tribes. The Prophet, whoever he be, is moved to tender pity at the sight, and hopes that, in the old ancestral connection with the house of David, Moab may yet be not too proud to seek a covert from the face of the spoiler. It may be that this is the very prophecy by which Jero- Jonah. boam's empire was inaugurated, according to the word of ' the Lord, which He spoke by the hand of His servant Jonah, 2 the son of Amittai.' This Prophet, who was to Jeroboam II. what Ahijah had been to Jeroboam I., and what Elisha had been to Jehu, though slightly mentioned in the history, has been already thrice brought before us in Jewish tradition, and conveys an instruction reaching far beyond his times. The child of the widow of Zarephath, the boy who attended Elijah to the wilderness, the youth who anointed Jehu, was believed to be the same as he whose story is related to us in the book of unknown authorship, of unknown date, of disputed meaning, but of surpassing interest-the Book of Jonah. Putting aside all that is doubtful, it stands out of the history of those wars and conquests with a truthfulness to human nature and a loftiness of religious sentiment that more than vindicate its place in the Sacred Canon. First look at the vivid touches of the narrative even in detail. We see the Prophet hasting down from the hills of Galilee to the one Israelite port of Joppa. He sinks into the deep sleep 3 of the wearied traveller as soon as he gets on board after his hurried journey. The storm rises; the Tyrian sailors are all astir with terror and activity. They attack the unknown passenger with their brief accumulated inquiries.' 'Why hath this happened to us? What doest thou? Whence 'art thou? What is thy country? Of what people art 12 Kings xiv. 25. 6 The word And,' with which the book commences, indicates a different origin from that of the earlier Prophetical Books. It is elsewhere only used at the commencement of the 3 Jonah i. 5 (Heb.). 'thou??! The good seamen, heathens as they are, struggle against the dreadful necessity which Jonah puts before them. They row with a force which seems to dig up the waves under their efforts. But higher and higher, higher and higher, the sea surges against them, like a living creature gaping for its prey. The victim is at last thrown in, and its rage ceases. This is the first deliverance, and it is the Divine blessing on the honest hearts and active hands of 'those that go down to the sea in ships, and do their business in great waters.' Then comes the unexpected rescue of the Prophet. He vanishes from view for three long days and nights. One of the huge monsters which are described in the Psalms 3 as always sporting in the strange sea, and which in the early Christian paintings is represented as a vast dragon, receives him into its capacious maw. His own hymn of thanksgiving succeeds. He seems to be in the depths of the unseen world; the river of the ocean whirls him round in its vast eddies; the masses of seaweed enwrap him as in graveclothes; the rocky roots of the mountains as they descend into the sea appear above him, as if closing the gates of earth against his return. The mighty fish is but the transitory instrument. That on which the Prophet in his hymn lays stress is not the mode of his escape, but the escape itself." All this is well brought out by Dr. Pusey on Jonah, pp. 251, 252. 2 This is well given in Josephus (Ant. ix. 10, §2). Psalm civ. 26. Jonah ii. 3, 5, 6. Unless we have previously determined the question, whether the Book of Jonah is intended by the sacred writer to be a literal history, or an apologue founded on a history-and the example of the Books of Job and Tobit strongly leads to the latter supposition-'tota hæc de pisce Jona disquisitio,' as an old commentator observes, ' vana videtur atque inutilis.' The explanations divide themselves into those of a strictly preternatural kind as that a fish was created for the occasion; or into the natural or semi-natural-as that it was a ship or an inn bearing the sign of the whale; or that it was a shark. (For this last hypothesis see all that can be collected in Dr. Pusey's Commentary on JONAH.) It is more to the point to observe 1 ance of The third deliverance is that of Nineveh. The great city Repentrises before us, most magnificent of all the capitals of the Nineveh. ancient world-great even unto God.' It included parks, and gardens, and fields, and people, and cattle, within its vast circumference. Twenty miles the Prophet penetrates into the city. He had still finished only one-third of his journey through it. His utterance, like that of the wild Preacher in the last days of the siege of Jerusalem by Titus, is one piercing cry, from street to street and square to square. It reaches at last the King on his throne of state. The remorse for the wrong and robbery and violence of many generations is awakened. The dumb animals are included, after the fashion of the East, in the universal mourning, and the Divine decree is revoked. ance of Of this revocation, and of the lessons of the whole book, Repentthe concentrated force is contained in the closing scene. Jonah, The Prophet sits in his rude hut outside the Eastern gate, under the shade of the broad leaves of the flowering shrub," the rapid produce of the night. With the scorching blast of the early morning the luxuriant shelter withers away, and in his despairing faintness he receives the revelation of the Divine character, which is to him as that of the Burning Bush to Moses, or of the Vision on Horeb to Elijah, and which sums up the whole of his own history. He has been shown to us as one of the older Prophetic school, denouncing, rebuking, moving to and fro, without fixed habitation, like Elijah, flying from kingdom to kingdom, as if on the wings of the wind. But both in his weaker and his stronger side he represents the rapid change which came over the Prophetic school of Israel at this epoch. In the wider scope of his movements, and the mild and catholic spirit which pervades the whole tenor if not of his teaching, at least of his history, we trace the same transitions that have been already remarked from the fierce and exclusive Elijah to the gentle and comprehensive Elisha. From west and east alike the curtain has in his life been rent asunder. On the one side we have embarked, for the first time in the sacred history, on the stormy waters of the Mediterranean, in a ship bound for the distant Tarshish on the coast of Spain. On the other side, we traverse, for the first time, the vast desert, and find ourselves in the heart of the great Assyrian capital. Jonah is the first apostle, though involuntary and unconscious, of the Gentiles. The inspiration of the Gentile world is acknowledged in the prophecy of Balaam, its nobleness in the Book of Job, its greatness in the reign of Solomon. But its distinct claims on the justice and mercy of God are first recognised in the Book of Jonah. It is the cry of the good heathen that causes the sea to cease from her raging.' It is the penitence of the vast population of the heathen Nineveh that arouses the Divine pity even for the innocent children and the dumb, helpless cattle. And this lesson is still more forcibly brought out by contrast with the conduct of the Israelite Prophet, in whose timidity and selfishness is seen the same degeneracy that has already marked the descent from Elisha to Gehazi. He, indeed, is delivered, but so as by fire.' The tables are turned against him with a sublime irony which almost anticipates the Gospel teaching of the first and the last,' the Pharisee and the Publican,' the elder and the 'younger son.' It is not in his strength, but his weakness, that the strength of that Divine message is perfected, through which a lesson is delivered to the Pastors of every age. In the Prophet's despondency, which swerves aside from the heavy duty imposed upon him, many a coward spirit that shrinks from the call of truth and duty starts tó see its true likeness. In the return of the tempest-tossed soul, de profundis, to the task which has now become welcome in the long-sustained effort to which at last he winds himself up, is the same encouragement that was needed even by an Apostle, Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou 'Me?' Venio iterum Romam crucifigi. But most of all is the warning thrust home in the rebuke to the narrow selfishness which could lament over the withering of his own bower, and yet complain that the judgment had not been carried out against the penitent empire of Nineveh. More 'than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between 'their right hand and their left,' the Prophet had desired to see sacrificed to his preconceived notions of the necessities of a logical theory, or to the destruction of his country's enemies. It displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry. I pray Thee, was not this my saying when I was yet in my country? . . . Therefore take, I beseech Thee, my life from me; for it is better for me to die than to 'live.' Better (so it has often been said by Jonah's successors) to die, than that unbaptized infants should be savedthan that the reprobate should repent-than that God's threatenings should ever be revoked-than that the solemnity of life should be disturbed by the restoration of the thousands who have had no opportunity of knowing the Divine will-than that God should at last be all in all.' He sate under the shadow of his booth, still hoping, believing for the worst,till he might see what would become of the city.' |