God
is so eager to save humankind that even the wicked Ninevites can repent and be
saved: “And God renounced the punishment He had planned to bring upon them, and
did not carry it out” (Jonah 3:10). The more literal 1917 JPS translation says,
“And God repented of the evil, which He said he would do unto them; and He did
it not.” Whether the Hebrew נחם is translated as “renounce” or “repent,” the
message is clear. In this case the Ninevites themselves hold the key to unlock
God’s divine mercy. The act of repentance neutralizes the forces of darkness
and renders punishment unnecessary. The Talmud (Pes. 54a) indicates that
repentance was among those seven commodities (including the Torah and Paradise)
fashioned by God at the time of creation. . . . In other passages, notably in
the book of Micah, God does have a change of mind and tenderly bestows to the
Israelites the same forgiveness freely given to the Ninevites. Here God cannot
forsake the chosen people, however sinful they may be. God also points out that
divine compassion is superior to human:
I
have had a change of heart,
All My tenderness is stirred.
I will not act on My wrath,
Will not turn to destroy Ephraim.
For I am God, not man,
The Holy One in your midst:
I will not come in fury.
(Hos 11:8-9)
The
Lord’s methods of dealing with sin are likely to be more merciful than human
inclinations. In fact, “we are called to forgive each other, but God’s
forgiveness is of a wholly other order. The difference lies in the decisiveness
of God’s forgiveness” (Sponheim 322). The profound imbalance between divine and
human pardon leads Danish philosopher and religious thinker Søren Kierkegaard
(1813-1855) to conclude, “As sinner, man is separated from God by the most
chasmal qualitative abyss. In turn, of course, God is separated form man by the
same chasmal qualitative abyss when he forgiveness sins . . . There is one way
in which man could never in all eternity come to be like God: in forgiving
sins” (122). The Jonah narrative certainly supports this view. . . . Seven
passages in the TANAKH contain similar anthropathic language affirming God as
“slow to anger” and “abounding in steadfast love”: Exod 34:6, Ps 86:15, Ps 103:8,
Ps 145:8, Joel 2:13, Neh 9:17, and Jonah 4:2. Of these, only the Joel and Jonah
verses indicate that God renounces previously prescribed punishment. All six of
the other verses are deliberate restatements of the original Exodus analysis of
God’s personality, placed within other poems and prose passages because of
their beauty and power and to remind readers that God’s basic character does
not alter with time or circumstance. In fact, Jonah 4:2 may be an exegesis on
Exod 34:6. The Jonah verse repeats key words but expands upon their meaning by
broadening the population to which they refer and showing God’s response to
intercessory prayers of all nations.
Scholars
who interpret Jonah to be midrash point to the whole story as an explanation
not only of Exod 34:6 but also of Num 23:19:
God
is not man to be capricious,
Or mortal to change His mind.
Would He speak and not act,
Promise and not fulfill?
Ezekiel
18:23 also needs amplification: “Is it my desire that a wicked person shall
die?—says the Lord GOD. It is rather that he shall turn back from his ways and
live.” In all three of these passages, the question arises of what divine
traits predominate. Does God prefer mercy to justice? If God truly willing to
repent—to see and then see again? Does God’s love extend beyond Israel? Which
of the traits of God, repeated at Jonah 4:2, dominate? The book is a homily to
explain the preferences of the ancient God of the Israelites. Here God’s
conduct is a model for human beings, encouraging us to the same mercy and
flexibility as the deity (Rogerson 513). In origin the formula of Exod 24:6 is
valid for the Israelites, but there are always signs that protection is applied
to all of God’s creatures, as early stories indicate. For example, God allows
no harm to come to the Egyptian slave woman, Hagar, when Abraham and Sarah cast
her out into the wilderness of Beer-sheba (Gen 21), showing that all of God’s
creations are objects of providential care. The narrow, nationalistic tendency
to believe that the Lord’s kindness is reserved for the chosen people is, by
the literature of those very chosen ones, shown to be unworthy and ungodly. (Janet
Howe Gaines, Forgiveness in a Wounded World: Jonah’s Dilemma [Studies in
Biblical Literature 5; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2000], 99, 100,
109)
