Jonah the Nationalist
Jonah is racially self-conscious, as we should be.
The book of Jonah says much that is relevant to the matter of race and nation. In the first chapter, Jonah has decided to run from the Lord and goes to Joppa to board a ship for Tarshish. A violent storm at sea threatens to destroy the boat and kill all the passengers on board. Each sailor cries out to his god, but Jonah goes below deck to sleep. He knows exactly what’s happening. The sailors cast lots to find the cause of their peril, and they see that Jonah is to blame. Jonah is asked, “Tell us, we pray thee, for whose cause this evil is upon us; What is thine occupation? and whence comest thou? what is thy country? and of what people art thou?”
These are “blood and soil” questions; they are occupational, geographical, national, and genetic. Jonah chose to identify himself to foreigners not by his region, tribe, or nation, but by his race, and he adds to this his faith. He answered, “I am an Hebrew; and I fear the LORD, the God of heaven, which hath made the sea and the dry land.”
For these people who presumably had no contact with negroids or mongoloids, this was the broadest racial category that could have been used.
According to John Gill, Jonah had a reason for identifying racially:
“He does not say a Jew, as the Targum wrongly renders it; for that would have been false, since he was of the tribe of Zebulun, which was in the kingdom of Israel, and not of Judah; nor does he say an Israelite, lest he should be thought to be in the idolatry of that people; but a Hebrew, which was common to both.”
The broadest recognizable category of identity was used to distinguish Jonah’s people from strangers. To his spiritual identity, which could have been shared by any man, he added his blood loyalty, which could not.
Jonah’s own people called themselves Israelites, but to foreigners they were Hebrews. This is also how Joseph identified himself to Egyptians (Genesis 40:15) and how God himself told Moses to identify himself before the Pharaoh (Exodus 3:18).
Likewise, we find a common identity as White when contrasted with other races, but internally we identify by nation, region, tribe, state, language, and confession.
So Jonah is racially self-conscious, as we should be. But not all see this as a virtue today. Consider how Sinclair Ferguson in his book on Jonah, first published in 1981, condemns Jonah for the alleged sin of nationalism and the defense of territory:
“[Jonah] was a nationalist of the most dangerous kind – one who believes not only in defending his own territory and living for the benefit of his immediate kinsmen, but who, as a consequence, has a spirit of antagonism towards others, and hopes that God shares his attitude...
[It] was Nineveh he hated. It was Nineveh he felt should be barred from the grace of God. How he hated these Gentile dogs! The spirit of the nationalist in Jonah’s case drove him into antagonism against God and his fellow men. It is legitimate in the sight of God to love our kinsmen, as Paul did, and to give expression to the most deeply felt concern for their welfare (see Romans 9:1–3). But hatred of others as a result is a crime against both God and man.
We are living in a period of world-wide upsurge of nationalism. It is plainly discernible in the United Kingdom, but it is evident in every corner of the earth. Men feel they have lost their corporate identity and long to find roots. It may be that in the years to come this warning note from Jonah’s experience will be an urgent one for us to hear. Churches must never be conditioned by national environment rather than by the word of the gospel. But the kind of prejudices, which come to the surface in waves of nationalism, lie in the heart at all times. Prejudices... can daily drive us from the love of our fellows and from the service of God. Our prejudices need to be exposed, just as they were in Jonah’s life. Once exposed, they must be destroyed by grace.”
—Man Overboard! The Story of Jonah (London: Pickering & Inglis, 1981)
The audacity of a minister of the gospel to claim that nationalism “must be destroyed by grace”! Nationalism is simply natural, and all that is natural (that is, created) is good. But why would grace destroy what is good? As Johann Alsted wrote, “[N]ature is healed and perfected by grace, not abolished and destroyed” (Natural Theology 12.5).
Pausing to consider Jonah’s motives can help us see that his sin was not that of mere nationalism. It stands to reason that Jonah understood the danger posed by Nineveh’s repentance. The covenant warnings of Deuteronomy had already established that Israel’s idolatry could provoke God to use foreign nations as instruments of judgment (Deuteronomy 28:49–50; 32:21). Assyria was already an emerging power during Jonah’s lifetime, and the prophecy of Isaiah 10:5–6, which could have preceded the events of the book of Jonah, makes explicit what this warning meant for Israel: Assyria was the rod of God’s anger against Israel. Jonah therefore had good reason to understand that if Nineveh repented and received mercy, God’s purposes for Assyria might extend beyond Nineveh itself. Although Scripture does not explicitly state that Jonah fled because he feared Assyria would eventually punish Israel, his reluctance to preach to Nineveh is entirely consistent with an Israelite prophet who understood both God’s mercy toward repentant nations and his willingness to use foreign nations to discipline his own people.
The book of Joel might also be dated prior to Jonah. In Joel 2:20, though he doesn’t explicitly state that the threat would come from Assyria, Joel warns of danger to the north.
Jonah was wrong to disobey God, but he likely knew what was coming.
He was sent to Nineveh in roughly 750 B.C. The Assyrians conquered the ten tribes of the northern kingdom of Israel, capturing Samaria in 722 B.C., and then transferred about 27,000 of them (Sargon II, Annals, cited in James B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 3rd ed. with Supplement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 284) to other parts of the empire to dissolve their cohesion, replacing them with a mixture of peoples from Babylon, Cuthah, Ava, Hamath, and Sepharvaim (2 Kings 17:6, 23–24).
Later, during the reign of Josiah (640–609 B.C.), Zephaniah prophesied judgment against Nineveh (Zephaniah 2:13), saying that it would be left empty like a desert. He also prophesied judgment against Judah and the nations, and conversion of the nations.
Nineveh fell to the Babylonians and Medes in 612 B.C. Fifteen years later, in 597 B.C., Babylon besieged Jerusalem and captured the city; in 587 B.C., it returned and destroyed the city. In retrospect, the irony of Jonah’s story is striking: the Assyrian city he was sent to spare eventually fell to Babylon, which would itself become the instrument of God’s judgment against Judah.
This means that between Jonah preaching to Nineveh in roughly 750 B.C. and the Assyrians conquering Samaria in 722 B.C. (modern scholars say that the captivities began in 732 B.C.), about twenty-eight years elapsed, possibly more.
Then the time between the Babylonians conquering Nineveh in 612 B.C. and Jerusalem being destroyed by them in 587 B.C. was about twenty-five years, possibly more.
Therefore, when Jesus speaks of “the sign of Jonah” (Matthew 12:39–40; 16:4; Luke 11:29–30), Jonah serves as a sign to first-century Israel in more than one respect. Just as Jonah was sent to Nineveh as a warning that elicited repentance from the Ninevites, Jesus was sent to Israel with an even greater summons to repentance. Nineveh repented when confronted by God’s prophet, while Jesus’ generation largely rejected a far greater Prophet. And just as Jonah’s three days in the belly of the fish foreshadowed Christ’s three days in the tomb, the “sign of Jonah” ultimately pointed to Christ’s death and resurrection.
But there is another aspect: the time it took for judgment to fall after Jonah’s warnings took close to the same amount of time as what befell Jerusalem a few decades after Christ, when Rome forever ended the old covenant order in 70 A.D.
Just as Assyria conquered Israel and was subsequently conquered by Babylon, and just as Babylon conquered Judah and was subsequently conquered by Medo-Persia, so Rome would conquer Judea and would subsequently be conquered by the Church. As Daniel foretold (Daniel 2:44), the kingdom of Christ would “break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand forever.”
And like Jonah, Christ preached the gospel to the nations (the Syrophoenician woman, the Roman centurion, the Great Commission) about thirty-five years before Rome attacked.
Jonah was initially disobedient to God’s command. He wanted his people to survive, and so he did not want God to spare Nineveh. Perhaps he realized that a spared and strengthened Assyria would eventually threaten Israel. Nevertheless, Jonah’s concern for his flesh and blood cannot excuse his disobedience. Moses and Paul likewise expressed an extraordinary willingness to sacrifice themselves for their fellow Israelites (Exodus 32:32; Romans 9:3), but neither man resisted God’s revealed will. Jonah sinned by being initially unwilling to accept God’s right to show mercy to Nineveh and, if necessary, to use the Assyrians in his judgment of Israel.
If Jonah’s fear was indeed that Nineveh might survive to become an instrument of judgment against Israel, his error was not in loving his own people or desiring their preservation; it was in allowing that love to supersede submission to God’s will. Israel’s chastisement was itself just, and Jonah had no right to oppose God’s mercy toward Nineveh merely because he feared its consequences for Israel.
The book of Jonah therefore exposes not the sinfulness of loving one’s own people, but the sin of allowing even a legitimate love to become an excuse for resisting God’s sovereign purposes. It is not about hatred for Ninevites simply because they were foreigners. This is the common misinterpretation of those who completely miss the point of the book. They cast Jonah as motivated by evil, like Sinclair Ferguson, or as an absurd figure who was obstinate to the point of desiring suicide, when in fact what motivated him was love for his own people, misguided though it was.
Some of this assessment of Jonah’s motives is necessarily speculative, but what is crystal clear is that in Scripture, nationalism is not a sin. Contrast this with the common error of the ecclesiocentrists today, who believe that our identity is only to be found in Christ and who hate talk of blood and soil since they are alienists who deny that racial and national boundaries are meaningful.
In Scripture, there are many references to nations as races, and as particular peoples with particular languages in particular lands. These form political entities descended from common ancestors, and this strong bond is taken as natural.
For example, David flees from Saul, his own kinsman, and defects to Achish, the Philistine king of Gath. In 1 Samuel 29, the Philistine lords are preparing to attack Saul, and we see in chapter 31 that the attack is successful. Achish is gullible, believing that David is on his side, unaware of all that David has done (1 Samuel 27:8–12). The lords are not as gullible, because they are racially aware. They understand natural duty and devotion to one’s own kin. They exhort Achish to expel David from the alliance for this reason, not to mention the fact that David essentially has a reputation like Achilles as a champion in war.
The lords understand that regardless of pretensions, dual loyalty is never to be trusted. They understand that contrary to Achish’s rationalizations, it is more natural for David to be loyal to his kinsmen, even when they want to hunt him down and kill him, than to the Philistines who had literally saved his life by providing a safe refuge for him. They were correct. Although David had placed himself under Achish’s protection and entered into a military alliance with him, his loyalty to his own people remained. His conduct demonstrates that political alliance does not necessarily erase one’s natural obligations to kin and nation.
Even the word “Canaanite” functions as a racial category. It can refer to the particular people of Canaan, as in Joshua 11:3, or be used more broadly to include other inhabitants of the land, as in Judges 1:9–10.
See Judges 12, where the Gileadites identify the Ephraimites as their enemies by how they pronounce the word shibboleth (s versus sh). This was inter-tribal rather than inter-racial conflict, but the same principle applies: culture develops distinctly (in this case geographically, separated by the Jordan River), and all the building blocks of culture, especially religion, easily allow us to identify and trust our own people.
Rudyard Kipling stated this beautifully in his poem The Stranger, which ends with the verse:
This was my father’s belief
And this is also mine:
Let the corn be all one sheaf—
And the grapes be all one vine,
Ere our children’s teeth are set on edge
By bitter bread and wine.
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