by Bruce Feiler
The use of the word Sheol, which means “hell” or “pit,” echoes the way Joseph is thrown into a pit before being transported down to Egypt. Later, when Jonah wails, “The waters closed in over me, / The deep engulfed me,” he uses the word deep, an echo of the Babylonian story of Enuma Elish. These similarities are hardly accidental. Jonah has gone back to the depths of Creation, to a time when a watery chaos covered the earth. And what he discovers is a central lesson of the Bible. In moments of personal turmoil, a person no longer wants to be alone. He no longer wants independence. He wants dependence. The only answer to chaos is God. So Jonah, now that he has reached the darkest depths, calls out. Originally called to cry out against Nineveh, he now cries out for God: “When my life was ebbing away, I called the Lord to mind.” And God, as he does time and again, answers. He brings Jonah “up from the pit.” He allows him to be re-created. He commands the fish to spew Jonah onto dry land.
Now the story resumes where it started. God once again orders Jonah to go to Nineveh, and this time Jonah obeys. “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” Jonah tells the Ninevites. His declaration appears to leave no room for negotiation, but the people change their ways anyway, fasting and dressing in sackcloth. “Let everyone turn back from his evil ways and from the injustice of which he is guilty,” the king says, in a direct echo of Jeremiah. The Israelites, warned of their misbehavior for centuries by earlier prophets, consistently failed to make amends. The Ninevites make immediate adjustments and prove that God responds to changed behavior. God sees their actions and withdraws his punishment. Nineveh is saved.
But Jonah, who should be happy that he helped save the city, is disconsolate that the hated Nineveh has been spared. “Please, Lord, take my life,” he cries, “for I would rather die than live.” God is flabbergasted. “Are you that deeply grieved?” In an apparent attempt to test God, Jonah then flees the city and settles on a hill. God originally provides a plant to protect Jonah but then destroys the plant and leaves Jonah exposed. God seems determined to impress upon Jonah that he controls all things, even nature, even him.
But Jonah can express his sadness only at losing the plant. Again God is boggled. “Are you so deeply grieved about the plant?” “Yes,” Jonah replies, “so deeply that I want to die.” The book ends with a rhetorical question from God, a statement of his commitment to provide succor for anyone who promises to embrace his moral vision, no matter where they live. “You cared about the plant, which you did not work for and which you did not grow,” God says to Jonah. “And should not I care about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not yet know their right hand from their left, and many beasts as well!” As long as humans can still learn to live righteously, God says, he will protect them.
On its surface, the Book of Jonah would seem to be a perfect candidate to slide into obscurity, like plenty of other prophetic books. (Heard any references to Obadiah, Nahum, or Habakkuk lately?) The narrative is not particularly believable. The hero is not particularly heroic. The evil enemy doesn’t exactly get punished. At the climactic moment, the blubbery antagonist, having dined on the hero, actually “vomits” him onto the beach. And at the end, the regurgitated hero is chastised by God, and God’s sworn enemy is redeemed. By all rightful measures, the son of Amittai is a failure and an ingrate. He should be known as Jonah Who?
Instead he’s one of the most famous figures in the Bible.
Part of this has to do with the sheer fascination of a man getting swallowed by a fish. But more has to do with how the religious mind can find meaning in the least likely places and, in particular, how the religions that grew out of the Hebrew Bible—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—have reinterpreted the same stories to extract similar but slightly different messages.
Jews attached themselves to Jonah because of the powerful message of repentance the story provides. The first repenter is Jonah. The rabbis viewed Jonah’s descent into the fish as a simile for the Israelites’ descent into exile. They pointed out that Hosea says Israel will be “swallowed” by Assyria, and Jeremiah says Israel will be “devoured” by Babylon. The message of Jonah echoes the message of exile: God meets you most intimately in your moments of darkness. “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you,” God says in Isaiah. (Talmudic rabbis tried to make the dag gadol more contemporary, saying the inside of the fish was like a large synagogue, in which the fish’s eyes were windows and lamps lit its stomach. The message here was hardly subtle: Come to services. We won’t eat you alive!)
The even bigger repenter, the rabbis said, was Nineveh. For Jewish populations, trapped for generations in gentile empires, the story of Jonah held a powerful message. Be patient. God has larger goals in mind. You may be enraged at your tormentors, but God is postponing his judgment to give them time to accept his moral vision. Trust God. And in the meantime, attend to your own moral well-being. This message is considered so central to Jewish identity that the Book of Jonah is read annually in synagogues around the world on the holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur, the Day of Repentance.
Muslims also embraced Jonah, or Yunus in Arabic, though the Islamic version of the story differs somewhat from the biblical version. In keeping with the notion that a Muslim is “one who submits,” Yunus actually does go to Nineveh upon receiving his initial call, only to have the Ninevites reject his pleas. Yunus then flees. His sin is not disobeying God; it is not trusting God to fulfill his promise eventually. But repentance echoes through the Muslim version as well, as Jonah realizes his sin while alive in the fish. The fish eventually coughs him onto the shore, whereupon he returns to Nineveh and the people embrace his call to God. Yunus is so central to Islam that an entire chapter in the Koran bears his name, an honor bestowed on only five other biblical figures: Abraham, Noah, Joseph, Mary, and the Queen of Sheba.
But the religion that most embraced Jonah was Christianity. The association began with the Gospels, which saw deep parallels between Jonah and Jesus. The most obvious connection was the amount of time both spent interred. Matthew quotes Jesus as saying, “Just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth.” Luke broadens the connection. “Just as Jonah became a sign to the people of Nineveh, so the Son of Man will be to this generation.” Later interpreters read the prefigurement of Jesus across the entire narrative. Jonah descends into darkness on the ship before the nonbelievers lift him up and sacrifice him to the sea. Jesus passes through darkness at Gethsemane before being lifted up by nonbelievers and sacrificed. Just before the sacrifice, the sailors cry, “Do not hold us guilty of killing an innocent person!” Just before Jesus is killed, Judas cries, “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.”
The story of Jonah holds a special place among Assyrian Christians, who once dominated the East. As Donny George mentioned, Assyrians consider themselves the first converts to Christianity. This claim is based on the tradition that the apostle Thomas converted the town of Edessa, in Turkey, around 100 C.E. The Assyrian Church split from the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches in 431 after it refused to accept that Nestorianism—the belief that Christ was two persons, one human and one divine—was heresy. Largely forgotten in the West, Assyrian Christians evangelized across the Silk Road to Afghanistan, India, China, and Korea. By 1200, Assyrians boasted their church was bigger than its European counterparts combined. As much as half of Genghis Khan’s army was said to be Assyrian Christians, and when Marco Polo visited China in the thirteenth century, he was astonished to find Assyrian priests in the royal court.
The church later suffered under the Turks and today numbers only a few million, with an estimated several hundred thousand still in Iraq. Sakina Welly is one of them. She told me that the holiest days of her year are a three-day fast, just before Lent, called the Rogation of the Ninevites, which commemorates the town’s redemption after Jonah’s thre
at. “I remember as a girl,” she said, “how scary it was to read about God calling for the destruction of my town. I had nightmares about my house catching on fire.” And now, as an adult? “I have to cook during the entire fast!” she said, laughing. “On the last night we eat cakes and a special kind of bread made with seven types of grain. It represents the sand that Jonah landed on when he was spit up from the fish. It would be a lot easier to cook fish.”
One surprise of my trip to Iraq was discovering these differing interpretations of Jonah. He’s almost like a second Abraham, a figure from Mesopotamia who shows the common roots of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam yet also exemplifies the spiritual biases that divide them. But sitting in Nineveh, I felt that looking primarily at Jonah misses the larger meaning of the story. The principal message is that morality is the central quality God seeks in humans. He doesn’t care about your status in life, he doesn’t care where you live, he doesn’t care what you believed in the past. He doesn’t even care if, like Nineveh, you once destroyed his chosen people.
God cares only that you conduct yourself in a moral way, even if you have to repent to do so. This message reinforces the theme that has been building throughout the prophets. First, beginning with Joshua, God shows that behavior is more important than land. Later, beginning with David, God shows that behavior is more important than power. Here, with the Ninevites, he shows that behavior is more important than nationality. Moral conduct is so important to God that he’s even prepared to rebuke Jonah by sending a whale to swallow him, just as he admonished his chosen people by sending them into exile.
Despite his repeated criticism of Jonah, God’s final note toward him is one of compassion. By ignoring Jonah’s request to die, God shows forgiveness toward him as he did toward the Ninevites. God’s mercy is universal. “I am ready to respond to those who do not ask,” God says in Isaiah. “I am available to those who do not seek me. I tell a nation that does not invoke my name, ‘Here I am; here I am.’ ” In Genesis 22, God calls out to his chosen partner, Abraham, who responds, “Here I am.” After the Exile, in Isaiah 65, it is God who reaches out, this time to his unchosen ones. “Here I am; here I am.”
This call represents the highest cry of the prophets: God belongs to everyone, even if his universality offends some people who might want to keep him all to themselves.
Bijar drove Sakina home, leaving me alone atop the tell. Hikmat, concerned about aggravating his heart, remained at the bottom. Some children were playing with a dog. From here I could see over the edgy city. To my left was the shrine of Jonah. Directly below me was a giant mosque under construction, part of Saddam’s late-term Islamification, now stopped in its tracks. Lights were beginning to flicker on in some neighborhoods; others remained in the dark. Later the entire city suffered a blackout, and I spent my final night in Iraq sitting upright in bed, gripping my satellite telephone, staring at the bolted door, and listening to the explosions outside my window.
Before she left, Sakina asked me a question. Her tone was mothering. She knew I was leaving the country the next day. “Did you get what you came for?”
Her question lingered in my mind.
On an immediate level, one reason I came to Iraq was to understand its role in the roots of religion and the formation of Western civilization. On that front, the country surpassed my expectations. From the elemental notion that humans were made in God’s image, through the revolutionary idea that God is everywhere, to the radical concept that God embraces his enemies, many of the most transformative concepts of biblical religion were born on this land. For that reason, Iraq felt very comfortable. As a teenager visiting Los Angeles for the first time, I was struck by how much of its terrain and how many of its streets I already knew, from watching television and movies. I had the same feeling in Iraq. More than in any country I’d visited in the Muslim world, life in Iraq seemed instantly familiar to me because we learn about these places in second grade and read about them in the Bible.
This sense of kinship was the revelation of this place: Iraq was more dangerous than it appeared on television, but it felt more like home.
But I came for other reasons, too, among them to search for clues into the georeligious tumult of today. There, my experience was more bracing. The most immediate lesson of Iraq at the start of its eighth millennium is that political power is fleeting. The greatest empires in the world once stood here. Today they are in ruins. Yet every empire left behind some contribution—writing from Sumer, astronomy from Babylon, the cult of personality in Assyria—that embedded themselves in the larger evolution of civilization. Saddam perfectly illustrated this enduringness of the past. He understood he couldn’t erase Iraq’s past glory, so he decided to join it, which explains why he rebuilt Babylon, scripted his name across Hatra, and erected statues to himself throughout the land, like the Assyrians. His insight is telling: Just as the Israelis cling to King David, the Italians adore the Renaissance, and the British wax nostalgic about the Empire, Muslims romanticize the Baghdad caliphate, and Iraqis boast about Nebuchadnezzar. This national pride was most evident in the lingering resistance to foreign occupation. The most avoidable mistake war planners made in Iraq was underestimating Iraqis’ pride in their history, their land, and themselves.
The second lesson I learned seems directly related. No civilization has exclusive claim to truth. The bromide I learned in college, “History is written by the winners,” turns out to be wrong. History is written by winners and losers. The grandeur of Babylon suggests Nebuchadnezzar was a daring commander with an appreciation of science; the Bible presents him as a villain and a sot. The point is not that one is right and the other wrong; it’s that both are right to those who believe them. I was startled to realize how many Jews and Christians look at events in the Middle East as conforming to some preordained prophetic vision of history, while many Muslims view the same events as pointing to an opposing preordained conclusion. If we look at Babylon only as a place against which God wreaks judgment in the Bible, we miss seeing the Muslim nationalist view that it’s also a place that once wrought judgment on Jerusalem—and might do so again. We will only understand the threat that religious fundamentalism poses to the world if we understand that those fundamentalists read different versions of history.
The third lesson I took away from Iraq is that the roots of religious violence in this soil are inextricable from the roots of religion itself. From the opening chapters of Genesis, in which Cain murders Abel, to the vengeful cries of Psalm 137, in which bloodthirsty Israelites imagine bludgeoning their enemies, chaos lives alongside these rivers just as much as order. Every day I felt the underlying sense that civilization could give way to inhumanity at any moment. As a result, everyone I met in Iraq, both locals and foreigners, had one thing in common: They wrapped themselves in emotional body armor. And I did, too. It’s the only way to survive in an environment where anarchy and death are icy realities.
Still, I came away convinced that the triumph of violence is not precast in these stones. They tell a different story, too. They tell of the most humane things ever invented: writing, mathematics, time, the calendar, the plow, the garden. Imagination was kindled here, as was freedom. Above all, what emerged from Mesopotamia was the simple idea that humans can control our environment rather than let it control us. We could see the chaos and re-render it as order.
Before I came to Iraq, my sense of Mesopotamia was somewhat muddled. I had a hard time distinguishing among the many civilizations that seemed to jostle one another on these shores. Sumer bled into Babylon, gave way to Assyria, back to Babylon. That mix of cultures continues today. Iraq is still one of the most heterogeneous countries in the Muslim world, with an ever-shifting balance of influence among Sunnis, Shias, Kurds, and their various outside supporters.
But having traveled from one end of the country to the other, I was struck that one iconic image links all three ancient cultures I visited—Sumer, Babylon, and Assyria—the ziggurat. Yet each was built to a
different god. The Bible casts this structure as the Tower of Babel, a ziggurat leading humans closer to the one God. The story of Babel has traditionally been viewed as God’s punishment against humans for encroaching on his authority. “If, as one people with one language for all, this is how they have begun to act,” God says, “then nothing that they may propose to do will be out of their reach. Let us, then”—note again the plural—“go down and confound their speech there, so that they shall not understand one another’s speech.”
But rereading the story in Iraq, I came to view it somewhat differently. In the episode that precedes Babel, the Flood, God is so angry at humans’ lawlessness that he opts to wipe out all of humanity, “to put an end to all the flesh.” Five chapters later, after humans build the Tower of Babel, God no longer seeks to annihilate humans; he merely scatters them over the face of the earth. His leniency is telling. God is not threatened by humans’ industry; he is threatened by their unity. Specifically, he worries that if humans put aside their differences and act as one, they will think of themselves as more powerful than God. To reinforce his view, God’s response to homogeneity is instructive: He re-creates humans in heterogeneous groups, forcing them to live as distinct cultures, speaking multiple languages.
The message here is unexpected but powerfully relevant today. When humans try to create one language—when one group of people tries to impose an artificial order on the world—God views this as a hubristic attempt to usurp his powers and slaps down the arrogation. God insists on diversity. He demands that humans accept their differences. In rejecting the Tower of Babel, God rejects fundamentalism, the idea that one way of speaking is the only way of speaking and can be imposed on others at will.
God’s solution is a cacophony of voices, living side by side.
On the afternoon I left for Iraq, I called to say good-bye to my parents. In the spirit of my farewell note to my wife, I wanted to leave nothing unsaid to anyone I loved. Each conversation had been more difficult than the last. I told my parents that the most important thing they had taught me and my siblings was to engage life fully, to be ourselves. To live. “If something happens to me,” I said, “I would like my journey to be remembered as an act of living.” An hour later, my mother called back. She was still crying. “Do you know that when a Jewish person dies,” she said, “the last words he or she is supposed to say are the Shema?”
