he, exhausted by long 
 searching for some track obliterated by sudden siroccos, 
 ate and drank, giving God thanks. Thereafter they ques- 
 tioned him of his name and country and of the great world 
 
22 THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 of cities they so seldom entered. Calling himself Ben- 
 Ammi (the Son of my people), the stranger answered their 
 questions, and then told of one whom he had met upon the 
 road from Hebron, a learned man, who had offered him a 
 scripture, saying, ‘ Read this, I pray thee,’ but he had 
 perforce answered, “ I cannot for I am not learned.’ Whereat 
 the stranger had sat down beside him under a juniper tree 
 and had read to him the book, telling him many words 
 besides that explained the book, all which, because the story 
 he related was most wondrously full of the Spirit of God, 
 he could remember to speak again. 
 
 The story was this. There dwelt in Galilee a prophet of 
 Yahweh named Jonah. Often had this man of God seen 
 from the hill-tops of his country great armies of the Gen- 
 tiles, with their hot-breathed horses, and with a multitude 
 of chariots whose wheels glittered in the sun like bundles 
 of swords. And, because he loved peace and ease and 
 contemplation, the heart of Jonah was wrathful at the 
 frequency of battles and at the laying waste of the corn- 
 fields and vineyards. He hated the very name of the 
 Assyrian. His own people of Israel he esteemed as God’s 
 elect son. Also, being a Hebrew of the Hebrews, he held 
 to the ancient ways of worship, and loved to ponder the 
 words of the prophets before him. To his neighbours he 
 often spoke of the greatness of Yahweh, pointing to the 
 stars and asking, Who hath created these that bringeth out 
 their host by number ? And often he would sing the words 
 of the son of Jesse, [ love thee, O Yahweh, my Sirength. 
 But with the passing of time there worked a change in him. 
 For although Jonah saw and heard enough of the armies 
 of the heathen that came and went, yet, his home being 
 hidden away amongst the hills, he himself dwelt securely, 
 and had nought to trouble him. Indeed, full of ease, the 
 spirit in the prophet began to slumber, and he ceased at 
 last to speak the word of Yahweh to the people. No 
 disciples gathered about him to write down-and treasure 
 his oracles. And the placid years came, wherein a man 
 
THE BOOK AND THE SIGN 53 
 
 ceases to see the visions of youth and dreams not as yet the 
 dreams of old men. He spent these mid years of life as a 
 tale that is told. | 
 
 But it came to pass, on a day when Jonah sat under his , 
 
 figtree, watching the flying of a hoopoe that nested near 
 by, a youth came running to him and spake of the Assyrians, 
 how they had smitten down the people that dwelt by 
 Megiddo, slaying the men with the sword, and carrying 
 away their wives and daughters to Nineveh. Jonah 
 stirred himself a little and muttered in reply, ‘ It is Yahweh, 
 let Him do what seemeth Him good.’ ‘ Nay, father Jonah,’ 
 said the youth, ‘ but Yahweh surely hath need of one to 
 rebuke the enemy and the devourer of His people.’ And 
 he departed from him. 
 
 Thereafter Jonah slept, and in his dream he saw, and lo !s« 
 a mighty city, with walls high and lifted up against heaven, 
 thronged with a strange people. Over the city ina dark sky 
 was the flame of a sword held by burning seraphim. Vast 
 was its sweep, tearing the black clouds. And Jonah awoke 
 hearing a voice that said, Arise, go to Nineveh, the Great 
 City, and shout against it; for their wickedness affronts me. 
 
 In the sweat of his brow he girt his loins, and took a 
 staff in his hand, and put bread and wine and silver in his 
 scrip, and set out upon his journey. But even as he went, 
 another voice spake within him bidding him stay beside 
 the pleasant vineyards of Gath-Hepher. Why should he 
 thrust himself into a lion’s den? What avail was it to 
 speak of justice and judgement to the heathen? Let 
 Yahweh pour out His wrath upon them, and that suddenly 
 as when a robber slays, and then strips the slain, at mid- 
 night. So Jonah thought within himself and counted the 
 word of Yahweh a foolish thing, and despised the counsel 
 of the Almighty. 
 
 Yet did he not dare to turn back, lest all his neighbours 
 who had seen him depart should mock at his return. More- 
 over the hand of Yahweh was upon him ; there was, as it 
 were, a burning fire shut up in his bones. He thought to 
 
24 THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 find no relief save in leaving Yahweh’s land for some far-off 
 Western shore. So he turned to the South and came down 
 to Joppa, a city of the uncircumcised Philistines, and there 
 he found a ship about to sail for Tartessus, in the land of 
 the sunset beyond the Great Sea. And he paid the fare 
 for this long journey, for he was a rich man and had lived 
 in plenty. Then as one afraid he hastened down into the 
 lowest part of the ship, and hid himself amongst the bales 
 of Tyrian cloths and coils of hempen rope. Now also as the 
 ship rode upon the waves the vision of the word of Yahweh 
 ceased from Jonah’s heart. He was free, for was he not 
 escaped from Yahweh’s land? But still in his memory fell 
 echoes of words he had spoken to the people in days long 
 past, wherein he had declared that Yahweh was Lord of 
 heaven and earth and sea. Wearied out with his journey 
 and angry and hopeless, at last he slept deeply. 
 
 Now, continued Ben-Ammi, when the Scribe told me the 
 story thus far I trembled, for I bethought me of Jordan 
 when it overfloweth its banks, and of Chinnereth on the 
 way to Damascus, and of the sea of the Arabah whose 
 waters are bitter, and all these are often troubled with 
 tempest yet ever have the land about them. But the 
 Great Sea stretcheth to the sky and no man knoweth the 
 end thereof. Thou shudderest, said the learned man, and 
 ‘truly the power of Yahweh is not shortened to the hills 
 and rocks and the cities of Israel. He blew His breath 
 upon the sea. The ship’s sails were torn to pieces and she 
 crouched between the waves, as a woman with flying hair 
 crouches in terror, fearing a breaking blow. And on the 
 ship every mariner was crying to his god. But there was 
 no god that heard. Then because the waves were snapping 
 the tacklings, the shipmaster and the mariners went down 
 into the hold to take up their wares and to cast them into 
 the sea. And amongst them lo! Jonah asleep. What! 
 cried the shipmaster bitterly, will sleeping help us? Arise 
 and call upon thy God, if perchance God will give thought 
 to our plight and rescue us, 
 
THE BOOK AND THE SIGN 25 
 
 Then also one of the seamen said to his fellows, Come 
 and let us cast lots that we may see who of us is the cause 
 of this disaster. The lot fell upon Jonah! Then they 
 questioned him and he told them how he feared Yahweh 
 who had made both the sea and the dry land. And because 
 he saw that the face of Yahweh was against him, he bade 
 them cast him as a prey to the roaring sea. But the men, 
 though they were of the Gentiles, and knew not Yahweh, 
 were kindly, and they plunged their oars into the sea, 
 rowing hard to get back to Joppa. Howbeit the sea grew 
 more and more angry. Then did they pray to the God of 
 Jonah to be merciful unto them, and if they did unto His 
 servant as he had requested, not to charge them with 
 shedding innocent blood. When, therefore, they had 
 prayed, two of them lifted up the prophet and threw him 
 into the raging waves ; wide open and dark were his eyes 
 amid the white crested waters; then he sank out of their 
 sight. At once the wind ceased and the waves gnashed 
 upon the ship no more. Then the mariners were filled with 
 fear, and they hastened and offered unto Yahweh a sacrifice 
 of young pigeons which, after the manner of the Gentiles, 
 they had taken with them for the discernment of omens. 
 And they made vows and worshipped Yahweh. 
 
 Now Yahweh had created the great sea-monsters, and 
 he ordered one of these to swallow Jonah. Then was 
 Jonah three days and three nights in the monster’s belly. 
 And his soul fainted within him, and he prayed to Yahweh 
 from the bottom of the deep sea, amid the rocky roots of 
 the mountains, where, amongst the weeds, the monster 
 had his home. And his prayer came up through the green 
 waters, and like a white sea-bird that rises crying to its 
 mate in the high cleft above the breaking billows it entered 
 into the temple of Yahweh in heaven. So Yahweh bade 
 the sea-monster to cast Jonah out upon the dry land. And 
 the sea-monster did so. Then did Jonah sacrifice unto 
 Yahweh with the voice of thanksgiving. 
 
 As he was worshipping, lo! the word of Yahweh came to 
 
 Cc 
 
26 THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 him a second time saying, Arise, go unto Nineveh, the 
 Great City, and proclaim against it the proclamation that 
 I bid thee. So Jonah went to Nineveh. Now Nineveh 
 was a city, great even in the sight of God. Three days were 
 needed for a man to travel from one end of it to the other. 
 And Jonah journeyed in it one whole day, saying nought 
 to any man. But on the second day he began to preach, 
 and he said, In three days’ time Nineveh shall be over- 
 thrown. And the people of Nineveh believed God’s word. 
 Even the king of Nineveh heard about Jonah, and he left 
 his throne, and cast aside his robe, and girt himself with 
 sackcloth, sitting down amid ashes. Also he commanded 
 the people everywhere to fast, neither to eat nor drink, 
 nor to give to their cattle, but all to wear sackcloth, even 
 the beasts in the fields and the oxen in the stalls. Let all, 
 he said, turn away from evil and from violence and pray 
 to God, if so be God will have mercy upon us. Then did 
 God repent of the evil He had said He would do unto them, 
 and He did it not. 
 
 Now Jonah went on his way through the city still preach- 
 ing and saying, Nineveh shall be destroyed in three days. 
 And everywhere the heralds of the king followed, making 
 proclamation that men should mourn and fast and turn 
 from their evil ways. And it was as when reapers with 
 their sickles cut down the thick-standing corn in the field : 
 as they went through the city, the people, hearing the word 
 of Yahweh and of the king prostrated themselves upon the 
 ground with weeping and crying and mourning. And lo! 
 the third day came and Jonah looking back saw and heard 
 the lamentation of the people. And he was very angry 
 indeed because they repented, for he knew that in 
 their repentance they would be forgiven. So he prayed 
 that Yahweh would take away his life from him. But 
 Yahweh only said unto him, Art thou very angry ? 
 
 Jonah answered not again to Yahweh, but went out of 
 the city. In his anger he tore down some branches of a 
 tree and made himself a booth and sat in its shadow watch- 
 
THE BOOK AND THE SIGN 27 
 
 ing the city, if so be that even yet Yahweh would destroy 
 it. But there came no storm-cloud in the sky, neither was 
 there any shaking of the earth. 
 
 Now the leaves of the branches Jonah had cut for his 
 booth soon withered in the sun, and so God caused a gourd 
 to spring up beside it that the broad green leaves of the 
 gourd might make a shade for Jonah, just as men often 
 plant the gourd beside a lodge in a garden of cucumbers 
 to grow upon the poles thereof. So Jonah rejoiced greatly 
 in the gourd. But God sent a worm next day to smite the 
 gourd, and all its pleasant leafage withered away. Also 
 God sent the sirocco, blowing very softly, and in the heat 
 of the sun Jonah’s spirit fainted within him, and again he 
 asked God that he might die. 
 
 Then did God answer him, Art thou very angry about the 
 gourd? And Jonah said, Very angry lam; I could die with 
 anger. And Yahweh said, Thou hast cared for the gourd, 
 although thou hast not laboured over it, neither madest it 
 to grow, the offspring of the night-dews, perishing too in a 
 night. Should not I have pity upon the people of Nineveh, 
 the work of my own hands, a multitude whom I have fed 
 and nourished from their childhood, more than six score 
 thousand of them, all ignorant of the way they should walk 
 in? And should I not pity also their innocent cattle ? 
 
 Through the tent-door came the peaceful light of the 
 jewelled sky. Ben-Ammi rose and led the shepherds 
 forth, saying, Look now toward Heaven. Wide are the 
 ways of the Almighty, and many are the stars. So like- 
 wise is His mercy upon His servant Ben-Ammi, and upon 
 every son of every people, and upon every living thing 
 which God hath created and made. 
 
~ i 
 
 a 
 — 
 + 
 
 < 
 
 
 
V 
 
 THE PURPOSE AND CHARACTER OF THE BOOK 
 
[Throughout this and the succeeding studies I distinguish the Scrtp- 
 ture from the prophet by naming the former the BooK OF JONAH, as 
 in the English vgrsions one reads the Book oF EsTHER, and the Book 
 
 OF Jos, etc.) 
 
V 
 THE PURPOSE AND CHARACTER OF THE BOOK 
 
 NY satisfactory exposition of this Scripture must deal 
 with the things in the book itself, unencumbered by 
 references to it elsewhere. Thus our Lord’s allusions to 
 Jonah, which will be discussed in a later chapter, do not here 
 concern us at all. It may, however, be said at once that 
 such references as He made have little or nothing in common 
 with the main purpose of the book. Whereas Jesus was 
 thinking of the impact of Jonah upon the Ninevites, the 
 author evidently desired to exhibit the character of Jonah in 
 respect to the Divine mercy upon Nineveh. “It is clear that 
 Jesus only used the book for the purposes of an illustration. - 
 At the same time, since He referred to the Ninevites as 
 s nding up at the Last Judgement with the men of His own 
 generation, it is also clear that He treated the book as 
 historical. He would do this simply because of its narra- 
 tive form. Had the question of its historicity been raised 
 in His time, and been viewed in the lights with which for 
 us it is invested, it is possible His usage of the book might 
 have been accompanied by some qualification safeguarding + 
 its true literary character. Certainly He, whose favourite 
 teaching-method was the parable, a method evidently 
 selected for the quickening of thought in individual minds, 
 would have been no party to any closuring of free enquiry, 
 nor to the introduction in the discussion of any merely 
 arbitrary authority.1 As loyal Christian disciples, there- 
 fore, we are free to examine our subject in its proper place 
 as a book of the Old Testament having its occasion and 
 -1See further the Note C, on page 99, at the end of the book. 
 
32 THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 meaning long before Jesus spoke. Similar to His use of 
 the Scripture—broad, general, untechnical—would be that 
 first oral circulation of the story it told, which has been 
 suggested in the previous section. Looking at it more 
 closely, however, we can see it had a mission particular to « 
 the author's time. That mission is now our concern. 
 
 In the enquiry before us, we shall find that the allegorical 
 interpretation is the only method of reading the Book of * 
 Jonah which can do full justice to its artistic quality. The 
 more closely it is studied the more sure we are that the 
 writer has freely quarried in the realms of both Nature and 
 the Supernatural for the purpose of expressing one para- 
 mount truth. 
 
 Now if the story is an allegory, it is unnecessary to suppose » 
 that a prophet named Jonah ever visited Nineveh at all. 
 Symbolic journeys and actions were sometimes made by 
 the Hebrew prophets, but it would appear that at other 
 times they were content, after having publicly announced 
 them, to take such things as done. Thus, Ezekiel was , 
 commanded to lie down upon his couch, first of all on his 
 left side for a period of 390 days, and then on his right side 
 for 40 days, all the time being bound with cords, that 
 he might represent to the people God’s judgement upon the 
 sins of Israel and of Judah respectively (Ezekiel iv, 4-8).4 
 Did he really lie in bed so uncomfortably for some thirteen 
 months in order to illustrate the impending punishment 
 of his nation’s sins? Similarly Jeremiah was bidden to, 
 make two journeys to the River Euphrates? in order that 
 by first burying his girdle there, and then later on recovering 
 it he might effectively picture to the people of Jerusalem 
 Yahweh’s power to mar their pride (Jeremiah xiii, I-4). 
 We can hardly think he really went ; and in view of all the 
 circumstances involved, the journey of Jonah to Nineveh 
 
 1The actual numbers should perhaps be read differently. This, 
 however, is immaterial. 
 
 2 It is possible, though not probable, that Parah near Anathoth, 
 
 rather than Euphrates, is intended. This would lessen but not 
 destroy the force of my illustration. 
 
THE BOOK AND THE SIGN 33 
 
 and his preaching there in a foreign language, is almost 
 equally improbable. Indeed, for the purposes of the 
 author of the Book of Jonah, it is not essential, at most 
 only a happy subsidiary fact, that any prophet of this 
 name actually existed at all. Pure works of fiction, how- 
 ever, are not so much to be looked for in Hebrew literature 
 as imaginative and free reconstructions of actual events, 
 and it is possible the story of Jonah starts from an historic 
 basis. All that now we can discern of that foundation is the 
 fact that a prophet of this name is referred to in JJ Kings 
 Xlv, 25, as having foretold an extension of the kingdom of 
 Israel under Jeroboam IJ. We shall consider later such 
 significance as he possesses for this book that bears his 
 name. 
 
 The foundation of the allegory of Jonahylies in Jeremiah 
 li, 34-44. Israel is heard bitterly complaining: Nebu- -« 
 chadrezzar the King of Babylon hath devoured me, he hath set 
 me as an empty vessel, he has swallowed me up like a monster, 
 he hath filled his maw with my delicacies ; he hath rinsed me 
 out. ‘The violence done to me and my flesh be upon Baby- 
 lon!’ let the inhabitants of Zion say; and ‘ My blood be 
 upon the inhabitants of Chaldea!’ let Jerusalem say. 
 Therefore thus saith Yahweh: Behold, I will defend thy 
 cause and take vengeance for thee. ... And I will punish 
 Bel in Babylon, and I will bring forth out of his mouth that 
 which he hath swallowed up: and the nations shall not flow 
 together any more unto him: yea, the wall of Babylon is 
 fallen !+ Here we have a pictorial representation of the 
 Exile and the Return under the figure of the swallowing * 
 of a man by a sea-monster and his subsequent ejectment 
 from the monster’s mouth. In the same way Jonah’s 
 adventure in the sea figuratively expresses the Captivity 
 and the Return, the prophet first of all representing his 
 nation and then more particularly the whole order of the 
 prophets in his time. 
 
 Before looking at this any further a glance at certain 
 
 1 Driver’s translation. 
 
34 THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 other features of the story will make clear the high impro 
 bability of any literal interpretation. Consider the peni- 
 tence of the Ninevites, not its suddenness and completeness 
 but the grotesque form it takes. The decree of the king 
 and his nobles requires a universal abstinence from food 
 and water not only by the people but also by their numerous 
 flocks and herds. Both men and beasts are to be clothed 
 in sackcloth and—if we are really to be literal—all together 
 to cry vehemently to God for His mercy. Conceive the 
 picture and listen to the petitions and bellowings of this 
 vast and mixed assembly! Conservative commentators 
 have diligently sought out from Herodotus and other 
 ancient writers (e.g., Judith iv, 9-15) stories of domestic 
 animals that were made to bear the trappings of mourning, 
 as until recently was the case with our own funeral horses ; 
 but I find no instance of cattle being called upon to par- 
 ticipate in the prayers of their masters, although, no doubt, 
 they might somehow vocalise their distress. The thing 
 is preposterous if the narrative is history: it is exquisite 
 
 if it is the irony of fiction? Had we met with the — 
 
 king of Nineveh’s decree in the pages of Sir John Mande- 
 ville we should scarcely have failed to recognise its lurking 
 humour, a quality which peeps out again in Yahweh’s 
 question to His sulky servant, Ave you very angry? as 
 also in the words about the shadow of the miraculously 
 growing gourd being granted the prophet ¢o deliver him 
 from his evil case. 
 
 But the particular literary quality of the book reaches 
 its fullest expression in the expostulation of Jonah when 
 Nineveh is spared. He is displeased, and his displeasure 
 has been explained by some as occasioned by the apparent 
 stultification of his prediction. Hebrew prophecy, how- 
 ever, was always contingent. At least five times in the 
 Old Testament God is said to have repented of the evil 
 He had threatened. Jeremiah formally laid down what we 
 
 1 Taking the latter view I find it unnecessary to suppose, with 
 some scholars, an error here in the Hebrew text. 
 
 ® 
 
 é 
 
THE BOOK AND THE SIGN 35 
 
 may call the doctrine of the Divine Mobility—God’s free- 
 dom to change His mind, as man changes his—in the 
 following passage: The word of Yahweh came to me saying 
 . . . At what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and 
 concerning a kingdom, to pluck up and to break down and to 
 destroy 1t; tf that nation concerning which I have spoken, 
 turn from thetr evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to 
 do unto them.1 So Jonah’s menace to the Ninevites must 
 in his own mind have depended for its fulfilment upon 
 their continuance in sin. And, indeed, this is implied in * 
 his remonstrance to Yahweh. Before he set out on his 
 journey, he declares, he knew what the issue of his preaching ° 
 would be, namely that they would be forgiven. He has 
 even the audacity to say that he had hoped by fleeing to 
 Tartessus to forestall and thwart the gracious purpose of 
 the message which he was commissioned to take. Ap- | 
 parently in his tremendous egotism he has forgotten that | 
 he is not the only messenger at Yahweh’scommand. Surely | 
 the frame of mind revealed in his language here is a very — 
 curious one for a prophet of Yahweh, so curious in fact as 
 inevitably to raise the question, Would any real Hebrew 
 prophet ever speak like this? Can such a misanthropic 
 man have been a living prophet at all? Ah! Yahweh, 
 was not this what I said when I was yet in my own land ? 
 Why, tt was because of this I tried to forestall Thee by fleeing 
 to Tartessus for I knew that thou art a gracious God, slow 
 to anger, and plenteous in mercy, and repentest thee of the evil. 
 Is this, indeed, a possible prayer? We notice that the 
 phrases employed about Yahweh are just the current 
 watchwords of Israel’s piety. Most of them meet us over 
 and over again in the Old Testament. Taken together 
 they have here the force of a creed and appear to be bor- 
 rowed direct from Joel ii, 13. Yahweh 7s gracious, and full 
 
 1 For the full doctrine see the whole passage Jeremiah xviii, I-10, 
 and compare also Ezekiel xviii, 2off. 
 
 ?I quote the rest of the prayer from the Revised Version, in 
 
 order that the reader may the more easily recognise the conven- 
 tionality of Jonah’s description of his God, 
 
36 THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 of compassion, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy, and 
 vepenteth him of the evil. Now to make Jonah ascribe these 
 beautiful qualities to his God as the reason for refusing to 
 preach about Him is excellent irony but impossible history. 
 No Hebrew prophet would have dared to use in prayer to 
 Yahweh the most classic words on the Divine mercy to 
 be found in the speech of his countrymen, as a reason for 
 disapproving the exercise of that mercy. It would be 
 almost as though an English Christian prayed to his Lord, 
 “I knew that Thou camest into the world to save sinners 
 and therefore when Thou calledst me to preach Thy Gospel 
 in India I fled to New York.’ Our actions and negligences 
 may be as inconsistent with creed as this, but we do not 
 
 cS 
 
 commonly flaunt them in the face of God with quite such 
 
 open cynicism. The Book of Jonah seems clearly revealed 
 here as a piece of vigorous and yet delicate satire, and its 
 hero to be as truly a literary creation as, say, Sir Hudibras 
 or Don Quixote. 
 
 It will help us to see the cogency of the appeal of the 
 _ book if we can place it in relation to Hebrew history. There 
 is general agreement that it was written after the Exile, 
 yet not later than the third century, B.c. Various dates 
 between 400 and 200 B.c. have been assigned for its compo- 
 sition. Dr. Bewer, in the International Critical Commen- 
 tary, leaves the matter undetermined between these limits. 
 Dr. Peake, in his Commentary, places it in the fourth or the 
 third century. Sir George Adam Smith, in the Expositor’s 
 Bible, appears to favour a time somewhere about the year 
 300, say 130 years after the work of Ezra and Nehemiah. 
 If we may choose a fairly early date and bring the book 
 into relation with the restored community, while those 
 religious forces which Ezra and Nehemiah represented were 
 in full operation, we shall obtain a most relevant 
 situation. 
 
 The attitude of post-exilic Israel to the outside world 
 always appears to our minds a lamentable declension from 
 the lofty teaching of Isaiah xl-lv. The impressive feature 
 
 S 
 
 = 
 
THE BOOK AND THE SIGN 37 
 
 of that great work of prophecy, written mostly on the eve 
 of the Return, is its universal outlook and its missionary 
 appeal. Israel, as the servant of Yahweh, is to be a light 
 to the Gentiles. We read the splendid oracles contained 
 in Jsatah xiii, xliti, xlix, lii, 13—liii, lv, and then turn to the ,, 
 records of the restored community in Jerusalem, with its 
 anti-Samaritan feuds, and polemic against those mixed 
 marriages the Book of Ruth seems to have been written to 
 justify, and we wonder that so great a voice should have 
 awakened echoes so few in men who were unquestionably 
 devout. Amongst the acknowledged writers of the time 
 and of the century immediately following we see no one 
 upon whom the mantle of the great prophet of the Exile, 
 the Second Isaiah, had evidently fallen. On the contrary 
 the author of Zechariah ix-xiv, a Scripture probably later 
 than the Book of Jonah, confessed to the existence of very 
 unworthy elements in the men of his order. As a moral 
 force prophetism was surely spent, was, indeed, bankrupt, 
 when it could be said by Yahweh of a time of coming 
 blessing, J will cause the prophets and the unclean spirit to 
 pass out of the land, and when this could be supported by 
 a picture of the prophet as a dervish-fanatic with self- 
 inflicted wounds, shamefacedly disowning his own frenzy 
 (Zechariah xiii, 2-6). 
 
 At some time, then, in these epochs of religious narrow- 
 ness and atavistic prophetism, the Book of Jonah was 
 written, not as a work of prophecy, but, in the first place, 
 as a satire upon the contemporary prophetic order, and, 
 in the second place, as an arraignment of the nation whom 
 the prophets represented. It is probably the work of one 
 whom we should call a layman, a man of literary culture 
 and of outlook broadened by travel, with a heart whose 
 affluence included humour and sympathy as far-reaching 
 as that of any mind in the Old Testament. 
 
 I have ventured to compare his portraiture of Jonah with 
 Butler’s Siv Hudibras or with the Don Quixote of Cervantes. 
 For various reasons the latter comparison is the pleasanter 
 
38 THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 and the more suitable. It may be worth while in a few 
 sentences to establish this reference. 
 
 Although, of course, in bulk there is a great difference 
 between these two masterpieces in the literature of satire, 
 yet if the Spanish work through its quantity has a cumula- 
 tive effect to which the Hebrew story can make no claim, 
 we may yet say of the latter: 
 
 In small proportions we just beauties see ; 
 And in short measures life may perfect be. 
 Both works had a serious moral purpose. Prescott, in his 
 essay on Cervantes, reviewing the intellectual and moral 
 temper of Spain in the sixteenth century, draws attention 
 to the mischievous influence exerted by the books of chivalry 
 then so widely current. The mind of the Spanish people 
 was debauched and their morals were impaired by foolish 
 and impossible stories of knight-errantry. So much was 
 this the case that in 1555 the Cortes petitioned the Crown 
 (but vainly) to suppress this literature by a licensing decree. 
 The best minds in Spain deplored the patent degradation 
 of popular taste, but were helpless to stay it. Then it was 
 that Cervantes wrote his immortal satire upon the knight- 
 errant. Like Jonah, the knight de la Mancha is not without 
 elements of greatness. Much of his discourse, when he is 
 free from his obsession, is notable and solid. This, how- 
 ever, only helps to overwhelm with destructive laughter 
 the obsolescent véle he is so anxious to sustain. And in 
 this, the first object of the book, the author is completely 
 successful. 
 
 But Cervantes achieved more than an effective criticism 
 of a type of person who, in earlier years, had fulfilled a real 
 function, but whose figure had later become a nuisance 
 and injury to society. What Don Quixote did for Spain 
 is put by the late Major Martin Hume thus: 
 
 To other countries that welcomed the marvellous 
 book it appealed by its wit, its satire, and its truth ; 
 and these qualities, together with its pathos, doubt- 
 less aided its popularity in Spain also. But to Spaniards 
 
THE BOOK AND THE SIGN 39 
 
 it was much more than a witty book; it was the 
 supreme cry, echoing from the inmost heart of the 
 nation, that the old gods were dead, and that Spain’s 
 exalted heroics were now but a laughing-stock. The 
 nation was indeed decadent: its faith and belief in 
 itself had fled, and presumptuous pretence, personal 
 and national, was but a poor substitute for the spiritual 
 exaltation that had made it great. 
 
 Now the Book of Jonah does for the professional prophet 
 of the writer’s time something like that which Don Qutxote ° 
 did for the knight-errant in Spain, only the verdict is not 
 so definitive, even as it is not so stern as the judgement 
 pronounced upon the same lamentable creature in Zechariah 
 xiii. The Book of Jonah does not banish the prophet either 
 with laughter or with execration, but it makes him a lugu- 
 brious renegade, false through cultivated pessimism to the 
 very reason and purpose of his existence. Further, just as 
 Don Quixote served also the larger purpose of a judgement 
 upon the Spanish people, so the Book of Jonah is more than} 
 a criticism of the prophetic order : it condemns the popular’ 
 mood. This will be made more apparent in a later chapter. 
 
 We do not know all the causes which led to the presenta- 
 tion of the story of Jonah, as it now stands, but we can 
 see how exceedingly well its parts fit together. In this 
 case a name—the name of the prophet—is certainly more 
 than a mere appellation. Israel was often spoken of as a* 
 jonah, that is, a dove.2, The Son of Amuttat also is a didactic 
 name, suggestively reminding us of Puritan names in 
 Cromwell's day—a period in religious history which re- 
 sembled the time of our writer in its legalistic conceptions 
 of piety. The Dove is the Son of Truth, the typical guile- > 
 less and orthodox believer, in the Hebrew community. 
 The actual historic prophet of JJ Kings xiv, 25, who bore 
 this suggestive name, was remembered only as one who 
 had predicted a political expansion of Israel’s borders. 
 We may conceive him as concerned more with Israel's 
 
 1 Cambridge Modern History, iti, 547. 
 2 Flosea Vii, 11; xi, II. 
 
40 THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 external greatness than with her spiritual well-being. As 
 such he also contributes to the success of the book that 
 bears his name, for the imperialistic aim in politics, the 
 zeal that seeks an ever-expanding earthly dominion, un- 
 happily is often associated with that dislike of other peoples 
 which is the subject of our writer’s censure. 
 
 So for those who prided themselves on being strict | 
 followers of Moses and Ezra—the Pentateuch was now 
 
 'complete—this allegory of an erring prophet was 
 
 bs, 
 
 woven about an old and mostly forgotten man, whose 
 very name seemed framed for the purpose of a deadly 
 satire. In effect the writer said to the prophets of his time 
 and their hearers and associates in the worship of Yahweh : 
 You call yourselves holy. You are harmless as doves, 
 children of impeccable orthodoxy. You believe that God 
 is slow to anger, full of compassion, plenteous in mercy, and 
 that He repents Him of the evil. Yes; you have the whole 
 gamut of the vocabulary of piety. You have had, too, the 
 great lesson of the Exile told you by your fathers. Asa 
 nation you have been buried deep in the very belly of Hell. 
 But your temper is unchanged and stiff-necked, and if the 
 word of Yahweh were preached to the Gentiles, and they 
 repented as men never repented before, clothing themselves 
 and even their very sheep and oxen with sackcloth, all 
 mightily, if confusedly, lifting up their crying to Heaven, 
 you would still spurn the Gentiles from fellowship with 
 yourselves, you would refuse to welcome them to share 
 those blessings of which you say so much. 
 
 So at least the book could hardly fail to be understood by 
 
 ' those to whom especially it was addressed, and who could 
 
 see its cogency by many a particular or fact of the time 
 which for us is only summarised in the general picture 
 presented by the contemporary literature. Something, 
 perhaps, of the asperity of reproof may have been mitigated 
 by the lambent humour which lights up these few but 
 wonderful pages. This, however, but serves to make its 
 purposive criticism the more unanswerable. 
 
THE BOOK AND THE SIGN 4I 
 
 And now let us examine yet further this Prophet of the 
 Rueful Countenance, and let the artistic truth of the book 
 establish itself in our minds for noble ends. Strange are 
 the contradictions in the thought of the man. I revere 
 Yahweh, he says, the God of Heaven who made both sea and 
 land. Yet rises he up to flee upon the sea from the Presence 
 of Yahweh. Indeed three times in the first chapter we are 
 told of Jonah’s seeking to flee from the presence of this 
 Universal Creator. Can we disentangle his thoughts, as 
 he hastens down into the ship that is to carry him, he hopes, 
 the whole length of the Mediterranean ? 
 
 In early times his forefathers in common with other 
 Semites believed animistically. Where we moderns see a 
 reign of universal natural law, they saw things parcelled 
 out and administered by a multitude of spirits. In time 
 these supposed beings became a hierarchy under a few chief 
 gods. Then every nation possessed its own deity and 
 conversely every deity had its own people and land. Moab, 
 belonged to Chemosh, Israel to Yahweh. So when David 
 remonstrated with Saul for hunting him from place to 
 place in the wilderness, he said concerning his enemies, 
 They have driven me out this day that I should not cleave unto 
 the inheritance of Yahweh, saying, Go, serve other gods. Now 
 therefore let not my blood fall to the earth away from the 
 presence of Yahweh (I Samuel xxvi, 1of.). It would appear 
 from this that across the frontiers of Israel Yahweh’s writ 
 did not run. Banishment from the territory of one god .. 
 meant the transfer of a man’s worship to another. So 
 David understood things. It should, perhaps, be added, 
 that here we have the historic David apart from the idealised 
 David, miscredited by tradition with psalms of a far later 
 period. In the same way, the kindred people of Syria 
 once had occasion to say of Israel, Their god 1s a god of the 
 hills ; therefore they were stronger than we: but let us fight 
 against them in the plain, and surely we shall be stronger 
 than they (I Kings xx, 23). Or again, take this from the 
 story of Naaman the Syrian: convinced of the greatness 
 
 D 
 
% 
 
 42 THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 of Yahweh, Naaman requests of Elisha, Let there be given 
 to thy servant two mules’ burden of earth ; for thy servant will 
 henceforth offer neither burnt-offering nor sacrifice unto 
 other gods, but unto Yahweh (II Kings v, 17). It was just 
 a little bit of Yahweh’s land that Naaman needed to take 
 away with him, in order to build an altar to Yahweh in 
 his own country, lying as that did under the rule of a 
 different deity. How otherwise could he worship Yahweh ? 
 But Israel slowly outgrew this common Semitic philosophy 
 of religion, if we may callit such. The splendid faith of the 
 eighth century prophets claimed a wider jurisdiction for 
 Yahweh. Amos demands for Him, Ave ye not as the children 
 of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel ? saith the 
 Lord. Have not I brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt, 
 and the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Syrians from K1r ? 
 (Amos ix, 7). The circumstances of the time, however, 
 compelled Isaiah to emphasise the presence of Yahweh in 
 His temple at Jerusalem, and from that emphasis sprang 
 a great evil. A ritual-and-magic-loving generation shut 
 up its faith within those temple walls. All the tragedy 
 of the Exile had its source in the demoralising of religion 
 which then followed. But once again, as so often in the 
 systolic and diastolic movements of Revelation came a 
 new breath into Israel’s soul. As out of the broken 
 chrysalis there rises a higher-ranked creature than the 
 caterpillar that had slumbered there, so out of the broken 
 walls of Jerusalem’s temple arose a fairer and more spiritual 
 religion than any previous generation had known. The 
 faith of Israel was emancipated from territorialism. In the 
 Babylonian captivity the Hebrew was driven to seek God 
 without even the help of Naaman’s two mules’ burden of 
 sacred earth, without holy buildings, altars, or sacrifices. 
 Three happily consecutive psalms of the Exile period, or a 
 little later, the 137th, 138th and 139th? record the result. 
 At first all was mournful perplexity : 
 
 1 The titles of the 138th and 139th are, as so often in the Psalter, 
 
 - misleading and should be ignored. 
 
 
 
THE BOOK AND THE SIGN 43 
 
 By the rivers of Babylon, 
 
 There we sat down, yea, we wept 
 
 When we remembered Zion. 
 
 Upon the willows in the midst thereof 
 
 We hanged up our harps. 
 
 For there they that led us captive required of us songs, 
 
 And they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, 
 
 Sing us one of the songs of Zion. 
 
 How shall we sing Yahweh's Song 
 
 In a strange land? (cxxxvii, I-4). 
 Aye, that was the problem, man’s perpetually recurring 
 problem, the problem of the transplanting of worship from , 
 the dear, familiar, sacred haunts of the Past into some 
 forbidding territory of the unknown and the unexplored. 
 But man’s very need as he sits among his broken theologies 
 compels a rebirth of trust in a mightier God. The 138th 
 Psalm answers the 137th: 
 
 I will give thee thanks with my whole heart: 
 Before the gods will I sing praises unto thee. 
 
 Before the Gods. Conspicuously before the Gods, runs the 
 Hebrew verse (DITO Ti), will I sing praises unto thee. 
 All the kings of the earth shall give thee thanks, O Yahweh. 
 
 Surely that was a splendid defiance of deities, the singing 
 of Yahweh’s praises right in their very faces! It meant 
 that for the worshipper these traditional gods, the supposed 
 guardians of foreign lands, were fading into powerless 
 _ ghosts, like shreds of the night mists a summer dawn dis- 
 perses, and that with their evanescence the whole wide 
 world was Yahweh’s land. 
 
 Finally, the writer of the 139th Psalm registers as with 
 a gasp of wonder the advance thus made in Hebrew 
 thinking : 
 
 O Yahweh, thou hast searched me and known me. 
 Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, 
 Thou understandest my thought afar off. 
 
 oe a 8 
 
* 
 
 44 THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 Thou hast beset me behind and before, 
 And laid thine hand upon me. 
 
 Such knowledge 1s too wonderful for me ; 
 It is high, I cannot attain unto it. 
 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 take the wings of the morning, 
 
 And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; 
 Even there shall thy hand lead me, 
 
 And thy right hand shall hold me. 
 
 Such was the faith reached by Israel in Babylon. With 
 that revelation the Exiles returned. The men and women 
 around the author of the Book of Jonah were supposed to 
 hold this larger creed. Indeed, as we have seen Jonah 
 himself testifies to it in his confession to the sailors on board 
 the ship. Jonah knows it all and prays to his God from 
 the very belly of the fish, deep down at the bottom of the 
 sea, knowing that even there Yahweh's right hand can 
 hold him and lift him out. Is it not strange that sharing 
 the splendour of Israel’s enlarged faith, this man, because 
 of rooted aversion to the task imposed upon him, should 
 have turned back to the older, narrower faith of Yahweh 
 and His land, and have seriously thought that he could 
 escape the God who had been so vastly revealed? It is 
 an illustration of lines in Francis Thompson’s The Hound 
 of Heaven: 
 
 I fled Him down the arches of the years ; 
 
 I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways 
 
 Of my own mind. 
 The secret of this lapse into an earlier theology is just 
 Jonah’s very refusal to express the larger faith of his people 
 in missionary service. For if Yahweh be the World-God, 
 He claims sovereignty and dispenses grace in Nineveh as 
 well as in Jerusalem. But it is always true that he who 
 disobeys the practical implications of a great creed loses 
 the glory he has seen therein, and is drawn back through 
 
THE BOOK AND THE SIGN 45 
 
 the arches of the years and the labyrinthine ways of his 
 own mind into the old discredited limitations he had out- 
 grown! The half-truths and the half-gods set up their 
 thrones in our own hearts with incredible swiftness and 
 insolent familiarity, when we are false to the larger religion 
 of the universal God. That is a great saying of the French- 
 man, Turgot, in the eighteenth century: “ It is not error 
 which opposes the progress of Truth ’’—or we might add, 
 the retention of truth—‘“it is indolence, obstinacy, the 
 spirit of routine, everything that favours inaction.”’ 
 

 
VI 
 
 THE BOOK AS PROPAGANDA 
 

 
VI 
 THE BOOK AS PROPAGANDA 
 
 HE common mind of the Church, which has collected 
 
 for us and sent forth as authoritative Scripture the 
 sixty-six books of the Old and the New Testament, is so 
 manifestly of God, that Christian people ought never to 
 despair of a superintending Providence working through 
 all the changes of their opinions. The catholicity of the 
 collection is extraordinary. Here, side by side, lie books 
 and pamphlets which, at least on their surface, plainly 
 disagree. The disagreements are all the more impressive 
 in that there is nothing bitter about them. The sacred 
 writers were content merely to state opposite aspects of 
 Truth. They shewed respect to the prerogatives of our 
 individual minds by leaving to us the task of reconcilia- 
 tion. Indeed nothing in the Bible is more suggestive of 
 the potential oneness of God and Man than this Divine 
 employment of writers antipodean to each other. For 
 to each of us, on whose behalf this high employ is devised, 
 God clearly calls saying, as to His servant Ezekiel, Son 
 of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak with thee 
 This erect attitude, with lois girt like a man, is the condi- 
 tion in which His truth is best apprehended, whether 
 offered us in the Old Testament? or in the New. 
 
 In our present study, concerned only with Hebrew 
 Scriptures, what antithetical positions are disclosed! The 
 broad oppositions of Law and Prophecy are familiar to 
 
 1 Ezekiel ii, 1. 
 
 SF ion, xaxvill, 3" xi, 7: 
 S71 Peter i,) 13: 
 
50 THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 every student. How far apart, again, is the prudential 
 righteousness of Proverbs from the superb self-integrity of 
 the patriarch Job! Or again, to turn from the Song of 
 Songs to Ecclesiastes, its immediate predecessor in the order 
 of the books, is like making a magic transposition from 
 some tropical island of luxuriant beauty to the austere 
 loveliness of an antarctic summer; yet both Scriptures 
 are of God. And, amongst the prophets, Nahum and the 
 Book of Jonah deal with the same guilty people of Nineveh, 
 . but in manners how different! Two brief booklets, one 
 numbering forty-seven verses, the other forty-eight, they 
 might suitably be printed in parallel columns, in illustra- 
 tion of that diversity of operation which is wrought by 
 the one Spirit. 
 
 The wickedness from which the Book of Jonah represents 
 the Ninevites repenting is rhetorically described in Nahum 
 thus: Where ts the den of the lions, and the feeding place of 
 the young lions, where the lion and the lioness walked, the 
 lion’s whelp, and none made them afraid ? The lion did tear 
 in pieces enough for his whelps, and strangled for his lionesses, 
 and filled his caves with prey, and his dens with ravin (il, 
 II, 12). Woe to the bloody city! «tt 1s all full of les and 
 rapine ; the prey departeth not (ili, 1). ... There 1s no 
 assuaging of thy hurt; thy wound 1s grievous: all that hear 
 the bruit of thee clap the hands over thee ; for upon whom hath 
 not thy wickedness passed continually ? (iii, 19) If we need 
 any confirmation of Nahum’s accusations against Nineveh 
 we have only to read the books of the Assyrian kings them- 
 selves in their clay tablet libraries and monuments. Sum- 
 ming up these Prof. Sayce declares that on the capture of 
 a town 
 
 Pyramids of human heads marked the path of the 
 conqueror ; boys and girls were burned alive or re- 
 served for a worse fate; men were impaled, flayed 
 alive, blinded, or deprived of their hands and feet, 
 of their ears and noses, while the women and children 
 were carried into slavery, the captured city plundered 
 
THE BOOK AND THE SIGN 51 
 
 and reduced to ashes, and the trees in its neighbour- a 
 
 hood cut down.} x 
 Such was the wickedness of which Yahweh’s word to 
 Jonah said—t has affronted me. We can understand . 
 Nahum’s exaltation when Nineveh itself was trampled 
 down by the enemy. We are tempted to say with Rabbi 
 Ben Ezra, 
 
 This rage was right i’ the main. 
 
 Was it not a right desire to see the vindication of justice 
 upon the earth? Even enlightened Christian teachers, 
 like Richard Baxter in The Saints’ Everlasting Rest, remem- 
 bering the wantonness and cruelties of their times, have 
 fiercely craved a sight of Hell for the enhancement of the ~ 
 joys of Heaven. 
 
 Now the author of the Book of Jonah doubtless chose 
 Nineveh as his theme just because its reputation had been 
 so vile. All that Nahum felt he also may have felt. In any 
 case Nahum wrote some centuries before him. Was he 
 a reader of Nahum’s scroll? Did this pean of rejoicing 
 over Nineveh’s fate, however righteously motived, seem to 
 him too perilous an emotion for the men of his day, restless 
 already under a similar heathen yoke? Did he see how 
 those sins are commonly accounted the worst which happen 
 to hurt their judges the most ? Certainly righteous indig- 
 nation is always a most unmanageable virtue. While with- 
 out it we may readily draw upon ourselves the rebuke of 
 a wise writer, 
 
 As a troubled fountain, and a corrupted spring, 
 
 So is a righteous man that giveth way before the wicked,® 
 yet the dangers of resentment are grave. Shakespeare has 
 shewn us the progress of anger in Timon of Athens. Here 
 is one who by loss of fortune learns too late the unworthi- 
 ness of friendships based upon mere cupidity. Turning 
 
 1 Assyria: its Princes, Priests and People, p. 12 
 
 Cf. chap. V, 111. Cf. also Augustine’s City of God, Bk. XX, 
 
 chap. 22, etc., etc. 
 3 Proverbs xxv, 26. 
 
52 THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 with legitimate wrath from his ungrateful associates, Timon 
 _ falls a prey to that egotistic spirit ever lurking in human 
 nature, which is apt haughtily to demand for us the unique 
 deference of our fellows. It is not long before this dis- 
 illusioned man is heaping curses upon the whole population 
 of Athens. Like Jonah sitting outside Nineveh watching 
 and still hoping for its overthrow, Timon haunts the woods 
 beyond the city’s wall desiring nothing but evil to befall 
 it. From such a mood it is only a step to this— 
 And grant as Timon grows, his hate may grow 
 
 To the whole race of mankind, high and low! 
 Amen. 
 
 Difficult is it for men to obey the apostolic admonition, 
 Be ye angry and sin not. 
 
 The attitude of Nahum and of Nehemiah, and then later 
 again that of the Maccabees, towards the Gentile world 
 hardened yet further as the hope of political freedom died 
 away. While, in the time of Christ, Judaism outside 
 Palestine, was not without, to use Professor Harnack’s 
 phrase, ‘the feeling that self-diffusion was a duty,” 
 the opposite tendency characterised more _ especially 
 the Judaism of Jerusalem. We see an illustration of this 
 when S. Paul, defending himself before the people was led 
 to narrate his vision of the risen Jesus and to affirm, He 
 
 * 
 
 said unto me, Depart: for I will send thee forth far hence . 
 
 unto the Gentiles. Then we read, And they gave him audience 
 unto this word—Gentiles—and they lifted up their voice, and 
 said, Away with such a fellow from the earth: for it 1s not 
 fit that he should live. We recall the verdict of Tacitus 
 upon them, ‘ Connected amongst themselves by the most 
 obstinate and inflexible faith, the Jews extend their charity 
 to all of their own persuasion, while towards the rest of 
 mankind they nourish a sullen and inveterate hatred.’* 
 
 1See The Mission and Expansion of Christianity, i, 15ff, 
 2 The Acts xxii, 21f. 
 ® History, V, 5. 
 
THE BOOK AND THE SIGN 53 
 
 That may be a judgement more of scorn than of truth, but it 
 accords only too well with other testimonies. 
 
 Indignation at sin easily passes into dislike of sinners, 
 and dislike of sinners into that enmity which at last merits 
 Shelley’s incisive phrase, “ eyeless with hate.” Professor 
 Dowden has commented upon the beauty and worthiness 
 of the character of Timon’s steward in the play, and he 
 adds, “ this his Master, blinded by his fierce misanthropy, 
 has no eyes to see.’’4 So Jonah, corroded in spirit by hatred 
 of his country’s oppressors, has no eyes for the simple 
 humanity of the sailors, whose lives he knows he has im- 
 perilled, and who yet seek so earnestly to save him from 
 the threatening doom of his God. Nor does the spectacle 
 of a nation upon its knees quicken his pity. He fails to 
 see how God has been moving in their hearts. He has 
 forgotten Yahweh’s word through Amos, Have not I brought 
 up the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Syrians from Kur ? 
 He has lost that clue to national suffering, which the great 
 prophet of the Exile had set forth in the Song of the Suffer- 
 ing Servant of Yahweh (Jsazah liu, 13—liii), who puts away 
 the guilt of the heathen races by the offering of himself. 
 “He is eyeless with hate.” But also he is ridiculous and «/ 
 this is the point of the propaganda. ' 
 
 1 Shakspere Primer, p. 144. 
 
salt 
 Ft a 
 
 ha) i ae ; 
 . a P i Cae! 
 d © . fs 4 SS ahs si : 
 
 ? 
 
 
 
Vil 
 
 THE ANATOMY OF BIGOTRY 
 

 
Vil 
 THE ANATOMY OF BIGOTRY 
 
 F the Book of Jonah was written and sent upon its way 
 in ancient Israel, both by oral circulation and by the 
 fast multiplying copies of scribes, not only to beget amongst 
 the common people a kindlier attitude to the nations 
 without the law—the “ lesser breeds,”’ as our own Imperialist 
 poet calls them—but especially to rebuke the deadening _ 
 bigotry of the professional exponents of Hebrew religion, 
 it will be worth our while in the present chapter to examine 
 the kind of bigotry which the writer had in view and to 
 search out, if we can, its causes. 
 
 Bigotry is a disease which takes many forms. It 
 has been described by Prof. J. Clark Murray as “ the moral 
 characteristic which combines strong will with narrow 
 intelligence in its direction.” That is a description which 
 may be correctly applied to Jonah. He is certainly pos- 
 sessed of strength of will. He argues in the face of his 
 God, adhering to his own gloomy mood despite all the 
 Divine correction. He says, as men of his type always 
 do say, sourly enough, “I told you so. Was not this 
 my saying? I have not altered my mind.” He forgets 
 nothing and apparently learns nothing. Hence his in- 
 telligence remains closely restricted in outlook. 
 
 Now such would seem to have been the character of, 
 that generation of Jewish people who with indomitable 
 pluck set their hands to the rebuilding of Jerusalem and 
 
 1 Article in The Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, ii, 618, 
 
 E 
 
58 THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 the surrounding country. No one can withhold admira- 
 tion from Nehemiah and the men he led, as, notwithstanding 
 persistent opposition, and amid all the discouragements of 
 poverty, they set themselves to restore the land of their 
 fathers. Yet it remains true that they turned the drift 
 of Israel’s religious life into a channel that narrowed more 
 and more. The influence of Ezra and his companions led 
 to the exaltation of the Law and to a consequent glorifying 
 of the priest and the scribe. During the Persian period 
 came the establishment of synagogues throughout the 
 country. This offered the opportunity of spiritualising 
 religion by the introduction of regular spoken addresses. 
 But the opportunity was largely lost. The Law was made 
 the one supreme object of exposition and this so effec- 
 tually that its supremacy remains to the present day. 
 Maimonides, the most famous of Jewish philosophers—he 
 died in A.D. 1204—1is quoted approvingly by M. Friedlander 
 in these terms: “It has been distinctly stated in the 
 Torah that its precepts remain in force for ever without 
 change, diminution, or addition. . . . Hence we see that 
 a prophet cannot reveal any new law.’’! Modern Liberal 
 Judaism may, indeed, take a broader outlook than this, 
 but Liberal Judaism has yet to vindicate itself before the 
 great majority of religious Jews. ' 
 
 Now the Torah (i.e., the Pentateuch) certainly embraces 
 many valuable elements besides its laws and rules, but it 
 has too little poetry to be an adequate instrument of a full 
 religious training ; moreover it has been the legal element 
 in the Torah which more than anything else has attracted 
 the study of orthodox Judaism. Herein lay the chief 
 defect of synagogue piety. Its emphasis was wrong. It 
 lacked Idealism. Poetry humanises. Music and Imagina- 
 tion are the wings of Faith, and Faith takes the soul as with 
 a plunge into the Immensities that redeem us. Any 
 religious judgement, therefore, which assigns to Prophecy 
 and Poetry a lower degree of inspiration than that claimed 
 
 1The Jewish Religion (published 1891) p. 217. 
 
THE BOOK AND THE SIGN 59 
 
 for Law is bound to develop an unlovely spirit. Sympathy, 
 so vital to comprehensive views of human nature, finds 
 little quickening in legalism. Insight and hope alike 
 decay, while the more sternly a man seeks to walk by rule, » 
 the less charitable he generally becomes. So it was that 
 the neo-Ezraism of the fifth century B.c. grew ever harder. 
 It was not merely, as our last chapter may have suggested, 
 that Israel’s sufferings at the hands of heathen powers 
 embittered her, The Law became an instrument of aliena-| 
 tion from humanity. The outside world not allowed to. 
 share Hebrew altars was spurned also as a world of enemies 
 and fools. Remember this, cries a Psalmist, the enemy doth 
 veproach. An impudent people do contemn Thy name.* 
 Gradually bigotry reached its full height. 
 
 But when we attempt the Anatomy of Bigotry it is not 
 enough to lay bare the conditions under which it has reared 
 its rank shape. We must dig deeper and discover its 
 ultimate root. 
 
 Lovers of English literature will recognise the origin of 
 the title of this chapter in a famous work greatly beloved 
 by Samuel Johnson. The Anatomy of Melancholy, by - 
 Robert Burton, a seventeenth century Anglican clergyman 
 of immense learning, has a section upon Bigotry, its 
 _ character and cure. The writer finds no bigotry in the 
 Church to which he belongs but plenty of it in the Romanists 
 and Separatists of his time. ‘“‘ What,” he exclaims, “ are 
 all our Anabaptists, Brownists, Barrowists, Familists, but 
 a company of rude, illiterate, capricious, base fellows ? 
 What are most of our Papists but stupid, ignorant and 
 blind bayards ? how should they otherwise be, when they 
 are brought up and kept still in darkness? . . . Being so 
 misled all their lives in superstition, and carried hood- 
 winked like hawks how can they prove otherwise than 
 blind idiots and superstitious asses?” (part ili, sec. 4). 
 This is written by way of reproving Bigotry. The cure of 
 
 1 Psalm \xxiv, 18, International Critical Commentary translation. 
 
60 THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 Bigotry is then set down with equal vigour and clearness, 
 ‘‘ For the vulgar, restrain them by laws, mulcts, burn their 
 books, forbid their conventicles; for when the cause is 
 taken away, the effect will soon cease. Now for prophets, 
 dreamers, and for such rude, silly fellows, that through 
 fasting, too much meditation, preciseness, or by melan- 
 choly are distempered; the best means to reduce them 
 ad sanam mentem, is to alter their course of life, and with 
 conference, threats, promises, persuasions, to intermix 
 physic ...I think the compendious cure, for some of 
 them at least, had been in Bedlam.” 
 
 Now if some suggestions in the Anatomy and for the 
 cure of Bigotry may be attempted in this chapter, they 
 must not be exactly on Burton’s lines. Yet, if we may 
 ignore his glaring petitio principir throughout his polemic 
 against Rome and the Protestant denominations, there is 
 truth in his criticism. Bigotry, he seems to say, arises from « 
 poverty of life. Neo-Ezraism illustrates that contention. 
 
 The root-cause of the great failure of post-exilic Israel 
 to attain any noble religious outlook was deeper than 
 legalism and scribalism. The entire life of the period wase 
 thin and poor. Herein it would appear to be with the 
 community as it is with the individual. Adolescence, when 
 life, physical and intellectual, is surging up in the person, 
 is generally the time of religious enthusiasm. And history 
 shows us that great moments of national revival in piety 
 are generally moments when the common life of the time 
 is full. The late Dr. McEwen in his History of the Church 
 in Scotland (Vol. II) has a striking chapter entitled ‘“ Scot- 
 land in Renaissance,’ which bears upon this matter. He 
 exhibits the epoch of the Reformation in Scotland as a 
 time when in politics, municipal affairs and social life there 
 was a great ferment working. The lower orders of the 
 nobility and the gentry were claiming a larger place in 
 politics. The burgh was developing both in vitality and 
 in organisation, and the artisans were seeking a share in 
 its concerns. Foreign trade was bringing into the country 
 
THE BOOK AND THE SIGN 61 
 
 wealth of ideas as well as wealth of goods. Finally the 
 peasantry were awakening to their rights and opportunities. 
 There was, in short, a renaissance of the nation as a whole, 
 and the reform of the church was part of a great uprush of 
 life in the national consciousness. We may add, what was 
 true of Scotland was true of the reforming peoples generally. 
 
 Now at such a time Bigotry is not a characteristic vice. 
 
 It may be a transmitted discoloration from less spacious | 
 
 days, but each new wave of life tends to widen the out- 
 look by strengthening the optic nerve of the mind, so bring- 
 ing into view all the hinterlands that adjoin our creeds. 
 In a season like this Nehemiahs do not go about cursing 
 and plucking off the hair of those who have connexions 
 with foreigners, nor do Jonahs watch hungrily for the 
 destruction of hereditary foes. 
 
 Conversely, Bigotry is always the brazen front of mis- 
 
 giving: it is the bluff of weakness, the blotch in the flesh 
 which reveals anemia in the blood. Sophocles in the 
 Antigone puts the matter thus, ‘‘ Wear not, then, one mood 
 only in thyself; think not that thy word and thine alone 
 must be right. For if any man thinks that he alone is 
 wise,—that in speech, or in mind, he hath no peer, such a 
 soul, when laid open, is ever found empty.’ And this is 
 
 specially true of that particular type of Bigotry which the’ 
 _ Book of Jonah exhibits—the refusal to admit the pariah 
 
 peoples to our fellowship in Divine things. It is more than 
 dislike of the foreigner which animates us. It is the self- 
 deceiving misgiving heart within us, whose supreme ailment 
 is vacuity. We refuse to speak of God to those who need 
 Him only when we have really nothing to tell. We shut 
 our souls against the mute appeal of a seeking world only 
 when there is nothing within them to guard. We have 
 
 e 
 
 only words of judgement for the outsider because we our- | 
 selves are strangers to grace. We brandish conventional © 
 
 phrases of theology to hide a bankrupt religion. 
 If we consider the poor, straitened character of that 
 1Lines 707-9. Sir Richard Jebb’s translation. 
 
62 THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 little highland subject-state which Ezra, Nehemiah, Haggai 
 and Zechariah built, we must admit that the tout-ensemble 
 was not impressive. Even in the case of the leaders them- 
 selves the Spirit of God had, relatively, poor stuff to work*® 
 upon. Not for one moment can you put them alongside 
 the great prophets and kings of the eighth century. Theirs 
 was a day of small things; they were small people; and 
 some of them knew it. 
 
 Where then does the cure of Bigotry lie? One seems to 
 descry a helpless conclusion. Is it that we must wait until 
 the hidden cisterns mysteriously fill up again, and life comes 
 flooding in once more with its surge of adventure and ex- 
 pansion and hope? If so, character is determined for us 
 and no place is left for praise or blame. Is there no way 
 but this ? 
 
 We shall find our answer as we study life more closely 
 and watch its laws of gift and renewal. Let us hear what a 
 modern thinker has to say upon biological phenomena. 
 In his Creative Evolution M. Henri Bergson declares :— 
 
 Life in general is mobility itself; particular mani- 
 festations of life accept this mobility reluctantly, and 
 constantly lag behind. It is always going ahead ; 
 they want to mark time. Evolution in general would 
 fain go on in a straight line; each special evolution 
 is a kind of circle. Like eddies of dust raised by the 
 wind as it passes, the living turn upon themselves, 
 borne up by the great blast of life. They are there- 
 fore relatively stable, and counterfeit immobility so 
 well that we treat each of them as a thing rather than 
 as a progress, forgetting that the very permanence of 
 their form is only the outline of a movement. At 
 times, however, in a fleeting vision, the invisible 
 breath that bears them is materialised before our eyes. 
 We have this sudden illumination before certain forms 
 of maternal love, so striking and in most animals so 
 touching, observable even in the solicitude. of the 
 plant for its seed. This love, in which some have 
 seen the great mystery of life, may possibly deliver us 
 
THE BOOK AND THE SIGN 63 
 
 life’s secret. It shows us each generation leaning over 
 the generation that shall follow. It allows us a glimpse 
 of the fact that the living being ts above all a thorough- 
 fare, and that the essence of life 1s in the movement by 
 which life is transmitted.+ 
 
 More recently in an essay upon the “‘ Psychology of Power ”’ 
 a medical specialist has said: 
 
 Nature is economic in her gifts: she will not give 
 strength to those who will not expend it. These 
 remain uninspiring and uninspired. She is lavish in 
 her gifts to those who will use them, and especially to 
 those who devote them to nature’s altruistic ends, for 
 such ends harmonise the soul. Life demands expres- 
 sion. If the life-stream that flows through us finds 
 the channel blocked by a life of inactivity, we inevi- 
 tably suffer from staleness and boredom, or a sense of 
 physical debility. . . . We are not merely receptacles 
 but channels of energy. Life and power is not so much 
 contained in us, it courses through us.? 
 
 If these teachings are true—and does not something of 
 the very genius of Christian experience attest them ?—the 
 remedy for low vitality with all its attendant evils must lie 
 in our beginning to give, even though what we have to give 
 is but the widow’s handful of meal and drop of oil in the 
 cruse. Does not that touch the root of the matter? Turn , 
 back from Jonah’s booth outside Nineveh and scrutinize 
 the Church in the homeland he had left. Somewhere in 
 Jerusalem itself did there not lie unconsecrated possessions ? 
 Did not “the particular manifestations’’ of life “lag 
 behind ”’ Life itself? It is good sometimes to employ the 
 great phrases of inherited creeds, but in Religion quotation 
 is always a suspect process. For, as Henry Suso wrote, 
 “There was never a string so dulcet-toned but ceased to 
 sound if stretched to a withered frame; a heart poor in 
 love can no more understand speech rich in love than a 
 
 1 pp. 134-5: italics in the last sentence are mine. 
 4 Dr. J. A. Hadfield, in The Spirit (pp. 104 and 111). 
 
64 THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 German can an Italian.”? <A gracious God, full of com- 
 passion, slow to anger, plenteous in mercy, repenting of the 
 evil—how far did these historic watchwords awaken respon- 
 sive devotion not to Nineveh’s need, but even to that of 
 Jerusalem ? how far were they even understood ? Malachi, 
 a work certainly earlier than Jonah, but belonging to the 
 same religious epoch, tells a story of worship which had 
 become an acknowledged weariness, a slovenly routine, 
 
 Still pumping phrases for the Ineffable, 
 Though all the valves of memory gasp and wheeze, 
 
 —a story of lame and sick animals given to Yahweh, as 
 to-day the well-to-do send their cast clothes to the jumble- 
 sales of the poor,—a polluted table and tithes of the store- 
 house withheld (Malach: i, 7; iii, 8). Was it wonderful _ 
 there was no grace for Nineveh when Jerusalem fared so 
 ill? Yet the power to give was there. 
 
 It is within our own reach to rise into newness of life. 
 However weak and low we may be, however impoverished 
 all the other spheres of our time—industry, merchandise, 
 literature, art—the way to renewal is by gift of what we 
 have, and it is the failure to give which hands us over to 
 all manner of pettinesses, squabbles and misanthropies. 
 And while religious quickening may often arise, as we have 
 seen it has arisen, through the increase of the whole life of 
 the time, it is too Divine a thing to be wholly determined 
 by external conditions. The soul is constructed for auto- 
 nomy and for immediate access to God. Man is child of 
 the Infinite and Eternal. 
 
 Further, it does not so much matter where contact may 
 function, whether in Nineveh or Jerusalem, in foreign mis- 
 sion or home ministry ; essential religion means our sub- 
 limation into God. Where that happens universal love is 
 born in the soul. As Thomas Traherne teaches us, com- 
 munion with God means a real union of the human with 
 the Divine in all the largeness of the Divine activity. 
 
 1Cf. Dr. Otto’s The Idea of the Holy, English Edition, p. 48. 
 
THE BOOK AND THE SIGN 6s 
 
 “God willed,” he says, “‘ the redemption of mankind and ; 
 therefore is His Son Jesus Christ an infinite treasure to you. 
 Verily you ought to will these things so ardently that God 
 Himself should be therefore your joy because He willed 
 them. Your will ought to be united to Hts in all places of 
 His dominion. . . . Woulds’t thou love God alone? God 
 alone cannot be beloved... . He must be loved in all with an 
 unlimited love, even in all His doings, in all His friends, in 
 all His creatures. Everywhere in all things thou must 
 meet His love.’”+ What Traherne means by our being 
 united to God in all places of His dominion may be illus- 
 trated by the exquisite thought (not necessarily pantheistic) 
 of Shelley in his lament over the death of John Keats: 
 
 He is made one with Nature: there is heard 
 
 His voice in all her music, from the moan 
 
 Of thunder to the song of night’s sweet bird ; 
 
 He is a presence to be felt and known 
 
 In darkness and in light, from herb and stone, 
 
 Spreading itself where’er that Power may move 
 
 Which has withdrawn his being to its own; 
 
 Which wields the world with never wearied love, 
 
 Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above. 
 
 Yes: but even before “ Death with the might of his 
 sunbeam ”’ liberates us into this ampler life, the soul that 
 knows communion with God blends itself into all His vast 
 compassions, and realises that it can never know His love 
 towards itself, apart from His redeeming grace to others. 
 The Universal’s love breathes universality into the one 
 beloved, 
 
 And no man knows God thus who withholds aught from 
 Him. The altar fires of Jerusalem must burn luminously 
 with Israel’s choicest offerings, or there will be no abiding 
 vision of world-salvation, no message for Nineveh but 
 pitiless doom. 
 
 1 Centuries of Meditations, i, 53 and 72. Italics mine. 
 

 
Vill 
 THE SIGN OF JONAH 
 

 
VIII 
 THE SIGN OF JONAH 
 
 CCORDING to S. Matthew our Lord twice spoke of 
 Jonah as a sign. For the first reference we have a 
 parallel in S. Luke, and the second belongs to a passage 
 also found in S. Mark. We may dismiss this second re- 
 ference (S. Matthew xvi, 1-4: S. Mark viii, 11-13) from our 
 present consideration, since it tells us nothing beyond what 
 is indicated in the earlier one. 
 In seeking an explanation of the Sign of Jonah we must 
 first of all compare the two narratives, which run as follows : 
 
 S. Matthew xii, 38-42. 
 
 Then certain of the scribes and 
 Pharisees answered him, saying, 
 Master, we would see a sign 
 from thee. But he answered 
 and said unto them, An evil and 
 adulterous generation seeketh 
 after a sign; and there shall no 
 sign be given to it but the sign 
 of Jonah the prophet: for as 
 Jonah was three days and three 
 nights in the belly of the whale ; 
 so shall the Son of man be three 
 days and three nights in the 
 heart of the earth. The men of 
 Nineveh shall stand up in the 
 judgement with this generation, 
 and shall condemn it; for they 
 repented at the preaching of 
 Jonah; and behold, a greater 
 than Jonah is here. The queen 
 of the south shall rise up in the 
 judgement with this generation, 
 and shall condemn it: for she 
 came from the ends of the earth 
 to hear the wisdom of Solomon ; 
 and behold, a greater than Solo- 
 mon is here. 
 
 S. Luke xi, 29-32. 
 
 And when the multitudes were 
 gathering together unto him, 
 he began to say, This generation 
 is an evil generation: it seeketh 
 after a sign; and there shall no 
 sign be given to it but the sign 
 of Jonah. For even as Jonah 
 became a sign unto the Ninevites, 
 so shall also the Son of man be 
 to this generation. The queen 
 of the south shall rise up in 
 the judgement with the men of 
 this generation, and shall con- 
 demn them: for she came from 
 the ends of the earth to hear the 
 wisdom of Solomon; and be- 
 hold, a greater than Solomon 
 is here. The men of Nineveh 
 shall stand up in the judgement 
 with this generation, and shall 
 condemn it: for they repented 
 at the preaching of Jonah; and 
 behold, a greater than Jonah is 
 here. 
 
70 THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 It will be observed that whereas both Gospels speak of 
 Jonah as a sign, in S. Matthew Jonah is a sign to our Lord’s 
 own generation, in S. Luke he was a sign to the Ninevites 
 first, and it is as such he suggests a parallel to the signifi- 
 cance of Jesus. Then there emerges a further notable 
 difference. S. Luke is content merely to speak of Jonah 
 as a sign without telling us what he signified. S. Matthew 
 expounds the sign as a foreshadowing of the Burial and, by 
 implication, the Resurrection of Jesus. For as Jonah was 
 three days and three nights in the belly of the whale ; so shall 
 the Son of man be three days and three nights im the heart 
 of the earth. The question arises, Did our Lord actually say 
 this or did He leave the sign comparatively unexplained as 
 in S. Luke? If He expounded the sign in the way S. 
 Matthew describes, how comes it that S. Luke omits this 
 exposition? The suggestion of certain writers that S. 
 Luke’s version of the words is a summary report of that in 
 S. Matthew is open to two objections. In the first place 
 S. Luke does not follow S. Maithew’s order of the verses 
 respecting the men of Nineveh and the Queen of Sheba, 
 although here S. Matthew clearly has the more likely se- 
 quence of thought, so that the writer can hardly have had 
 S. Matthew’s narrative, or S. Matthew’s source before him. 
 In the second place, the author of the third Gospel had no 
 motive for ruling out of the discourse anything which 
 emphasised a miracle. No anti-miraculous feeling is dis- 
 cernible in his work elsewhere, and if, as is probable, he 
 was none other than S. Paul's beloved physician, he belonged 
 to a profession which in those days was rather too much 
 disposed to accept stories of the supernatural than other- 
 wise. Had S. Matthew’s form of the saying been before 
 him when he wrote, it is highly improbable that he would 
 have rejected it in favour of a more general version of his 
 own. I conclude, therefore, that the two versions are 
 mutually independent, and it remains for us to choose 
 which of the two we should accept as a report of what our 
 Lord actually said. 
 
THE BOOK AND THE SIGN 71 
 
 In estimating the value of S. Matthew’s version one has 
 to remember a special influence to which the writer of this 
 Gospel was exposed, perhaps more fully than was the case 
 with S. Luke. In early Christian circles, as Dr. Rendel 
 Harris has lately shewn us, there was circulated a Testimony 
 Book, used more especially for the confutation of Jewish 
 unbelievers. This work embodied certain Old Testament 
 passages that were supposed to prefigure Christ, and applied 
 them to various incidents in the Evangelic tradition. It is 
 quite likely that the Book of Jonah would be drawn upon 
 in this way. In any case the influence of the Testimony 
 Book would point the direction of the evangelist’s thinking. 
 Puzzled, perhaps, as to the meaning of our Saviour’s words 
 and so turning back to the Book of Jonah to see in what 
 respects a parallel to Jesus was to be found therein, it would 
 flash upon him that the reference may have been to the 
 prophet’s incarceration in the great fish for three days 
 and three nights. He would have no scruple in amplifying 
 our Lord’s words so as to include his own edifying interpre- 
 tation of them, for in such a free manner of composition 
 contemporary canons of literary workmanship found no 
 matter for offence. Nor would it appear a difficulty to him 
 that apparently, according to the later development of his 
 own story, Jesus was not in the heart of the earth for three 
 days and three nights, but for about half that time. Jewish 
 methods of reckoning days and hours may have permitted 
 Matthew to make his statement without obvious inaccu- 
 racy. In any case a broad comparison between the lot of 
 Jonah in the belly of the whale and the lot of Jesus in the 
 heart of the earth was near enough to enable the evangelist 
 to conclude that the Sign of Jonah here found its interpre- 
 tation. 
 
 The great difficulty, however, in the way of our accep- 
 tance of S. Matthew’s Version is that in the first place it 
 is self-contradictory, and, in the second place, is alien to 
 the general method of our Lord’s teaching. Does not Jesus 
 expressly declare that no sign should be given to that evil 
 
72 THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 and adulterous generation but the sign of Jonah? Why 
 should He make this exception whilst refusing every other 
 sign? Is it not just because of its enigmatic quality ? 
 He would be stultifying Himself surely if after giving it 
 to His heckling questioners He proceeded to particularise 
 it as a marvel. Again, throughout His ministry He re- 
 pudiated the carnal appetite for wonders. Yet in the class 
 of popular marvels anything more truly sensational than a 
 man’s three days’ burial and subsequent resurrection could 
 hardly be conceived. And it is wholly in keeping with this 
 that, in the Providence of God, all the actual manifestations 
 of the risen Saviour were withheld from those who in His 
 mortal life had so often clamoured for signs, and were 
 granted only to witnesses that were chosen before of God,+ in 
 other words, to those only who, as trained spiritually by 
 Jesus, were fitted to behold Him. This, as I have already 
 suggested, was not the only occasion upon which our Lord 
 deprecated the appeal to the Supernatural.? It was not, 
 of course, that He doubted the existence of a world beyond 
 what we call Nature, or had any merely faint conception of 
 its powers. That world was never far away from His 
 thoughts. But He knew that man’s loyalty to Truth ever 
 requires an economy in the use of the appeal to the super- 
 natural. He never attempted the impossible method of 
 bludgeoning the soul with the dead weight of the inexpli- 
 cable into an acceptance of~-spiritual realities. And His 
 attitude in these grave concerns has always approved itself 
 to the best minds amongst us. M. Maeterlinck strikes the 
 same note in his Mary Magdalene when, referring to the 
 report of the raising of Lazarus, one of the characters in 
 the play says of Jesus: 
 
 If he can convince me that I have acted wrong until 
 to-day, I will amend, for I seek only the truth. But, 
 if all the dead who people these valleys were to rise 
 from their graves to bear witness, in his name, to a 
 
 +The Acts :x, 41. 
 4 See, e.g., S. Luke xvi, 31. 
 
THE BOOK AND THE SIGN 73 
 
 truth less high than that which I know, I would not 
 believe them. Whether the dead sleep or wake, I 
 will not give them a thought unless they teach me to 
 make a better use of my life. 
 
 If we needed any further evidence for the rejection of 
 S. Matthew's explanation we should surely find it in the 
 fact that Jesus commonly refused to explain to them that 
 are without (the kingdom) the meaning of the symbols and 
 parables He employed.! Such refusal was based upon His 
 governing conception of the method of human salvation. 
 Men must themselves seek, think, pray, and this with the 
 striving of the athlete. Jesus was no party to such a 
 simplification of the Gospel as, in the supposed interests 
 of human weakness, would encourage any abdication of the 
 individual mind. He would flash upon his hearers the light 
 of a magic phrase such as the Sign of Jonah and leave to 
 their hearts and consciences the doing of that spectrum- 
 analysis work, whereby its various lessons might be 
 discerned.’ 
 
 We are free therefore to turn our attention to the saying 
 in its original greatness unrestricted by the apologetic 
 particularism of the first Gospel. In what sense then, was 
 Jonah, as S. Luke puts it, a sign to the Ninevites? How 
 did Jesus conceive this significance ? 
 
 Now, our Lord had a way of reading the Old Testament 
 which was distinctly His own. This was apparent to the 
 earliest disciples. He taught them as one having authority 
 —the authority of spiritual insight—and not as their scribes. 
 In His use of any Scripture He does not appear to have 
 considered, as we are-wont to do, the exact purpose of its 
 author. The Old Testament Scriptures for Him were the 
 
 1S. Matthew xiii, toff. S. Mark iv, 11. 
 
 2 As we thus feel compelled to reject S. Matthew’s version of our 
 Lord’s words, so also in a somewhat similar case—the passage 
 Destroy this temple, in S. John ii, 18ff.—we must discriminate between 
 the words there attributed to Jesus and the Evangelist’s comment 
 upon them. His words are capable of an interpretation different 
 both from that of the Jews and that of the Evangelist. 
 
 F 
 
74 THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 oracles of God, and the Spirit of God in Himself could be 
 trusted to reveal God’s meanings to Him. To us that 
 Spirit in Jesus seems to follow a path differing widely from 
 some forms of undoubted inspiration in the West. Jesus 
 had the poetic temperament which sees ideas in concrete 
 things, symbols in history, parables everywhere. It is an 
 imaginative mind which can exclaim, J beheld Satan fallen 
 as lightning from Heaven ; or again, summing up in three 
 words a story of terrific moral import, Remember Lot's wife. 
 When, therefore, Jesus thought of the story of Jonah, 
 other considerations than those we are wont to entertain 
 would be likely to present themselves. Questions as to 
 the place of the book in literature certainly did not trouble 
 Him. Nor did He concern Himself with the purpose of 
 the author. But He followed with eagerness the adven- 
 tures of Jonah—would it not be one of His boyhood’s 
 favourite stories? He saw the man in the midst of the 
 godless city, saw him with all that wonderful thought- 
 vividness which enabled Jesus so often to speak unfor- 
 gettable words. It should be noted that although the 
 allusion He makes to Jonah is followed by a reference to 
 the prophet’s preaching and to the consequent repentance 
 of the Ninevites, more was evidently in our Lord’s mind | 
 than Jonah’s preaching. And for the moment He saw 
 him not in his misanthropy, as the author intended him 
 to be seen, but as a great man. For when Jesus declared, 
 A greater than Jonah ts here He certainly affirmed of the 
 prophet a commanding personal value. The man was 
 great enough to be a sign to thousands. What, then, was 
 the kind of greatness Jesus discerned in him? We may 
 be sure He did not lose sight of the underlying patriotism 
 and feeling for justice, which motived so often Hebrew 
 antagonism to the nations that oppressed, not Israel alone, 
 but all the lesser peoples. Such affections not only accord 
 with personal greatness but are essential to the noblest 
 character. Jonah had these. When he spoke of my own 
 
 1 See, further, Note C on p. Ioo. 
 
 
 
THE BOOK AND THE SIGN 75 
 
 land (iv, 2) he revealed the drift of a deep devotion, how- 
 ever previously submerged by indolence, if such had been 
 his fault. When he ran the risk of a violent death in 
 the streets of Nineveh, by denouncing God’s doom upon its 
 citizens, he shewed a physical courage which is one of the 
 elementary virtues of manhood. This also Jesus, who Him- 
 self led a menaced life, would not be likely to overlook. 
 But in our Lord’s view of him such qualities as these would, 
 I think, be subsumed beneath a more distinctly religious 
 aspect. For the purpose of describing this let us look once 
 more at the story of the book and make an instructive 
 comparison with another great work of literature. 
 
 The Book of Jonah might almost be called a sailor’s book. 
 The-salt of the sea is in its pages. The picture of the storm 
 reminds us of the opening scene in The Tempest where, 
 as on the Tartessus ship, the sailors’ cry goes up, 
 
 All lost, to prayers, to prayers, all lost. 
 In true nautical manner is the saying about the straining 
 vessel, she reckoned herself doomed (i, 5). The great sea- 
 monster that swallows the prophet belongs to that strange 
 sailors’ world, in which to this very day common sights 
 and sounds sometimes give place to the supernatural and 
 the weird. 
 
 Now we have in English literature another great sea- 
 story, the plot of which revolves upon the sinful deed of 
 one man, just as the storm in the Book of Jonah follows 
 upon one man’s dereliction of duty. I mean, of course, 
 Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. 
 
 It is an ancient Mariner, 
 And he stoppeth one of three. 
 “By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, 
 Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?” 
 * * * * 
 He holds him with his glittering eye— 
 The wedding-guest stood still, 
 And listens like a three years’ child: 
 The Mariner hath his will, 
 
76 THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 Coleridge makes his man of the sea @ sign to the wedding- 
 guest. The awful scenes the mariner had been through, 
 the mystery of the sea, its rotting calms, its fantastic 
 creatures, its floating cemeteries—all have taken possession 
 of his soul and have sharpened his eye until it has become a 
 spearhead. There is something uncanny about the man. 
 He suggests that vast and dim hinterland of our mind, 
 in which are wont to generate the misgivings and vaticina- 
 tions of conscience, where also from mood to mood flash 
 those instincts of our immortality which like Northern 
 Lights coruscate and are gone—a world lying outside the 
 ordinary occasions of life and with which our eating and 
 drinking, marrying and giving 1m marriage are too generally 
 unconcerned. The mariner comes, as it were, panoplied 
 with these interfusing adumbrations and radiances, and 
 thrusts himself into the common flow of human life, arrest- 
 ing the gaiety of the hour, because it is laid upon him to 
 tell his tale and speak its warning, and the wedding-guest 
 is held, despite himself, until the tale is done. 
 
 The Mariner, whose eye is bright, 
 Whose beard with age is hoar, 
 
 Is gone; and now the wedding-guest 
 Turn’d from the bridegroom’s door. 
 
 He went like one that hath been stunn’d 
 And is of sense forlorn : 
 
 A sadder and a wiser man 
 
 He rose the morrow morn. 
 
 Just so Jonah comes from the sea to Nineveh. He comes 
 as a foreigner with the strangeness of a far-off country in 
 his accent. But more, the sea and its horrors still seem 
 to cling to him. There is a wildness in his aspect. He is 
 a scarred man, one who has been baptised in an experience 
 of wild waters, a man who bears in his very eye a reminis- 
 cence of the hell from which he has so narrowly escaped. 
 Clearly the hand of God is upon him. And the people of 
 Nineveh cannot ignore him, nor shake him off. They are 
 
THE BOOK AND THE SIGN 77 
 
 held by this ominous figure, thus arriving amidst their 
 pleasures and traffic. He speaks nothing of himself, but 
 in words full of awe and anger and utter fearlessness, he 
 denounces the doom of the guilty city. Spell-bound be- 
 neath his preaching, the Ninevites, though notorious for 
 hardness and cruelty, break down all about him, weeping 
 like little children, and thus repent at the preaching of Jonah. 
 
 If in some such dramatic way the figure of Jonah moved 
 through the spacious imagination of Jesus, though the tale 
 were but a fiction it would have all the verisimilitude which 
 a Hamlet or a Macbeth has to us, for its air and manner are 
 native to that Eastern world in which Jesus lived. A recent 
 writer and famous theologian, Professor Rudolf Otto, 
 whose book, The Idea of the Holy, comes as a timely cor- 
 rective to the placid religiosity of our time, has drawn an 
 instructive picture of the Eastern holy man in the fascina- 
 tion he exerts over the minds of his fellows. 
 
 The ‘ holy man ’ or ‘ the prophet ’ is from the outset, 
 as regards the experience of the circle of his devotees, 
 something more than ‘a mere man’ (Ads avOpwros). 
 He is the being of wonder and mystery, who somehow 
 or other is felt to belong to the higher order of things, 
 to the side of the nwmen? itself. It is not that he him- 
 self teaches that he is such, but that he is experienced 
 as such. (p. 162.) 
 
 Holy men, or prophets like these, the East, throughout its 
 length and breadth, has often known. It was a perfectly 
 natural mental movement in our Lord, therefore, which 
 clothed Jonah with mystery, and conceived him as having 
 been a sign to the Ninevites—a sign, in Professor Otto’s 
 language, of the Numen Itself—a sign of Him Who, both 
 in the Old Testament and in the New, is a consuming fire, 
 the sign of a God who from time to time with the flame of 
 a sword cuts out the ulcerous centres from the body politic 
 of our world. 
 
 1 Prof. Otto uses this Latin word in the sense of a supernatural 
 divine power which impresses our feeling but escapes both definition 
 and ethical classification. 
 
78 THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 Even as Jonah became a sign unto the Ninevites, so shall 
 also the Son of man be to this generation. The strange hold 
 which Jesus has had upon the souls of men in all the cen- 
 turies of our era began in those days when, despite all His 
 grace and charm, men feared Him even while they were 
 drawntoHim. They were in the way, going up to Jerusalem ; 
 and they that followed were afraid There was something 
 transcendent about Him. He suggested another country 
 than Israel’s. He had his historic heritages but it seemed 
 that for him, more than for any man, Earth was, in Words- 
 worth’s phrase, only “‘a foster-mother.’’ The fourth 
 Gospel attributes to Him the statement, Ye are from beneath; 
 I am from above: ye are of this world ; I am not of this world* 
 One has always felt a little repelled by the bluntness of 
 the words: they do not savour much of His manner of 
 speaking. I believe they owe something to the evangelist’s 
 eagerness in battling for his Lord against the ingrained 
 unbelief of a later time. But substantially they are in 
 accord with more authentic sayings of the Master reported 
 by the Synoptists. Far liker Him in form, and yet even 
 more suggestive of His transcendence is that distinction 
 He made in His parable of the husbandmen between the 
 servants and the son—He had yet one, a beloved son: he 
 sent him last unto them, saying, They will reverence my son.3 
 Or again, this transcendence meets us in the categories 
 of the famous saying about His Return: Of that day or 
 that hour knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven, 
 neither the Son, but the Father.* 
 
 Upon Him too, as upon Jonah, lay the sense of the 
 pressure of God. His preaching was in words which were 
 given Him to say. Here also the fourth Gospel is em- 
 phatic. J spake not from myself; but the Father which 
 sent me, he hath given me a commandment, what I should 
 
 1S. Mark x, 32. 
 
 *S. John viii, 23. 
 
 8S. Mark xii, 1-12, and parallels, 
 4S. Mark xiii, 32. 
 
 a 
 
THE BOOK AND THE SIGN 79 
 
 say, and what I should speak.1 And again too, less explicitly 
 perhaps, but with the greater significance of parable, comes 
 the word of Jesus in S. Luke, I have a baptism to be baptized 
 with; and how am I strattened till it be accomplished ! 
 There was a tremendous urgency in His message, especially 
 as the end of His ministry drew near. Ever deeper came 
 the note of pleading, of warning and of anger. There had 
 been a period about midway perhaps through His ministry, 
 when the crowds fell off from Him, but at the end they 
 could not shake themselves free. Indeed, then the people 
 all hung upon him, listening.® Yet what things He said ! 
 what rebukes! what scathes! what foreshadowings of 
 doom! Echoes of Nineveh-preaching reverberate through 
 His words. True, the issue of His work was different from 
 that of Jonah. This, indeed, was His lament. But in 
 His own soul He carried all those elements of personal 
 greatness which, in the story of Jonah, are the only possible 
 explanation of a whole nation’s repentance—the bearing 
 of a speaker who has found the high mission of God an 
 unevadable command. This generation, He said, 1s an 
 evil generation :; it seeketh after a sign; and there shall no 
 sign be given to it but the sign of Jonah. For even as Jonah 
 became a sign unto the Ninevites, so shall also the Son of 
 man be to this generation. I fear this can only mean that 
 for the generation to whom Jesus came His words of grace 
 should wither into a dead letter, and only His language 
 of doom be remembered, His profound sympathy with 
 sinners be lost to view and only the awfulness of the Numen 
 in Him be apparent. If that is the meaning, unwelcome 
 as naturally we find it, it is yet remarkable for its fore- 
 shadowing of the whole later history of Judaism in its 
 relations with Christendom down to our own day. There 
 have, of course, been many Jews who have followed Him. 
 There is an increasing number of them who revere Him. 
 
 1S. John xii, 49. There are many similar passages in this 
 Gospel. 
 
 aS. Luke xii, 50. 
 
 3S. Luke xix, 48, 
 
80 THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 But, broadly speaking, His significance with His own 
 people has had no charm, no allurement of beauty. He 
 has been only a messenger of the ill-will of God, a name 
 associated with unspeakable calamities, and this for the 
 most part without the justification of a moral dynamic 
 working repentance in the doomed. 
 
 In his Holy-Cross Day Browning has presented a picture 
 dealing with medieval times in Rome and the lot of the 
 Jews therein. It is a poem that humbles a Christian 
 churchman to the dust, a mordant and searching bit of 
 characteristic Browning-art. It makes one feel to the 
 full the wickedness of our ‘ Christian’ treatment of the 
 Jew. But the lines which chiefly make the poem memorable 
 are those in which the despised Jew thinks upon Jesus: 
 
 Thou! if thou wast He, who at mid-watch came, 
 By the starlight, naming a dubious name! 
 
 And if, too heavy with sleep—too rash 
 
 With fear—O Thou, if that martyr-gash 
 
 Fell on Thee coming to take thine own, 
 
 And we gave the Cross, when we owed the Throne— 
 
 Thou art the Judge. We are bruised thus. 
 
 But, the Judgement over, join sides with us! 
 Thine too is the cause! and not more thine 
 
 Than ours, is the work of these dogs and swine, 
 Whose life laughs through and spits at their creed ! 
 Who maintain Thee in word, and defy Thee in deed ! 
 
 We withstood Christ then? Be mindful how 
 
 At least we withstand Barabbas now! 
 
 Was our outrage sore? But the worst we spared, 
 To have called these—Christians, had we dared! 
 Let defiance to them pay mistrust of Thee, 
 
 And Rome make amends for Calvary ! 
 
 That is not repentance, nor, as yet a saving faith in Him, 
 but it betokens the beginning of a change towards better 
 things, and after the manner of Browning’s work generally, 
 
THE BOOK AND THE SIGN 8x 
 
 represents in reality more truly a modern than a medieval 
 attitude. The best Hebrew minds of to-day are not far 
 removed from those of Christian leaders, and we are re- 
 minded of the saying of S. Paul concerning his fellow- 
 countrymen, A veil lieth upon their heart, but whensoever 
 a man shall turn to the Lord, the veil is taken away.+ 
 
 It remains for us to realise that there is a message in 
 this New Testament handling of the story of Jonah for the 
 Christian Church as well as for Israel. I find in a recent 
 biography an illustration of the Sign of Jonah as fulfilled 
 in our Lord. Mr. Harold Begbie, in his Life of William 
 Booth, the Founder of the Salvation Army, gives us the story 
 of Booth’s first London convert, an Irish prizefighter. 
 
 “One morning,’ says this man, ‘“‘I was walking 
 towards the public house . . . when I came across 
 General Booth for the first time in my life....I 
 looked at him. He looked at me. Something in the 
 man’s external appearance took hold of me then and 
 there. I stopped dead in the street looking at him ; 
 and he stopped, too, looking atme. ... After he had 
 looked at me a long while, says he very sadly, ‘ I’m 
 looking for work.’ I was taken aback. ‘I’ve got no 
 place,’ says he, ‘to put my head in.’ I got hold of 
 some coins in my pocket, and was just going to offer 
 them to him, when he pointed to ‘ the boys’ outside 
 the public house just opposite, a crowd of them, and 
 says he, “ Look at those men,’ he says, ‘ look at them ! 
 —forgotten by God and man. Why should I be 
 looking for work? There’s my work over there, 
 looking for me. But I’ve got no place,’ he says, 
 “where I can put my head in.’ ‘ You're right, sir,’ 
 I said; ‘those men are forgotten by God and man, 
 and if you can do anything for them, ’twould be a 
 great work.’ And what made me say that? Sure 
 it was just the man’s external appearance. He was 
 the finest-looking gentleman ever you saw—white- 
 faced, dark-eyed and a great black beard over his 
 
 1J7I Corinthians iii, 16. 
 
82 THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 chest ; sure there was something strange about him 
 that laid hold on a man.” 
 
 Mr. Begbie adds, “‘I asked him to tell me whether the 
 preacher did not say anything at that first interview 
 which accounted in some measure for this instant 
 effect upon his mind. But again and again he pro- 
 tested that it was ‘ just the man’s external appearance,’ 
 hinting at some ghostly emanation, or psychic influence 
 which laid a spell upon his senses.’”’ (Vol. I, pp. 366-8.) 
 
 This, though crudely described, was the Sign of Jonah. 
 And as we turn the pages of the biography we see how that 
 arresting ‘external appearance,’ the ‘something strange ’ 
 in Booth was the outcome not so much of extraordinary 
 talents as of a tremendous moral urgency, a deep sense 
 of God’s will driving the man into his life’s work. He who 
 has the Sign of Jonah is one who thus stands in the great 
 succession of souls that have been baptised in the heart 
 of the seas and thence have learnt the majesty of the laws 
 of God, and the indissoluble responsibilities of every human 
 being. And at all times in the history of the Kingdom 
 of God here upon earth, there is little that can be done 
 for human salvation that does not bear as its imprimatur 
 this unmistakable token of God. And if with all this 
 one knows, as Jesus knew, the good pleasure of the Father, 
 and is baptised into the Spirit of Jesus, then something 
 more yet is realised ; the grace of the early Galilean preach- 
 ing is recovered and by the quality of that moral temper 
 which, despite all its indignation, grieved over the doom 
 of Jerusalem with a sweeter grief than Jonah’s grief over 
 the lifting of Nineveh’s doom, it may be said once more, 
 A greater than Jonah is here. 
 
IX 
 
 THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST WHICH WAS IN THE 
 AUTHOR 
 

 
IX 
 
 trier RIT OF. CHRIST WHICH: WAS IN >THE 
 AUTHOR 
 
 F one had the ability, and the courage and the reverence 
 
 to construct a discussion after the manner of Landor’s 
 famous Imaginary Conversations, between the Author of 
 the Book of Jonah and Jesus Christ, it would surely open 
 with some expression of surprise on the part of the Author 
 at the way in which his book had been viewed by Jesus. 
 He should be made to point out that whereas the story 
 had been written as a criticism of bigotry, Jesus had found 
 in it a record of human greatness. Our Lord would not 
 answer the surprise of his interlocutor by any explanation. 
 It would be left to the Author’s second thinkings to realise 
 that, if his story was to be taken seriously at all, whether 
 a story of fact or of fiction, then so vast a conversion to 
 repentance as that of the Ninevites, called for an adequate 
 cause in the agency thus Divinely employed. But such 
 an imaginary conversation should ere long deepen into 
 a monologue of the Lord, as in the conversation between 
 Him and Nicodemus, the silence of the Hebrew author 
 covering a neophyte’s joy in new unfoldings of truth. 
 On His side, certainly, if actually they could have met, 
 Jesus would have welcomed this old Hebrew writer as 
 a man in whom His own spirit found large expression. 
 Indeed, it is no profitless conjecture to say that since 
 Moses and Elijah once were permitted to converse with 
 Him touching the decease he was about to accomplish at 
 Jerusalem, strengthening Him, doubtless by their insight 
 into Death and Life, the Author of the Book of Jonah may 
 
an 
 
 > 
 
 86 THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 have been similarly commissioned at some time to confirm 
 Him in the wideness of His mercy towards all mankind. 
 It remains for us to see the things in which the Spirit of 
 Christ wrought in this man. 
 
 In the first place, the Author was certainly a patriot. 
 If one can recognise a patriotic value in the prophet’s 
 blind hatred of those great world-powers at the hands of 
 which Israel suffered so much, if something may be said 
 at least to excuse his zeal for the destruction of Nineveh, 
 there is a far nobler love of country manifest in our Author 
 himself as he pourtrays the narrowness of all this for our 
 emphatic reprobation. If in his work he pillories the 
 Israel of his day, yet we must remember it is not always 
 those who unqualifyingly panegyrize their nation who 
 love it best. Others who severely scourge its faults may 
 love it more. One can feel certain that our Author was 
 one who would not have troubled to write as he did had 
 he not been solicitous for his country’s welfare. There is 
 a tenderness in his humour which reveals a heart in living 
 sympathy with those whose faults he deplored. We cannot 
 fail to see this quality in the playfulness of Yahweh's 
 treatment of Jonah. One pictures the figure of a stately 
 man, such as those three Abraham saw at his tent door 
 on the eve of the destruction of Sodom, some angel of 
 Yahweh through whom the God deigned to speak, and 
 one seems to see him stooping down and looking through 
 the interstices of Jonah’s faded, gourd-covered booth, and 
 asking with an immense gravity, Ave you very angry? 
 There is no bitterness in the mockery; rather is it as the 
 mild rebuke of a father’s compassion for his sulking child. 
 Indeed, that medieval paraphrase of Jonah which bears 
 as its title Patience, and which has been referred to on a 
 previous page, perhaps is not wholly outside the scope 
 of legitimate interpretation in regarding the whole story 
 as a narrative of the Divine discipline of a Hebrew believer 
 through heritages of ancient enmity at work in his blood, 
 mingled with trials that might daunt the bravest. In 
 
THE BOOK AND THE SIGN 87 
 
 any case no one could write about his people as this man 
 wrote without the inspiration of the love of country. 
 
 In the second place, in the world of Revelation this book 
 is the matrix of the doctrine of Internationalism. Most 
 evidently the Author had that feeling of the value of other 
 nations than his own out of which true internationalism 
 must ever spring. He regarded all peoples as the work 
 of God’s hands. It is the Divine Artificer, workmanlike 
 finding an interest in his own craft, who shapes the last 
 question of the book, no longer a playful one but a ques- 
 tion of the most concise and moving eloquence, You have 
 had a love for the gourd, which you have not laboured at nor 
 made to grow. Child of a mght it sbrang up, and child of 
 a night it perished. And I, should not I have pity upon 
 Nineveh, the Great City, which has in it more than twelve 
 times ten thousand persons who do not know how to dts- 
 tinguish their right hand from their left and also much catile ? 
 These multitudes of the heathen—He had fashioned them, 
 equipped them, wrought in their consciences, though they 
 had developed so little according to His counsel and desire. 
 Unable morally—so it seemed—to distinguish their right 
 hand from their left, until some prophet should teach them, 
 they might be adult in years but in character they were 
 children—wilful, passionate, perishing without vision yet 
 not without value. One is reminded here of what 
 Dostoievsky wrote last century concerning his fellow 
 countrymen: ‘The Russian masses ought not to be 
 judged by the abominations which frequently they per- 
 petrate, but by the many noble and radiant things which 
 they produce amid their degradation.’ That is the liberal 
 judgement of an ardent patriot. The higher distinction of 
 the Author of the Book of Jonah is that he exercises the 
 same liberality in his envisagement of a foreign and hostile 
 people, viewing them as undisciplined and overgrown 
 children yet also as the work of God’s hands. Such a spirit 
 
 1 Dostoieusky : his Life and Literary Activity, by Eugenii Soloviev. 
 English edition, p. 240. 
 
88 THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 as this is the generating atmosphere out of which the 
 fellowship of all peoples at last will spring. 
 
 Now both in its patriotism and in its internationalism 
 the Book of Jonah exhibits characteristic workings of the 
 Spirit of Christ. He, too, condemned the Israel of His 
 day, only because He felt in Himself the better soul of His 
 people. Too little has been made of the patriotism of 
 Jesus; yet is it plain enough to any open-minded reader 
 of the Gospels. He addresses Himself primarily, and bade 
 His disciples do the same, to the lost sheep of the house of 
 Israel (S. Matthew xv, 24; x, 5ff.). The fourth Gospel is 
 in fundamental agreement with the Synoptics, when it 
 represents our Lord as identifying Himself with the pure 
 Jewish race: Ye worship that which ye know not: we wor- 
 ship that which we know: for salvation 1s from the Jews 
 (S. John iv, 22). And, again, the same spirit that wept 
 in Babylon, crying» 
 
 If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, 
 
 Let my right hand forget her cunning, 
 broke into the impassioned lamentation of Jesus: O 
 Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killeth the prophets, and stoneth 
 them that are sent unto her! how oft would I have gathered 
 thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens 
 under her wings, and ye would not! (S. Matthew xxii, 37). 
 
 But also our Lord’s range of vision outwent the impulses 
 of His contemporaries’ patriotism. Passage after passage 
 rises to one’s mind, indicative of the vast sweep of His 
 sympathies. Defiantly He throws the egis of His name 
 as a teacher over the boycotted Samaritan. In His fore- 
 casting of the Society He seeks to establish He declares, 
 They shall come from the east and the west, and from the 
 north and the south, and shall sit down in the kingdom of 
 God (S. Luke xiii, 29) ; and these are Gentiles ! 
 
 It is not, however, merely in His recorded utterances 
 that this wideness of His sympathy is made evident. 
 There is that in His character which justifies His self- 
 
THE BOOK AND THE SIGN 89 
 
 chosen title, The Son of Man, as a designation, which, 
 whatever its origin, symbolises on His lips relationship 
 with mankind as a whole. The appeal His personality has 
 made, from the first century until now, to men of most 
 widely divergent national types, reveals the working of a 
 power which, if selective in its operation, has yet been 
 broadly human too. So it is that the Christian religion, 
 generated long ages ago in that highest type of piety the 
 Book of Jonah helped to produce, is designed to be the 
 creator of the world’s last International. This it will 
 shape, not in destruction of either classes or nations, but 
 in the regeneration of our widely varied powers and sym- 
 pathies. 
 
 Nationalism and Internationalism—these which both 
 belong to the Book of Jonah and to the teaching and 
 character of Jesus Christ claim a place in our final thoughts 
 about this Scripture; and in view of that oscillation be- 
 tween a base and indiscriminate glorying in one’s country 
 on the one hand and a morally unfruitful cosmopolitanism 
 on the other, which so often marks the common mind of 
 our time, some further consideration of these high themes 
 may possess real value. 
 
 Firstly, then, there is a patriotism—or nationalism, if 
 the term be preferred—which is fundamental to personal 
 character as the Bible seeks to establish it. It is no mere 
 geographical affection ; it is more than an attachment to 
 the particular land in which we happen to have been born. 
 Whole peoples have sometimes migrated from one clime to 
 another, and yet have clung together in a common affection. 
 It is not based upon any foolish exaggeration of the great- 
 ness of one’s own kindred. Some of the smaller nations 
 have exhibited this virtue in the most intense and en- 
 nobling form, free from all misconceptions as to their own 
 relative importance in the world. Nor is it a consciousness, 
 of the superiority of the institutions, laws and customs of. 
 our country over those of our neighbours. Here, indeed, 
 
 G 
 
go THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 the critics of patriotism often shoot wide of the mark. 
 Thus the French rationalist, Diderot, in the eighteenth 
 century, declared, ‘‘ By comparing among all nations laws 
 with laws, talents with talents, and manners with manners, 
 nations will find little reason to prefer themselves to 
 others.’’* On the contrary a backward people, conscious 
 of much barbarism often moves to a higher level of civilisa- 
 tion through the strength of national preference. For the 
 moral sanction of patriotism is this—where we have most 
 received there our deepest obligation lies. I owe a debt 
 of gratitude to my own nation deeper than I can ever 
 owe elsewhere. Every one of us has received far more 
 from his nation than he can ever contribute to it—heritages 
 of language, of literature, of legal protection, and of an 
 almost infinite mechanism for the operation of daily life. 
 If at times other loyalties present claims that seem to con- 
 flict with national love, yet the way of duty opens for all 
 men of honour when they bring to it the memory and 
 measure of indebtedness. 
 
 The problem of patriotism, however, is that of self- 
 clarification. Love of country will have little value unless 
 it express itself in moral discrimination between historic 
 processes. The stream of life in our national history which 
 has been noblest is that to which our loyalty is due. The 
 unworthy elements of the past and of the present we are 
 bound to repudiate. And the truth about our own loved 
 British Isles is that, just as in Hebrew history, two streams 
 of influence the narrowly national and the international 
 are plainly discernible. On the one hand, it is probably 
 true, as J. A. Froude once observed, that our Empire 
 pioneers have been mostly men without much scruple or 
 regard for other interests than those suggested by the flag. 
 Whatever their private morals (and these not always quite 
 correct), they have been little concerned with any idea of 
 national altruism. They have fought and they have 
 
 1Morley’s Diderot, i, p. 245. Morley seems to have approved 
 the sentiment. 
 
THE BOOK AND THE SIGN QI 
 
 builded under no pretence of serving mankind. Indeed, 
 towards other peoples they have often been pathetically 
 contemptuous. Sir F. H. Doyle’s stirring poem, The 
 Private of the Buffs, illustrates a typical English attitude. 
 In the hands of a barbarous foe, 
 
 Let dusky Indians whine and kneel ; 
 An English lad must die. 
 
 On the other hand, it is possible to trace in our history 
 a current of nobler impulse slowly working towards political 
 expression. The late Professor J. A. Cramb, in his Origin 
 and Destiny of Imperial Britain, observes : 
 
 For this Empire (of Britain) is built upon a design 
 more liberal even than that of Athens or the Rome of 
 the Antonines. Britain conquers, but by the testimony 
 of men of all races who have found refuge within her 
 confines, she conquers less for herself than for humanity. 
 ‘ The earth is man’s’ might be her watchword, and, as 
 if she had caught the ocean’s secret, her empire is the 
 highway of nations. That province, that territory, 
 that State which is added to her sway, seems thereby 
 redeemed for humanity rather than conquered for 
 her own sons. (p. 96.) 
 
 The struggle between these opposing tempers of national 
 feeling is by no means ended yet. If the salvation of our 
 country in every critical juncture of her history has been 
 secured through her inherent righteousness—‘‘ The greatest 
 Empire in the annals of Mankind,’ says Cramb? “is at 
 once the most earnestly religious and the most tolerant ”’ 
 —yet it must be admitted our common Christianity is a 
 very diluted thing. We carry a tremendous persistence of 
 Paganism in our blood, and, as a whole, the nation is not 
 livingly interested in the rights of other peoples. And now 
 we also, like Israel, have had our baptism in dreadful 
 waters. What the Exile was to Israel the Great War has 
 been to us. And the word of the Eternal has come to us 
 a second time, recalling us to our trust—the moral leader- 
 
 top. cit., p. 78. 
 
Q2 THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 ship of mankind. For this, indeed, should be ours, partly 
 through the geographical position and the facilities of the 
 homeland we inhabit, partly through the fact that within 
 the British Commonwealth of nations there is brought 
 together a greater variety of peoples and languages than 
 can be found within any other political bond. What 
 response are we making to the Divine appeal? For the 
 quickening of our priestly vocation surely we have learnt 
 something from the waves and billows that have passed 
 over us with their nightmare of entangling seaweeds. Or 
 have we, too, been plunged into the belly of Hell in vain ? 
 
 These are the questions which the Book of Jonah suggests 
 for our people to-day. They are questions which an 
 unprejudiced survey of our present moral situation in 
 domestic and in industrial life compels us to leave 
 unanswered, even as in the brilliant Scripture we have 
 been considering the dogged misanthropy of the Hebrew 
 prophet is exhibited but not dissolved. And yet again, 
 as in the Book of Jonah the last word is not with the pro- 
 phet but with his God, so to us also a voice of the Spirit 
 is still audible, pleading that we should build Jerusalem 
 
 In England’s green and pleasant land. 
 
 Surely, too, it has been the prompting of that same Spirit 
 which has led to the framing of the Treaty of Locarno ; 
 for whatever view may be taken of British commitments 
 therein, some moral advance has been made beyond the 
 old position of our friendship with France and Belgium 
 in the pledge that British support henceforth will be 
 accorded to whichever of the Western Powers may be 
 the subject of aggression on those frontiers that lie nearest 
 to us. And we may well be hopeful of a statesmanship 
 which plainly seeks to establish goodwill, not only between 
 ourselves and our late allies, but in our relations with 
 former foes as well. 
 
 I have somewhat anticipated what needs to be said as 
 
THE BOOK AND THE SIGN 93 
 
 to the claims of Internationalism, for in truth we cannot 
 _ serve the noblest factor in our national life without enter- 
 taining those claims. The world of duties is one; its 
 hemispheres merge into one another. It needs to be 
 asserted that there is no necessary conflict between national- 
 ism and internationalism. Rather, to borrow an illustra- 
 tion from a modern Jewish writer, just as the earth revolves 
 upon its own axis and yet moves round the sun, so a nation’s 
 actions may turn upon a centre of its own life, while also 
 traversing an appointed path in the fellowship of the race. 
 
 At the present time there is a very clamant need for 
 the assertion and exposition of the Christian position. 
 The Churches have been somewhat savagely and hypo- 
 critically scourged by people outside their ranks for sharing 
 in the War-guilt of 1914. Whatever their sins have been, 
 however much any renewed affirmation of the teaching of 
 Christ may reflect upon their past, they must ever courage- 
 ously assert the principles of reconciliation, forgiveness 
 and goodwill between enemies. But yet more urgently 
 the doctrine of Christian Internationalism needs to be 
 applied to racial questions. For in face of what has been 
 truly called “ the rising tide of colour against white world- 
 supremacy ’’ there are English and American writers 
 whose attitude is frankly pagan. Thus Mr. Madison 
 Grant, in introducing Dr. Stoddard’s book on the Colour 
 question, tells us the Anglo-Saxon must “shake off the 
 shackles of an inveterate altruism, discard the vain phan- 
 tom of Internationalism, and reassert the pride of race 
 and the right of merit to rule.” Our present condition, 
 a very grave one, he holds, is largely “‘ the result of following 
 the leadership of idealists and philanthropic doctrinaires.”’ 
 And again, “‘ Democratic ideals ...in England or in 
 America is one thing, but it is quite another for the white 
 man to share his blood with, or entrust his ideals to brown, 
 yellow, black, or red men. This is suicide pure and 
 
 1 Prof. Lazarus, The Ethics of Judaism, American edition, II, 
 p. 226. 
 
94 THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 simple.’ These are ominous sentences. The objection 
 to mixed marriages is certainly not incompatible with a 
 very wide inter-racial association. Even within the same 
 nation, marriage out of one’s own class is a fruitful cause 
 of unhappiness, while yet we may all share together in 
 political and religious ideals and in the endeavour to pro- 
 mote the welfare of our country. But the wholesale 
 repudiation of idealistic leadership and the refusal to pro- 
 mote the white man’s ideals outside his own territories, 
 involves not only the repudiation of Christianity; it 
 creates also the danger of that very race-suicide this 
 American writer dreads; for in view of the admitted 
 “rising tide of Colour ”’ wars of the bitterest kind are almost 
 certainly the alternative. 
 
 Here we must dare to reassert the comity of nations in 
 the purpose of God. Whatever risks may seem to attend 
 a more generous attitude to Colour than as yet has ob- 
 tained, the ground of our confidence is the universalist 
 belief which underlies the Book of Jonah and which emerges 
 so plainly in the teaching of Christ. A recent work for 
 which the whole Church may well be grateful, Mr. J. H. 
 Oldham’s Christianity and the Race Problem, admirably 
 exhibits the problems we have to face, emphasises the 
 need for hard thinking towards practical solutions, and 
 restates for us the Christian ideal. Yet is there some- 
 thing further to be said with full emphasis. Mr. Oldham 
 rightly sees that the pressure of population is one of the 
 most serious factors in international and inter-racial hos- 
 tility. ‘‘ The desire to obtain access to supplies of food 
 and to the sources of wealth by which food may be pur- 
 chased to meet the need of an expanding population is 
 the chief cause of the national jealousies and rivalries by 
 which the world is distracted to-day.’ The facts and 
 figures by which this aspect of the world-problem is shewn 
 us may be all true enough, and the courageous plea for 
 
 1 The Rtsing Tide of Colour, p. xxxii. 
 2 Christianity and the Race Problem, p. 205. 
 
THE BOOK AND THE SIGN 95 
 
 justice all round, whatever the resulting hardships to 
 white peoples, is of the Christian faith. But it needs also 
 to be said that our Faith is fixed upon the character of 
 God. We are very inadequately equipped to measure the 
 resources God has locked up in our world. Fifty years 
 ago many people were seriously apprehensive that the 
 coal measures of the world would ere long be exhausted 
 and an Arctic prospect began to loom in the popular 
 imagination. Nowit appears to be difficult to find sufficient 
 purchasers for our coal. The truth is, as Lord Balfour 
 - said in his Presidential Address to the British Association 
 in 1904, ‘‘ We seem to be practically concerned chiefly with 
 the feebler forces of Nature, and with energy in its least 
 powerful manifestations. . . . We live, so to speak, merely 
 on its fringe.’ Every day since these words were uttered 
 has confirmed that view and opened up new hopes of 
 Nature’s resources for the supply of human needs. But 
 whatever may be the range of scientific discoveries, if we 
 know God as the Father of us all we have such sure confi- 
 dence respecting the provision He has made for His world, 
 as turns the appeal for the practice of inter-racial justice 
 into a call for simple loyalty to ourselves. If it be said 
 that this is a mere feeling and that we must face facts, 
 the reply is that, to him who follows Christ, God is the 
 Fact of facts. 
 
 To sum up: Not without foresight has the Sovereign 
 Will brought upon their journey these vast and gifted 
 peoples, whose ways so widely differ from those of the 
 white man. Our insistence, therefore, is not only upon 
 justice and truth in the white man’s dealings with them, 
 but also upon a believing good-will that they also, no less 
 than ourselves, may be served, and themselves be en- 
 couraged to offer service, within the great Family of Man- 
 kind. Our publicists and statesmen often hesitate to deal 
 generously in these matters because they see risks involved. 
 Such apprehensions would fade before a real conviction 
 as to the good pleasure of the Father. We plainly need 
 
96 THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 more faith, and better. Then in all the intercourse of a 
 Christian nation with other nations, coloured or white, 
 policy would be directed along that line of ancient Hebrew 
 thinking which asserted the priesthood of Israel as God’s 
 people among the various nations of the world. And this, 
 the supreme contribution of the Old Testament, with which 
 all the spiritual processes of the New agree, calls upon us 
 to affirm that the noblest prerogative of a free and sovereign 
 nation is the right to serve mankind. 
 
NOTE C 
 
 THE LITERAL INTERPRETATION 
 

 
NOTE C 
 THE LITERAL INTERPRETATION 
 
 POPULAR statement of the conservative position 
 
 in regard to the Book of Jonah has recently appeared 
 entitled, Jonah : Prophet and Patriot, by D. E. Hart-Davies, 
 M.A. In his endeavour to establish the historical character 
 of the mission to Nineveh, the author quotes from the 
 English version of Tobit. ‘Tobit on his death-bed, ad- 
 dressing his son Tobias, gives him parting counsel in the 
 words: “Go into Media, my child, for I surely believe all 
 the things which Jonah the prophet spake of Nineveh, that 
 at shall be overthrown. . . . And now, my child, depart from 
 Nineveh, because those things which the prophet Jonah spake 
 shall surely come to pass.” (xiv. 3, 4, 8.) 
 
 Mr. Hart-Davies is apparently unaware that this trans- 
 lation is based upon MSS. which in Dr. Charles’ standard 
 work, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testa- 
 ment, are regarded as of secondary value. Unquestionably 
 in place of Jonah the Prophet the true reading is that pre- 
 served in the famous Sinaiticus MS., Nahum the Prophet. 
 A moment’s reflection shews that this must be correct, 
 because while the overthrow of Nineveh, in which Tobit 
 so greatly rejoiced, accorded with the prophecy of Nahum, 
 the prediction of Jonah was, as the Book of Jonah 
 narrates, cancelled by the God who sent him. 
 
 Also it must be said that Mr. Hart-Davies’ method of 
 quoting an imposing array of ancient authorities in favour 
 of the historical character of Jonah’s mission is really of 
 very small value. It is no derogation from the greatness. 
 of these scholars to abandon their judgement upon a matter 
 
100 THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 of this sort. I suppose an equally impressive catena could 
 be made out in favour of the literal history of Geneszs i, 
 or, let us say, of the Ptolemaic astronomy. Such appeals 
 are really irrelevant when once our modern standards 
 and tests of literary criticism have approved themselves 
 valid. Similarly it is of small use to exhibit the diversity 
 of opinion amongst modern scholars concerning the details 
 of the critical position. All that such a method really 
 establishes is the mutual independence of such writers in 
 their rejection of conservative theories. They cannot be 
 said to confute one another, if, as Mr. Hart-Davies be- 
 lieves, they are all wrong. 
 
 But the most serious weakness in this writer’s book is 
 his endeavour to foreclose discussion by an appeal to the 
 authority of Christ. Following S. Matthew’s version of 
 our Lord’s reference to Jonah, and even declaring that 
 S. Luke’s has “‘ no substantial difference from it’ (p. 25), 
 he repeatedly insists that this reference establishes the 
 historicity of Jonah’s adventure and mission. “ The 
 testimony of our Divine Lord,” he affirms, “‘ ought to be 
 conclusive. This has always been for me the insuperable 
 objection to the allegorical interpretation of the narrative ” 
 (p. 24). He deals with various suggestions which have 
 been made with a view to disencumbering the subject of 
 Christ’s words. Some of these suggestions have, certainly, 
 been unfortunate but they make no appeal to most of 
 those who adhere to the allegorical interpretation. We are 
 not concerned here with any Kenotic theory of our Lord’s 
 person. | All that need be said is that the question of the 
 literary genus of the Book of Jonah, whether it should be 
 treated as history or as allegory, was not raised in Christ’s 
 time, nor, as far as we can judge, was it before His mind 
 at all. He had His own way of reading Scripture and did 
 _ not always follow what appears to us to have been the 
 original intention of the sacred writers. An instance of 
 this independence may be seen in His wonderfully illumi- 
 nating quotation of Exodus ii, 6, I am the God of Abraham, 
 
THE BOOK AND THE SIGN IOI 
 
 and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob; to which He 
 adds, He zs not the God of the dead, but of the living (S. Mark 
 xli, 26-27). There can be very little doubt that our Lord 
 here reads into the words a meaning which their author 
 never purposed, seeing that Moses is nowhere represented 
 in the Pentateuch as believing in the life after death. That, 
 while it in no way lessens the value of Christ’s comment 
 —for the great sayings of literature often contain more 
 than their authors consciously realise—illustrates that 
 independence of mind which is one of the most impressive 
 features of His recorded words. Now, similarly, His 
 treatment of the Book of Jonah, as I have been at some 
 pains to shew in these studies, was quite apart from the 
 author’s intention, and this whether the book be classified 
 as allegory or as history. I do not imagine, therefore, 
 that even had the allegorical character of the book been 
 clearly present in His thought it would have made any great 
 difference to His use of the story. For, whether the men 
 of Nineveh ever heard the preaching of a prophet called 
 Jonah or not, we all know perfectly well what Jesus meant 
 when He placed over against the type of people a repentant 
 Nineveh would have exhibited the wilful and hypocritical 
 amongst His own generation, against whom He was testi- 
 fying. No one, either then or now, could imagine that 
 He intended an actual standing together of the two bodies 
 of people, thus compared, in some world-assembly, at a 
 last great assize. His comparison held and holds good 
 in its essential appeal whether Jonah’s mission be fact_ 
 or fiction. But the point cannot be too strongly insisted 
 upon that the literary questions here involved were not 
 in men’s minds when He spoke, and it is a first-class mistake 
 to invoke His authority outside that sphere of moral and 
 religious truth with which alone He was concerned. He 
 did not come to deal with literary criticism any more than” 
 He came to teach astronomy. In all those matters that 
 are properly subject to scientific handling, He affected no 
 omniscience. He was content to take over the stock of 
 
102 THE PROPHET JONAH 
 
 knowledge and opinion which He found commonly received 
 by His fellow-men, and to make what use of these He 
 could for those higher purposes which relate to sin and 
 
 salvation. 
 
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