Nineveh Relents

An artwork can put an entire story on one page. But there is only so much that a page can take, and artists are selective about who and what they foreground or ignore.

In this Eritrean painting from the 1940s, by an Ethiopian priest whose name is not known, Jonah slides out of the mouth of the fish. He has a smooth landing, with his hair, beard, and clothes in place. The tail of the fish stands up like the tower of a castle, as if to suggest that the fish stands in for the empire. This work lets Nineveh off the hook, so to speak (see also, Lindsay 2016).

The power (read: effect of being in the belly) of the empire (fish) did not affect Jonah. He slides out of the empire and goes into the city where he sits to preach, from a text. He has words, and his audience are groomed and priestly. They are all men, with eyes wide open, and their arms, crossed over their chests, suggest reverence, not wariness or resistance (as folded arms can sometimes do). There is no hint of wickedness in Jonah’s audience. Nineveh was not wicked; the people of Nineveh did not need to repent.

This painting is about ‘men’s secret business’, to borrow a phrase from Indigenous Australians. Men’s secret business has to do with ceremonies, rituals, and rites of passage. Men in all cultures have secret business, and i wonder if the Ethiopian artist had something Ethiopian in mind to add to the biblical narrative.

There are plants in this work which, with the sea, are critically needed in modern carbon-producing civilizations. Could these plants be evidence of something Ethiopian (as asked above): symbolizing something meaningful in an Ethiopian context?

There are no women, children, or animals in this painting. I wonder if they have been drowned by the sea, which takes up more than half of the painting. Such a view of the sea is not so strange in our climate-changed world, where women, children, and animals are at the frontline of climate crises (see also, Elvey 2016).

References

Elvey, Anne. 2016. ‘Complex Anachronism: Peter Porter’s Jonah, Otherkind, Ancient and Contemporary Tempests, and the Divine’, The Bible & Critical Theory, 12: 79–93. Available at https://www.bibleandcriticaltheory.com/issues/vol12-no1-2016/vol-12-no-1-2016-complex-anachronism-peter-porters-jonah-otherkind-ancient-and-contemporary-tempests-and-the-divine/ [accessed on 31 July 2023]

Lindsay, Rebecca. 2016. ‘Overthrowing Nineveh: Revisiting the City with Postcolonial Imagination’, The Bible & Critical Theory, 12: 49–61. Available at https://www.bibleandcriticaltheory.com/issues/vol12-no1-2016/vol-12-no-1-2016-overthrowing-nineveh-revisiting-the-city-with-postcolonial-imagination/ [accessed 31 July 2023]

In this relief from the Sessa Aurunca Cathedral, Campania (Italy), Jonah’s right finger ‘preaches’ at the empire, as represented by a walled city at left. A man, who is not pointed out by Jonah’s finger, rises above the wall. Is this man, who could be the king in the biblical narrative, listening to Jonah or staring him down? There is no connection between the two men, and there is no feeling of urgency.

This relief could be referencing two instances in the biblical narrative: first, it could be referring to Jonah preaching against the city (3:4); second, it could also be referring to Jonah arguing with God on account of the city (4:1–4). The first was after Jonah arrived; the second was just before Jonah left the city (4:5).

The gate is open, and Jonah is outside the city. But he is not far off. At his feet, an audience—some of whom could be women—appears bored. They don’t look at Jonah. They also look past us, the viewers of this relief. They are there, and not there. They fill the space between where Jonah was, east of the city (4:5) and the city itself. They testify that the hinterland is not empty (see Manoa 2010).

Behind Jonah is a booth and a creeping plant that—in the biblical narrative—gave him comfort after he left the city (4:6). The Qur'an, by contrast, relocates the plant to the ‘wide bare tract of land’ (37:145) where the fish vomited Jonah out—a moment before he enters that city. The plant moves from providing relief to an angry prophet in the biblical narrative, to providing an opportunity for a fishy prophet to rest up and recover in the Qur’anic version (see Havea forthcoming).

Scriptures move details around, as the Qur’an does to the slender plant in the hinterland of the biblical narrative (and, among many other examples, as the Gospel of John does to the so-called Synoptic Gospels). And so do readers—we move and ignore narrative details in the interests of the readings that we favour.

References

Havea, Jione. Forthcoming. ‘Would Vishnu save Jonah’s Poor Fishie? A Transtextual Query’, in Queering the Prophet: On Jonah, and Other Activists, ed. by L. Juliana Claassens et al (London: SCM)

Manoa, Pio. 2010. ‘Redeeming Hinterland’, The Pacific Journal of Theology 2.43: 65–86

She got upset, such the sea, by Jonas who came up from the sea. She was struck by big waves as the tides striking the sea. Jonas went down to the sea and troubled it and came up to the land and upset it. The sea was troubled when he ran away, and the land was disrupted when he preached. The sea calmed down by the prayer and the land by the repentance. He prayed in the belly of the big fish and the Ninivites prayed in the mighty citadel. The prayer saved Jonas and the prayers saved Ninivites. Jonas ran away from God and the Ninivites, from purity. The justice locked them both like culprits. Both repented and were saved. (English translation of Aramaic script by Behnam Keryo)

Calligraphy is art, and Behnam Keryo’s work is art that disturbs. The calligraphy uses Aramaic words, the language of Nineveh—Keryo’s homeland—so one should read from right to left. But where should one begin to read Keryo’s script? The calligraphy forms six free-standing circles, as if they are ripples—but do they ripple inward, or outward?

Keryo’s work invites viewers to imagine the confusion that was caused by Jonah’s five Hebrew words intended for Nineveh. I imagine that Jonah’s words traumatized the people of Nineveh (see Boase & Agnew 2016) and moved them to act decisively.

Keryo provided an English translation of his Aramaic script (full text above): Jonah disturbed both the sea (by his presence) and the land (by his preaching); the sea calmed down because of Jonah’s prayer (of words, in Jonah 2), and the land by the people’s repentance (with purpose). In Keryo’s script, words saved both Jonah (in the sea) and the people of Nineveh (on land).

I come from a sea of islands—Oceania, Pacific Islands, Pasifika—where listening to the voices and interests of the sea and of the (is)lands is natural. For instance, the Tongan poet Kuini Salote III wrote songs in which she gave expression to the ‘voice of the wave’ (si‘i le‘o e peau) and the ‘voice of nature’ (si‘i le‘o ‘o natula).

I am grateful that the late Keryo of Nineveh (modern-day Iraq) and the late Kuini Salote of Tonga heard voices and words that scriptural texts ignored (see also Havea 2020).

References

Boase, Elizabeth and Sarah Agnew. 2016. ‘“Whispered in the Sound of Silence”: Traumatising the Book of Jonah’, The Bible & Critical Theory, 12: 4–22. Available at https://www.bibleandcriticaltheory.com/issues/vol12-no1-2016/vol-12-no-1-2016-whispered-in-the-sound-of-silence-traumatising-the-book-of-jonah/ [accessed on 31 July 2023]

Havea, Jione. 2020. Jonah: An Earth Bible Commentary (London: Bloomsbury)