Ok. We have to do some considerable grunt work on the terms mentioned in my last musing (i.e. great, bad, appoint, and fear), but for now let’s start afresh and have some fun. (Hopefully! Hopefully!)

Let’s get a little philosophic: Everyone knows that there are words, and then there are deeds. The popular distinction between the two has some merit: Talkers talk and Doers do. Furthermore, talk is easy and cheap, basically effortless. Something anyone can do. On the other hand, doing is hard and costly, the privilege of those who have talent and exert effort (at least in many cases). In Plato’s old dialogue, the Gorgias, the young ambitious Callicles comes clean with Socrates about his view of such things: Philosophers are basically babyish (and in need of a good cuffing!) in that they spend all of their time sitting aloof in the corner endlessly chit-chatting with the young. By contrast real men grow up, enter the world, and perform great deeds worthy of admiration, praise, and emulation. Callicles: “Grow up Socrates! Leave the talky-talk of philosophy for the young! Let’s be doers! Let’s be real men!”

Of course things end up being considerably more complicated in the real world; after all, speaking is an action–a doing– and conversely, doing is a kind of speech— always at least in some sense a speech of the heart. [Yeah, feel free to pause and chew on that a bit. It’s more profound than difficult, but it does sound a bit convoluted, I admit.] But to the point: Although very different in aim and tone than Callicles’ view, the book of Jonah is thematically about deeds versus words, and ultimately about the primacy of deeds over words. This claim will take considerable unpacking to make clear, but I’d like to start the trek down this argument in today’s musing. At this point some of this might feel like a stretch. So if feel that way, it’s ok. I do believe that at some point in the future it will end up eventually taking us into the very heart of the book. But I guess we will see…

So what does all of this have to do with Jonah? Or initially, at least with the book of Jonah? It may not be obvious at first, but upon reflection it seems clear to me that the book of Jonah downplays speech in various ways. Yes? How so? If we (for the moment) ignore Jonah’s prayer, his great verbal manifesto of soul (and by far the longest speech in the entire book), deeds in one way or another predominate throughout the text. And yes, we will deal with Jonah’s prayer eventually, which will only underscore my point: Jonah’s longest speech will be quite problematic upon closer inspection.

That said, certainly God speaks out at the beginning of the story and gets things started. But that’s it for the first two chapters, the entire first half of the book. God says nothing more: instead He gets busy hurling a storm here and appointing a fish there. Nevertheless, it appears that a message gets through to Jonah who counsels the sailors to throw him overboard. As he puts it: “I know that on account of me this great storm has come upon you.” (1:12b) [emphasis added] God knows how to communicate by mere deeds. Evidently words aren’t needed. God’s deeds do the job quite nicely, thank you.

Furthermore, when God speaks at the beginning, He only offers a command. What little speech He gives calls for action. God wants action. To underscore this desire, He offers no explanation of any kind. God offers no reasoning, no rationale, no appeal. He leaves Jonah to provide any missing information from his own thinking. (As we will see, Jonah does this.) To the point: God offers not much of anything to philosophize or theologize over. Just a command. Again, it appears that God wants action, far more than dialogue– at least for Jonah’s sake.

To push things further, although it’s true that Jonah was given something in general to say (a topic), God actually doesn’t even tell Jonah exactly what to say, only to “cry out” against Nineveh for its wickedness. It doesn’t appear as though God has much of a concern about the the exact content Jonah will provide– God leaves such wording to the prophet’s choice and preferences. Again, the focus is: Will Jonah act? Will he arise, go to Nineveh, and cry out against it? In other words, will he obey? And then again to repeat: from this single command on God says nothing. Nothing until we come to the second half of the book.

Finally (and this is a bit abstract, so hang in there), there is one more sense in which speech is downplayed in this opening scene that we have been exploring. If we recall that any speech is an action and by extension, that whatever an author writes is a deliberate action on his part, then whatever and however Jonah writes can have an inherent meaning behind it. Perhaps to be more clear: Whatever is written can have an inherent meaning that goes beyond the immediate meaning of the statement. Whatever the word choice or whatever is mentioned or not mentioned or explicitly quoted or referenced indirectly can “speak” the author’s intentions. The example I gave in a previous musing about beginning your fairy tale with a prince declaring that he is not a crook is perfect. The authorial choice of quoting a notoriously impeached president is an action that speaks loud and clear. The author’s choice is an action is a speech.

I think something like this can be seen in the opening scene. Jonah the author deliberatively chooses to exclude one particular speech by Jonah the prophet. It turns out that things didn’t occur exactly as He initially describes in the opening scene. As we find out later from Jonah’s own mouth in chapter 4, there was actually a conversation that occurred between Jonah and the LORD. Or if not a conversation, at least a verbal expression of protest on Jonah’s part. Jonah the author eliminates in the opening that very speech and really, any evidence of it– until the story is nearly over. The author Jonah in his action as author appears to downplay Jonah’s speech in the service of having us focus on Jonah’s actions.

But perhaps this is getting too much into the weeds; perhaps we’re seeing intentions that aren’t fully evident with this last point. That’s fine. Let’s come up for air and focus on Jonah the prophet. If it’s true that God speaks little in the opening half of the book, then it’s also the case that Jonah– the central narrative figure– speaks surprisingly little as well. As mentioned above, his initial verbal response to God’s command is eliminated while his actions by contrast are accentuated: he rises to flee; he goes down to Joppa; he purchases his fare; he enters the boat; and finally, he descends into the bottom to sleep. He does all of this without a word (recorded for us). Of course he had to speak in all of this, and there is plenty of speech around Jonah from others– both during and after the storm– but when the captain of the ship approaches and admonishes Jonah for sleeping, Jonah’s response is silence. Not a single word. His action of staying silent when the captain admonishes him to cry out to his God speaks louder than words.

Jonah does, however, end up speaking a bit later– but only twice and very briefly in this first half of the story. Or better, the text only records two of his short statements, though indicating that he in fact did say more to the sailors in the process. Jonah the author chooses himself to make us privy to that statement directly rather than merely letting Jonah speak. That statement provided by Jonah the author will prove worthy of highlighting it as he does. Of course, we’ll come back to this in another musing.

So back to his two speeches given directly: The first speech is a very shortened answer to a rather lengthy and multi-faceted set of questions about his person. His second is a brief piece of counsel as to what the sailors should do with him. Identity and recourse. Culprit and solution. Again, the focus is on action: Who is this person, what did he do, how could he have done this, and what should we do with him? Here is Jonah’s first speech in context:

Then they said to him, “Tell us, now! On whose account has this calamity struck us? What is your occupation? And where do you come from? What is your country? From what people are you?” He said to them, “I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord God of heaven who made the sea and the dry land.”

Here’s his second speech in context:

So they said to him, “What should we do to you that the sea may become calm for us?”—for the sea was becoming increasingly stormy. He said to them, “Pick me up and throw me into the sea. Then the sea will become calm for you, for I know that on account of me this great storm has come upon you.”

The one statement that Jonah gave to the sailors that in turn Jonah the author mentions for us is as follows: “For the men knew that he was fleeing from the LORD, because he told them.”

We will come back to all of this in another musing to tease out the significance of these authorial actions on Jonah’s part. I do think they all have significant meaning worth exploring.

As for the second half of the book, speech is again suppressed or “downplayed” in different ways:

1. God’s word comes again to Jonah a second time, but it’s not the same message. It’s similar in intent, but not in content. On this occasion God let’s Jonah know that he will be required to proclaim a message that at some undefined point in the future will be given to him. But again, for whatever reason, that speech “disappears” in the sense that we actually never find out in the text what exactly that message was. We are never made privy to its contents because Jonah the author never tells us what God told him to say. This omission actually matters (for a number of reasons), but for this immediate context it matters in that we really can’t tell if Jonah faithfully gave God’s exact message as God wanted. We may even be right to suspect that Jonah didn’t, that he redacted that message in some way. Consider this…
2. Jonah’s message is stunningly brief. Absolutely minimal: “Yet forty days and Nineveh will be overthrown.” Quantitatively speaking, that is eight words in English; it’s actually merely five in Hebrew. Qualitatively speaking, it doesn’t even manage to fulfill God’s original command: Is this what anyone would call “crying out against Nineveh for its wickedness?!” To continue, the speech really is minimal: On the one hand like God, Jonah gives no reasoning, no rationale, no recourse or hope. On the other hand, though unlike God’s command to him (which tells him what to do), it is a mere ominous predication, one which offers no guidance as to what the Ninevites can or should do to escape their doom. It’s hardly a speech at all and certainly not enough to help anything or solve any problem. The Ninevites are left to try and piece together a plan of action. In choosing to repent the king himself admits: “Who knows God may turn and relent, and withdraw His burning anger so that we shall not perish?” But despite how little help the speech provides, the contrast between speech and deed couldn’t be greater in that the meagerest of words yield the most stunning of deeds: Nineveh– the entire inhabitants and maybe its animals (!) somehow manage to repent, not even knowing if repentance will “work” and stave off destruction. Thematically right on cue the text reads: “When God saw their deeds, that they turned from their wicked way, then God relented…” (4:10)
3. Really quickly for the final pieces of evidence: Jonah has a series of outbursts in the final chapter, all with the same punchline: “Let me die!” His first outburst is not nothing, but not long either. It’s basically a verse long plus “Let me die.” His final two outbursts are very brief and culminate at the end with an awkward silence. At one point, he doesn’t even answer God’s question to him. In a similar but inverted manner, God also responds briefly in chapter 4. God appears to be a verbal minimalist. He first begins with a simple question; His next response is a brief question as well. Finally, He ends with a brief observation and then final question. It’s hardly any speaking at all.
4. And then we close. The book itself — as Jonah would have it– ends without any answer– just a haunting, probing question for Jonah and his readers to ponder in silence. Jonah the author doesn’t even give us an indication of Jonah the prophet’s response. Did he say anything? Did he argue? Did he confess to his God his wrong? Evidently- for Jonah the author- it doesn’t matter whether he spoke or not. But that said, doesn’t Jonah in deed provide evidence that he did respond properly? However long it might have taken. Doesn’t this deed by Jonah show that he too, like Nineveh, managed finally to escape his great “bad?” His action counts.

In short (and to simplify things): Both IN the narrative and OUTSIDE the narrative (i.e. through authorial choices) speeches are subtly but consistently subordinated in importance to deeds in the book of Jonah. In fact this is pretty consistent with basically all of Hebrew narrative as such. In comparing Hebrew narrative, to say, Homeric poetry, this difference is so pronounced that one could call it a distinctive hallmark of Hebrew narrative. At some point I’ll do my best to show how this appropriately reflects the fundamental vision of God for His people, but for now let me come full circle and put things in stark terms: There’s not a snowball’s chance in “lower purgatory” that a Socrates would ever emerge from the Hebrew people and there culture. Nada.

Anyways, as we will see, there is something about the nature and importance of deeds as such that Jonah wants us to grasp, specially as it bears on Jonah’s spiritual condition and crisis. But to get at that we’ll have to do some yeoman’s work with those terms I’ve mentioned. Then we can start pulling these various threads together and get to the bottom of things with Jonah.

For Your Own Musing

1. As we all know, the Bible wrestles with the relative importance of speeches and deeds. What prominent passages come to mind where these matters are addressed? Biblically speaking, how do each of these relate to salvation in particular? Is biblical faith a deed or more like a confessed speech?
2. Of speeches or deeds, which appear to reveal the human heart more? We know that we can lie and try to hide the truth about our hearts, but is there a sense in which mere deeds are incapable of speaking sufficiently about our hearts? Why or why not?
3. Jonah’s two short speeches are critical for understanding him as a person and what makes him “tick.” Consider rereading the first two chapters of Jonah with these two speeches in mind. How might these speeches in content and as deeds shed light on Jonah’s person and spiritual crisis? For example, doesn’t one of his speeches help to contradict one of his claims in his prayer, while a claim in his other speech proves in at least one sense to be false? (We’ll take up both of these points in further musings, so there’s much to chew on that’s worth the time and effort if you so choose.)