In 2014, I saw news footage of a mosque in Northern Iraq, blown up into a cloud of dust. This was in Mosul on the Nineveh Plains. The mosque was destroyed by Islamic State (ISIS) militants. They considered it blasphemous because it held a shrine to Jonah, who is revered as a prophet in Islam. Isis claimed the site had become a place of apostasy.1 At that time the news was a constant reel of their terror and violence.
Since Jonah had been dragged into this, I found myself wondering what I might say if the voice of God commanded me to go to Nineveh and preach repentance to ISIS. I think I would indeed get on a boat going the other way. Jonah preaching in Nineveh
Reality Check
I’d learned from children’s picture books that Jonah ran because he was naughty. He had not done as he was told, so God sent a whale to get him. I had learned from more adult theological interpretations that Jonah was insular, or perhaps racist. He didn’t want to share the treasures of salvation with outsiders or foreigners. In this respect Jonah was spun into an all too common anti-Judaic caricature: he was prideful, blinkered, and stingy.
What if it was none of these? What if he just didn’t want to die a horrible early death? A little research into ancient Nineveh and the Assyrian empire reveals a lot. It was the first proper empire, with the first standing army. Their conquests were brutal. They would horrify the colonised into submission with mass beheadings, skinning and impaling. They displaced the vanquished to break up and erase their culture, language and autonomy. They spread like a virus over the known world turning everything into Assyria. It’s not surprising that Jonah ran. It was something like asking a Jewish person to go and preach repentance and redemption at Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies.
Enemy-love
The book of Jonah is a deeply political story. The subject matter was traumatic. And yet this story, which humanises the monsters of the ancient world, was faithfully kept by Jewish readers, even after these horrors had been unleashed on the kingdom of Israel. This is a tale about the politics of enemy-love. It is one thing to welcome the stranger, or the enemy even. The book of Jonah proposed something more radical still. Rather than being the host waiting for the enemy to show up as a guest, the roles are flipped.
Jesus’ way
