Just been re-reading the story of Jonah ready to start writing my sermon for Sunday as part of our Covenant service. I happened to be reading a Good News Bible and was very struck by the way it renders Jonah 5:11:
How much more, then, should I have pity on Nineveh, that great city. After all, it has more than 120,000 innocent children in it, as well as many animals!
I was curious, so looked at other translations 'in the flesh' and online (alas I couldn't read Hebrew if I had it)
The use of 'children' is almost unique to the NIV, most versions have 'people' sometimes referred to as childlike, whilst in most translations rather than 'animals' it is 'cattle.' What is striking is God's care not only for the people (adults or children) but for the other living creatures who surely cannot be blamed for human sinfulness.
Despite having been brought up on this as a factual story, I'm no longer so sure: like Job its style doesn't 'fit' the historical texts and it reads more like the 'wisdom' literature. But what matters surely is not the absolute historicity (that it literally happened like this) but what it tells us about God's character of grace and mercy. Lots in the story to think really hard about - and I don't have time to do that now - but the Jonah story is a great one to wrestle with a while; I just hope I might be a little more appreciative of shady trees than him!
But the last word from God in this particular book seems to be 'I love cows' - which is mildly funny as well as profoundly significant.
Comments
Jonah 4:11 in Strongs uses 'adam' in the sense of humans and 'cattle' to denote generally any quadraped animal. Any OT scholras out there might be able to fill in nuances!
I agree with your view on historicity - I caused a stir at a NAM day when I said I couldn't put Jonah on a timeline for when it happened!
Jonah/the dove/Israel being swallowed by the great fish of Nineveh and exercising a prophetic role at the heart of that Empire. Israel would rather have run to the opposite end of the earth or have been swallowed in the depths of the Great Sea, but God has other ideas. The cattle on a thousand hills belong to the Lord, and so apparently do the plants. Not so sure about the people. They're a different kettle of fish...
A bit like Jeremiah telling the Babylonian exiles to build houses and pray for the prosperity of the city - but funnier?
Hi Both,
Thanks for your thoughts.
Andy, I was a good girl and prayed for your church today as per BUGB diary- but should I have prayed harder or differently ?! ;-) And why is your website not there any more?
My biggest problem is having learned 'Jonah Man Jazz' at school (Michael Hurd?) I find the songs coming back as I read the book. Ah well. Back to the task in hand...
So does God not love kangaroos, penguins or fishes then, since they are not quadrupeds...? ;-)
I think we can infer from this that, although the Almighty is a great lover of all creatures - arguably even the unclean ones, The Ninevites probably didn't own any kangaroos, penguins, fishes, etc. ;0)
The church website seems to have lapsed inconveniently without anyone telling us it was going to - probably still registered in the name of a former webmaster.
Doubly inconvenient, as the person trying to learn painstakingly how to use the website hasn't got the time to rebuild it, so we have a scrunch of conflicting priorities: either the website, the toddler group or the weekly notices sheet - one has to go to make the others possible or we need to find someone else to restore the website and keep on top of it.
If you have time to pray for us tomorrow as well as today, that would be good as one of our tenants has just gone into voluntary liquidation and we have no previous experience of this. Please also pray for the tenants - they almost certainly need it more than we do.
Hi Andy,
Priorities: toddlers, notice sheet, cup of tea/coffee, clean church ..... website
Prayers - of course, sounds tough. No experience of this, sorry.