Jonah as Allegory

(Part II: The Parable of the Plant)

For Part I of the present series, cp. https://jamesbejon.substack.com/p/jonah-as-allegory.

The parable of the plant

Finally, then, we come to Jonah 4, which draws an unusual book to an unusual conclusion. Particularly noteworthy is the sequence of events described in 4.5–8.

In 4.5, Jonah builds himself a shelter from the sun and sits down underneath it, and then, in 4.6, God causes a plant (קיקיון) to spring up and overshadow Jonah. Jonah rejoices in the shade it provides, though whether he attributes the shade to the plant or his shelter is unclear. The next day (4.7), God sends a worm to gnaw through the plant-turned-shelter’s root, which causes it to wither, and then, in 4.8, when the sun rises, God sends an east wind to afflict the now-exposed Jonah, which drives him to despair.

How do these events fit into our discussion of Jonah’s story? Doth God take care for mere gourds? Or is the parable of the plant meant to teach Jonah a lesson? The answer, I suspect, is the latter.

4.5–8’s events are described in very dramatic terms: Jonah’s shelter from the sun is said to ‘deliver him from evil’; the worm is said to ‘smite/slay’ (ותך) the plant; the sun is said to ‘smite/slay’ (ותך) Jonah’s head; and, as a result of the sun and wind, Jonah says he wants to end his life. The plant, worm, sun, and wind in Jonah’s parable thus seem to represent more than mere features of the natural world. They are matters of life and death, and they do the kind of things armies do in battle (‘smite/slay/etc.’)

With these considerations in mind, let’s see what else we can glean from 4.5–8’s details. One thing we can note concerns the way in which the plant, worm, and wind enter into Jonah’s experience. All three are said to arise by divine ‘appointment’ (mineh). Has anything else been ‘appointed’ by God in the book of Jonah? It has indeed. At the close of Jonah’s first panel, God appoints a fish (Babylon) to swallow Jonah up. And, just as Jonah’s said to ‘faint’ (להתעטף) because of the fish in ch. 2, so he’s said to ‘faint’ (להתעלף) because of the sun and wind in ch. 4.

Suppose, then, we take the final appointed entity in Jonah’s second panel—i.e., the ruach kadim = ‘east wind’—to depict the final appointed entity in the first panel, namely Babylon. Does that help us to make sense of any other aspects of the parable? It seems to. For one thing, it makes Jonah’s imagery sync up with Ezekiel’s, since Ezekiel likewise depicts Babylon as an ‘east wind’ (ruach kadim) which ‘smites’ (נגע) Israel and causes her to ‘wither’ (cp. the ‘heat/dryness’ associated with the wind in Jonah’s parable: Ezek. 17).¹ In addition, it helps us to identify Jonah’s plant, since if the wind is Babylon, then its precursor—i.e., the plant which previously shielded Jonah—must be Assyria, which again syncs up with Ezekiel’s use of imagery, since Ezekiel depicts Assyria as a tree in whose ‘shade’ Israel has enjoyed protection (Ezek. 31).

Note: The identification of the plant with Assyria makes sense for other reasons besides. First, in Isaiah 14, the king of Assyria is said to be consumed by ‘worms’, which resonates with the way ch. 4’s plant is consumed by a ‘worm’.² (Equally noteworthy is the correspondence between Isaiah’s reference to the king of Assyria as a ben shachar = ‘son of the dawn’ and God’s reference to Jonah’s plant as a bin laylah = ‘son of the night’.) Second, given his observation of the plant, Jonah is expected to re-assess his view of Assyria (4.10–11), which would be odd if the plant didn’t depict Assyria in some way.

We can plausibly, therefore, view the main ‘actors’ in Jonah’s parable as representative of three different nations/empires: Jonah represents Israel (as he does in chs. 1–3), the wind represents Babylon, and the plant represents Assyria.

With our parable’s actors thus identified, we can unpack ch. 4 as a whole.

At the outset of the chapter, Jonah removes himself from the events of his narrative. He sits outside Nineveh as an observer, and looks back at how God has treated the Ninevites. As he does so, he feels aggrieved by God’s decision to spare them, and he feels justified in his reaction.

Jonah’s assessment of God’s decision, however, is based on incomplete information, which God informs him of in 4.9–11 (the book’s final verses).

Not long ago, Jonah built himself a shelter from the sun. He rejoiced in the shade it (apparently) provided him with, although in reality the shade came from a plant above his shelter. Then, when the plant died and the sun and wind arose, God drew Jonah’s attention to the (dead) plant, at which point Jonah lamented its absence (4.8–9). Viewed in light of chs. 1–2, these events are highly significant. Why? Because a Babylonian exile could have looked back on the events of recent centuries in a very similar manner. For many years, Assyria was a thorn in Israel’s side. Unbeknown to Jonah/Israel, however, Assyria’s existence also provided the Israelites with considerable shade/protection; it shielded them from more hostile forces in the ancient Near East (most notably Babylon). Hence, in the parable of the plant, as soon as the plant has disappeared, the east wind (Babylon) begins to blow.

These considerations are intended to teach Jonah’s readers an important lesson. At the close of the book, Jonah is aggrieved at God’s decision to spare Nineveh. Given a more complete view of history, however, Jonah would have gladly spared Nineveh, if only to avoid the events of 587 BC (Jerusalem’s fall), which represent the culmination of Israel’s sorrows. Yet if Jonah would happily have spared Nineveh as a means to an end, then why, a fortiori, shouldn’t God have spared Nineveh both as a means to an end and as an end in itself—‘a great city, in which there were more than 120,000 people…and many cattle besides’?³ Didn’t God have every right and reason to do such a thing?

The lesson of the parable is, therefore, very relevant to us today. God’s world is an unfathomably interconnected place. Jonah shouldn’t have second guessed God’s governance of history. (Plenty of wheat would have been pulled up along with Assyria’s tares.) And, for much the same reason, we shouldn’t look back on history and think we can guess how things would have turned out in the absence of a given nation/empire. Indeed, consider Jonah’s God for a moment: a God who hurls a wind down to the earth in such a way as to stir up a previously undisturbed sea, so as to lead its sailors to hurl/cast lots and subsequently hurl Jonah overboard, just in time to be swallowed by a fish and spewed out on the dry land three days later, all of which has been convened so as to foreshadow Israel’s long history, ultimately to be lived out by God’s own Son in his (Jonah-like) death, resurrection, and acceptance among the Gentiles.

Suffice it to say, Jonah’s is the kind of God to whom we can entrust our lives, even if, as churches, we find ourselves subject to apparently wild and hostile forces in the days to come. The question posed by the book’s final verse is whether we’ll do so, or whether, like Jonah, we’ll be aggrieved at the fact God hasn’t governed his world as we think he should have.

1. Note also Jeremiah’s reference to Babylon as a ‘hot/dry wind’ (Jer. 4.11).

2. The title ‘king of Babylon’ simply denotes the person in charge of the city of Babylon; it needn’t be associated with (what we now refer to as) the Neo-Babylonian empire. Indeed, the text of Isaiah 14.24–27 explicitly identifies the king of Babylon as an Assyrian, and Sargon the Assyrian is known to have conquered the city of Babylon in 710 BC and refers to himself as ‘the king of Babylon’ in Babylon’s inscriptions. The interconnections between Isa. 14’s ‘king of Babylon’ and Isa. 10’s ‘king of Assyria’ provide further reasons to identify ch. 14’s king as an Assyrian. Both are ‘smiters’ of nations and wielders of ‘staffs’ (10.5, 15, 20, 24–27 // 14.5–6); both kings exalt themselves with similar delusions of grandeur and are brought low in similar ways (10.5–15 // 14.9–17), as is Ezekiel 31’s king of Assyria (cp. Ezek. 31.10, 15, 18); and, in ch. 14, the cedars of Lebanon rejoice precisely because the threat to them—ch. 10’s ‘woodcutter’—is no more (cp. 10.5, 15, 33–34 // 14.7–8).

3. That God views the preservation of Assyria as an end in itself is an important part of ch. 4’s logic. The word for ch. 4’s plant (kikayon) doesn’t occur elsewhere in the OT; it is unique to Jonah 4, which I take to reflect the unique value of Assyria as a part of God’s good creation. Just as in the absence of the text of 4.6–11, the Bible’s lexicon would lack a particular word, so, in the absence of Assyria, the world would lack a particular good which isn’t present elsewhere—a part of God’s creation which contributes to its richness, diversity, and glory. God is not interested in mere generalities—plants in general, nations in general, and people in general. He is interested in particular plants, particular nations, and particular people. (I’m grateful to Tim Vasby-Burnie and Alastair Roberts for help with these thoughts.)