COLUMN ONE

Not just a fish story

A well-intentioned but not always well-read friend once told me that the Bible, for all its worth, was devoid of any discernible humor. He must have overlooked the Book of Jonah. That’s understandable, since it’s about the shortest book in the Bible-and also my nomination for the funniest.

It would be hard to dream up a funnier picture of the self-righteous human condition than that of old Jonah sitting under his gourd or qiqayon or whatever it was, for biblical scholars have been at a loss to identify it exactly, and just glowering at the spared city of Nineveh. For he was mad as Hell at the Almighty for having sent him all this way only to forgive the city at the last minute.

He’d been cheated out of a really satisfying, Cecil-B.-DeMille ending, complete with a cast of thousands caught in cinematic catastrophe.

Jonah’s heartfelt complaint to the Lord is a classic:

“Is not this what I said when I was yet in my own country?” he huffs. “I knew that thou art a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and repentest of evil!” He made it sound like an accusation, indictment and conviction on all counts.

What a perfect image of the Prophet foiled, and of all of us when we’re being just a little more upright than God.

If they ever make the Book of Jonah into a movie, and they probably won’t, unless it’s one of those cartoonish productions for children of all ages, somebody as stagey as Charlton (Moses) Heston should play the title role. Just as the original Jonah did-straight.

Pity that John Belushi isn’t around any more; he would have made a perfect Jonah-dressed in Samurai robe and swinging out in all directions. Or picture Jonah with bushy eyebrows, thick-rimmed spectacles, sputtering on a cigar-not unlike Groucho Marx-and muttering imprecations at a God too soft for His own good.

The book’s opening scene isn’t bad, either. For a concise summary of Modern Man’s immediate reaction to being called by the Lord, it’s hard to top:

“Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amitai, saying, ‘Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.’ But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish . . . .”

Perfect. No fuss, no muss.

No dawdling, no arguments, no excuses. Having just been given his instructions, the Prophet promptly gets up and heads out-in the exact opposite direction. Ain’t that just like most of us?

A captain in the Salvation Army once told me he knew just how old Jonah felt. He wanted to know how come it was that every time he got a call from the Lord, it was never: “Arise, Bobby Joe, son of Bubba, and book passage on the QEII, and preach to the people of Paris, France, from a table I have prepared for thee at the Tour d’Argent, that they be turned from their evil ways . . .”

Alas, in the captain’s case, the message was always something like: “Catch a Greyhound bus to Kerrville, Texas, and start a soup kitchen on the bad side of town.”

Jonah’s instinctively heading West as soon as he’s told to go East has got to be one of his more human traits.

And none of this even touches on the overly celebrated fish story in the book, which outdoes anything in one of Vance Randolph’s Ozark stories.

Finally, catch the Lord’s response when He hears old Jonah say he’s mad enough to just curl up and die right then and there.

He giveth and He taketh away, and having done both with that little shade tree Jonah had grown so fond of, the Lord delivers the story’s punch line:

“You pity the gourd, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night, and perished in a night. And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?”

That part about the cattle always gets me, maybe because there is something about cows that is innately funny, and was even before The Far Side’s Gary Larson started drawing them his way-with that look of solemn, cud-chewing wisdom that masks nothing in particular. Not entirely unlike the herd-like people of Nineveh--any Nineveh any time, including ours.

Devoid of humor? Why, sometimes there’s nothing but in The Book.

If you like your wit a little drier, compare Genesis 18:12 and 18:13, and note how the Lord tactfully rephrases Sarah’s remarks when He repeats them to her husband, omitting her reference to Father Abraham’s waning powers. This only confirms what any Southerner would assume, namely, that the Lord God is a gentleman and will go out of His way to spare an old man’s feelings, even one long past his youthful ways at a however spry 100.

The rabbis chose the Jonah story as the portion to be read on the otherwise solemn Day of Atonement, presumably to demonstrate the Lord’s forgiving nature, though I’ve always suspected it was to demonstrate His sense of humor. He surely has one, for He created man.

Paul Greenberg is editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. E-mail him at: [email protected]

Perspective, Pages 79 on 04/06/2014

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