Too gracious, and the avenger

Two books of the scroll are about the same city, and together they form the two halves of a single truth. The city is Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, the cruelest empire of its day, which took pride in flaying its enemies alive and hanging their skins on the city walls. The two books stand a century apart.

The first is Jonah, and Jonah does not flee the judgment but the grace. He is the one prophet who is entirely honest about it. He is sent to that city, and he books passage the opposite way without delay. He does not doubt God's help; he fears that God will spare the city. He knows his God too well, and that is his whole problem.

Then the storm. The pagan sailors pray themselves hoarse to all their gods; the prophet of the only God lies below, asleep. When they shake him awake and cast lots to find the truth, he offers the solution himself: "throw me overboard" (1:12). What he does not say gives everything away. Not "turn back, I'll go after all." Not "God, forgive me." He chooses the waves over Nineveh, drowning over forgiving. Better dead than merciful. That is how deep the resentment runs in a man who knows all too well how gracious God is.

So overboard he goes, the sea falls calm and a fish swallows him. The bitter twist is that he does not even die. God will not grant him death as an escape. Three days he lies in the dark of the belly, and only when praying is the one thing left he can do, does he pray. It is a beautiful prayer ("salvation belongs to YHWH," 2:9), and you might believe the man has changed, until you notice there is not a syllable about Nineveh in it. The fish spits him out on dry land, and God has to give the command a second time (3:1–2) before the prophet gets his feet moving.

Finally he preaches: five words of Hebrew, the shortest and surliest sermon in all of Scripture, from a man hoping to fail. And the city falls to its knees, from the king down to the cattle. It works. It works far too well.

Jonah does not rejoice. He climbs a hill to sulk and prays the most revealing prayer ever prayed: "Ah, YHWH, this is what I knew: that You are gracious and compassionate, patient and rich in steadfast love, and relenting from harm; that is why I fled" (4:2). He quotes the most beautiful words there are, the Name of the mountain, and holds them against God. He accuses Him of being too much like Himself.

God does not replace His impossible prophet with a better one. He starts a conversation with him about a plant. No verdict comes; the book ends with a question that has hung in the air ever since: and should I not spare that great city, with its 120,000 people who cannot yet tell their right hand from their left, and also much cattle? God counts the very smallest there, who do not yet know right from left, and the animals in the stalls, defenseless creatures who know nothing at all. As a father has compassion on his children, David sang, so YHWH has compassion on those who fear Him. Here that compassion reaches one hand further still, even to a city that does not fear Him, to children who do not know His Name, and to beasts that can confess nothing. The last two words of the whole book are "much cattle." That love reaches so far that even the unwitting livestock of the enemy city falls under it, and it is so offensive that His own prophet chose the waves over it.

The second book is Nahum, a century later. In the Hebrew order it stands directly after Micah, which ends with a hymn to the forgiving God. Now Nineveh is ripe for judgment. The repentance of Jonah's day is forgotten, the bloodshed resumed. Nahum opens with the same Name of the mountain as Jonah, but its other wing: "A jealous God and an avenger is YHWH, an avenger is YHWH, and full of wrath [...] YHWH is patient in anger but great in power, and He will certainly not count the guilty innocent" (Nah 1:2–3). The first word comes from the love language of the mountain: jealous, the word of the Name Jealous (Exod 34:14). Assyria had been the rod in God's hand to punish His people, but the rod went far beyond its commission, wanted to destroy nations, and trampled the earth (Isa 10:5–7; Nah 3:19). Now God is zealous for His people, Israel in a special way: "I will break his yoke from off you and burst your bonds apart" (1:13). And as Judge of all the earth He is zealous for all the trampled whom Assyria left behind. In the middle of that judgment, like an eye in the storm, stands one line of refuge: "YHWH is good, a stronghold in the day of distress, and He knows those who take refuge in Him" (1:7).

Then the theophany rolls across the earth. The mountains quake before Him, the hills melt, the earth heaves at His presence. Who can stand before His indignation, who can endure the heat of His anger? And in the same breath: YHWH is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble, and He knows those who take refuge in Him (Nah 1:5–7).

Jonah alone would leave us a God with whom the victim never gets justice and the executioner of Nineveh gets off scot-free. Nahum alone would leave us a God from whom you can only flee. Together they show the one God there is: gracious enough to spare Nineveh if it repents, and just enough to fell it if it persists. That makes His forgiveness trustworthy. A God who simply overlooks injustice offers no comfort to whoever has been wronged. That He carries the guilt and also does not leave the guilty unpunished are the two sides of one love that takes its beloved and their wounds seriously.

On a hill outside Nineveh a prophet sits sulking in the heat, and a century later the ruins of the city lie there. It is the same zeal that spares Nineveh and fells Nineveh: the zeal of Someone who cannot remain indifferent, not toward a city that repents and not toward a people that is trampled. His grace reaches all the way to the enemy's cattle, and no wrong is left lying with Him. This love carries you with open eyes, without covering you over with indifference.

*A note on the source text. Jonah's flight: Jonah 1:3; "throw me overboard": 1:12; the prayer from the fish, "salvation belongs to YHWH": 1:17–2:10; the second command: 3:1–2; the sermon and Nineveh's repentance: 3:4–9; the grace-formula as complaint: 4:2; the 120,000 and "much cattle": 4:11; "as a father has compassion": Psalm 103:13. Nahum after Micah in the Hebrew order. The theophany with the judgment wing and "great in power": Nahum 1:2–3; cf. Exodus 34:7, 14; Numbers 14:17; Exodus 32:11; the quaking mountains and "who can stand before His indignation": 1:5–6; the refuge: 1:7; the broken yoke: 1:13; the evil that passed over all "continually": 3:19; Assyria as rod: Isaiah 10:5–7; "not from His heart": Lamentations 3:33; "Vengeance is Mine": Romans 12:19; cf. Deuteronomy 32:35. H. G. L. Peels, The Vengeance of God (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 199–207, 284–295. The divine Name as YHWH; the quotations in a modern working translation.*