A Fractal Translation of Ecclesiastes

Ecclesiastes 1:1-4 (A fractal translation)

1                 Ideas of Gatheress, a son of David - King in Jerusalem

2                 Fractal of fractals says Gatheress, fractal of fractals - the whole fractal.

3                 What is added to a human in the struggles they will struggle under the sun? 

4                 A generation walks and a generation arrives and the earth iterates to infinity.

The words above are the opening words from Ecclesiastes. Or rather they are a slightly cheeky translation of those first three verses. I have only translated the first four verses in this way so far, and I did it to see if it would work. But I think I need to explain why and in what ways this might hold up as a translation.

Ecclesiastes is peppered with the Hebrew word hevel (הֶבֶל), which is translated in different versions of the Bible as absurd, breath, bubble, enigmatic, fleeting, futility, meaningless, mist, nonsense, nothing, pointless, smoke, transient, useless, vanity and vapour. There may be more translations, but those are all I know. The reason for so many different translations is not because these are bad or confused translators, but because it's a really difficult word to pin down. Perhaps all together these words give a feel for the word hevel, but none quite get it right on their own. My take on hevel it is that the word refers to the fleeting transient nature of things. In this, the KJV and NRSV are technically fairly accurate when they use the word vanity, but whilst the KJV can be excused for its rather archaic take on the word vanity which now means something quite different, the NRSV has no such excuse and ends up being quite misleading in its choice.

Hevel is not about being absorbed by one's own beauty or the lack of it; it is not about extravagance or self indulgence. It is much gentler than that. The NIV's 'meaningless' does a quite a good job of updating 'vanity' to modern English, but like vanity, remains too harsh. Ironically, The Message translation offers us 'smoke', which is technically wrong; there is no suggestion of smoke in the original word, and yet it does the job it needs to do better than pretty much all the other translations of the word in modern English. Hevel, like smoke, is that which is here and then gone in a moment; ungraspable, uncatchable, gone!

In the Book of Ecclesiastes, the teacher is in some ways painting a bleak picture of a life without purpose, of a world where nothing we do has any lasting value. He, or perhaps she[1], delivers a damming blow to anyone who thinks that what they do, or who they are is significant, important or better than anything or anyone else. The teacher takes all of our works and achievements and grinds them to dust.

It is all too easy to see Ecclesiastes as a negative book, but it is honest and it creates a level (or hevel) playing field, it makes us equal in our insignificance, which is a great starting place from which to do all our theology. It also teaches us to enjoy and appreciate what we have, while we have it. I was recently talking to a friend who errs on the atheist side of agnostic. She talked to me about the self indulgence, the dissatisfaction and the angst she felt in searching for God and needing for a God to be there to validate her. There was for her a simple joy in letting that go, in enjoying who she is in this moment, in doing her best for others and not worrying about where it's all leading and what it all means. I think that to a great extent the writer of Ecclesiastes would commend her for her honesty and celebrate her capacity to enjoy what is good, and allow all that which is hevel to be hevel.

But the teacher does not let us go so easily. God is there in the text and meaning and purpose are present. They are all there gently and subtly, lurking beneath the surface. Above all the teacher doesn't remain with the tiny picture, the islands of happiness within an ocean of meaninglessness. Throughout the text there is a sense of the big picture, because there is a time for every purpose and because someday our islands of joy will be lost to that ocean. The teacher maintains that we don't know God's will, we don't know what happens to us when we die, but that God has a will is implicitly there within the text, there is a time for everything under the sun. A chosen time, a right time.

Like smoke, 'fractal' is the wrong word, but it does a particular and helpful job. To start with, it works grammatically in the proper context of the Hebrew sentence, allowing itself to be 'of' itself in a way that 'meaningless' can't and it can be 'whole' in a way that vanity can't; 'fractal of fractals - the whole fractal'. It calls to mind the other side of the teacher's narrative, the bigger picture. Fractals, like hevel are the same at every scale, they repeat to infinity and in spite of all manner of work done upon them and their displays of diverse beauty, their outcome and their origin remains the same. Under their complex and busy working surface, they are at heart simple in their essence, they reduce in concept to something with no substance at all, just an idea, a thought, an equation.

But unlike the meaningless, fleeting, vain, smoke of the usual translations, a fractal hevel is one that acknowledges the eternal interconnectedness of creation; an eternal nature that is there to be seen in the teacher's writings, if only we are sufficiently tuned in to see it. Generations come and go, but the entirety of creation remains, stays as it was and as it will be, ever changing, but unmoved.

Ecclesiastes 9:15 (NIV) says;                

Everything that happens has happened before,
and all that will be has already been
God does everything over and over again.

This theology of eternal return, as echoed in some far eastern religions, can be seen as a lifeless loop of unending purgatory, or if we are prepared to go where God is taking us, it can be a spiral, a helix, forever moving forward as on each turn of the circle we build in what was before, going somewhere new. Actually if we see the teacher's message in a fractal light it ceases to be about futility and becomes about the fact that you can't have the eternal without the fleeting moment and you can't be truly in the moment unless you embrace the eternal.

Fractal of fractals says Gatheress, fractal of fractals - the whole fractal.

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[1] The word often translated as teacher (Ecclesiastes in the Greek - hence the name of the book) comes from the Hebrew word Qohelet, which is a feminine noun construct from the verb Qahal, which means to call. So Qohelet is a feminine noun for someone who calls or gathers people, for teaching or preaching. The word Qohelet is normally used in the Ecclesiastes in a male context, i.e. 'he said' etc, but there is one stray 'she said' in 7:27. On this basis I invented the word 'Gatheress' as an English equivalent of Qohelet.

Genesis 1:1 - 2:3

I recently put together a worship that focussed on human interaction with God through technology; all kinds of technology, not just the modern stuff. As part of this worship, I decided to take on a task I had been wanting to do for a while; to produce my own translation of Genesis 1:1-2:3, the first of the two creation stories at the beginning of Genesis.

I am no expert in Hebrew so I relied a lot on technology to help me do this and some of my translation choices may well be questioned by those in the know, but I have a specific agenda for my translation (as all translations do) and for the most part, the controversial choices were deliberate, rather than a result of my naivety in the field.

The specific intention of this translation is to give the reader a feel for some of the peculiarities of the Hebrew language, to hear some of the grammar and sentence construction as it is delivered in the original, to retain some of the peculiar poetry of the text and perhaps most importantly to get a sense of the creation story as a fluid torrent of action rather than the stilted and coldly segmented list of actions that it often becomes in English translations.

I have attempted to leave in ambiguities or even push towards seemingly incongruent interpretations of phrases or words, which on their own work poorly in English, but in the context of the whole story begin to paint an exciting and dynamic picture - "And God saw, that's good"

In addition I have skewed the emphasis of gender, but not without rules. In Hebrew everything has a gender, whether it is a person, species or inanimate object. Our historical tendency has been to translate objects and animals as neutral (it), God as masculine (he) and ignore any references to the feminine except in humans. This is not wrong, but it misses the way that the Hebrew language often pairs masculine and feminine in a way that helps create movement, drama and tension within the very grammar of the text. For example Adam the person from chapter 2-3 is also the name for the human race in chapter 1. Adam is masculine and singular, and yet God is heard to make 'them' male and female, this is in part because adam, the species is male in reflection of the female earth, adamah. Yet in verse Gen:1:26 we hear God making adam - in God's likeness, here God is the masculine and the image is feminine. My translation seeks to draw the feminine to our attention wherever possible and allow the masculine to go unnoticed except when it has a specific purpose to play. In particular, I have tried to avoid calling God 'he' as God is not human and therefore to translate as he is inconsistent with the traditional treatment of other non human nouns. This is intended partly as a counterbalance to other translations but also as a way of drawing out those hidden gender relationships within the grammar.

Genesis 1:1-2:3

1:1      In beginning, God created the skywaters and the earth

1:2      And the earth she was shapeless, empty and dark over the face of the deep

            And the breath of God, she fluttered over the face of the waters

1:3      And God said - be light, and light be

1:4      And God saw because the light was good

            And God separated between the light and the dark

1:5      And God called day towards the light and night towards the darkness

            And it was evening, and it was morning: Day one

1:6      And God said - be an open space between the waters

            And be separated choosing waters from waters

1:7      And God made the open space

            And chose the waters which were from beneath to the open space

            And chose the waters which were from above to the open space

            And it’s so.

1:8      And God called skywaters to the open space

            And it was evening, and it was morning: Second day

1:9      And God said - gather the waters from beneath the skywaters to one place

            And the dry land she will be seen

            And it's so.

1:10    And God called the earth to the dry land

            And to the gathered waters, called sea

1:11    And God said - sprout she the earth,

            Grass, seed sowing plants, produce trees bearing produce of their kind

            Which carry their seed on the earth

            And it’s so

1:12    And the earth she send out grass,

            Plants sowing seed of their kind and trees making produce

            Which carry the seed of their kind

            And God saw, that’s good

1:13    And it was evening, and it was morning: Third Day

1:14    And God said - be lights in the open space of the skywaters

            To separate between the day and the night

            And they were a sign for occasions, days and years

1:15    And the lights be in the open space of the skywaters

            To be light upon the earth

            And it’s so

1:16    And God made two great lights;

            The greater light for representing the day

            The lesser light for representing the night

            And the stars

1:17    And God gave them to the open space of the skywaters

            To cause light upon the earth

1:18    And to represent day and night

            And to separate between light and darkness

            And God saw, that’s good

1:19    And it was evening and it was morning: Fourth Day

1:20    And God said - the waters swarm with swarming things

            Living life forces

            And a flock fly over the earth

            Over the face of the open space of the skywaters

1:21    And God created the great sea monsters

            And each of she living, moving, life forces of their kind which swarm the waters

            And each winged flock of its kind

            And God saw, that’s good

1:22    And God welcomed them

            And said - produce and be many

            And fill the waters in the seas

            And the flocks were many above the earth

1:23    And it was evening, and it was morning: Fifth day

1:24    And God said - the earth send out living life forces of her kind,

            Beasts and crawlies and life on earth of each kind

            And it’s so

1:25    And God made life on earth of each kind

            And animals of each kind

            And crawlies of the womanearth of each kind

            And God saw, that’s good.

1:26    And God said - let us make man in our image, as our feminine reflection

            And they control, with fish, the sea

            And with flock, the skywaters

            And with the animals and with all the earth

            And with all the crawling crawlies on the earth

1:27    And God made the man in the image;

            In the image of God, created him;

            Male and female, created them

1:28    And God welcomed them

            And God said to them - produce and be many and fill the earth

            And bind and control with fish, the sea

            And with flock, the skywaters

            And with all the living crawlies on the earth

1:29    And God said - hey! I give to yous all plantlife to sow seed

            Which is on the face of all the earth

            And all the treelife which contains tree produce to sow seed,

            For yous it is for eating

1:30    And for all life of the earth

            And for all the flock of the skywaters

            And for all the crawlies on the earth

            Which contain the living life force;

            all green plantlife for eating

            And it’s so

1:31    And God saw all that was made.

            And hey, it’s very good

            And it was evening and it was morning: Sixth day

2:1      And the skywaters and the earth

            And all their gathered multitudes were complete.

2:2      And in the seventh day God completed the work that was done

            And in the seventh day, rested from all the work that was done

2:3      And God welcomed the seventh day and set it apart

            Because in it was rest from all the work of creating

            Which God had done

Deuteronomy 8:3 Part II: The Lonely Bread

כִּי֠ לֹ֣א עַל־הַלֶּ֤חֶם לְבַדּוֹ֙ יִחְיֶ֣ה הָֽאָדָ֔ם כִּ֛י עַל־כָּל־מוֹצָ֥א פִֽי־יְהוָ֖ה יִחְיֶ֥ה הָאָדָֽם׃

The second part of Deuteronomy 8:3 says

'Man shall not live by bread alone but on every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord.' Or in my translation; 'it is not on the bread in its loneliness that the human will live, because on all emissions from the mouth of Yahweh will the human live'

This line, later quoted by Jesus (Mt 4:4/Lk 4:4), is often used to infer two things;

1.     That we cannot simply rely on earthly, physical food; we must also rely on spiritual food.

2.     That that we should listen to and be fed by the verbal word of God, through the scriptures.

Neither of these is entirely wrong, but both have slight problems.

1 We cannot simply rely on earthly, physical food; we must also rely on spiritual food.

If you read Deuteronomy 8:3 on its own you might indeed conclude that God is saying symbolically through the manna; 'you can't simply live on your own earthly resources, you need to rely also on me; supplement your earthly bread with heavenly manna and all will be well.' Except we hear from Numbers 11:7-8 that they baked the manna into bread, which in Exodus 16:4, Nehemiah 9:15, Psalm 78:24-25 and John 6:31 it is referred to as the 'bread of heaven'. Neither Deuteronomy nor Matthew's Gospel say; 'Man shall not live by earthly bread alone, but also by the heavenly bread.'

We might ask if manna is the bread that we cannot survive on, or does it represent that all nourishing word of God? In Numbers 11 we hear a request from the Israelites for some meat with their manna as they are fed up with the same diet. But that request is met with a resounding 'no', as if to say 'you shall live by this bread alone.' This seems to be a contradiction of Deuteronomy 8:3 where the manna is the unknown food, but we'll come back to that.

2 We should listen to and be fed by the verbal word of God, through the scriptures.

There is a translation issue here; whilst the Greek in the New Testament inserts the word rhema (ῥῆμα), 'word',[1] the Hebrew from Deuteronomy gives us the phrase col motsa (כָּל־מוֹצָ֥א) which loosely means all the 'emissions' or the 'going forths'. Motsa is a noun that captures the action of going forth as much as the thing or the word that is being sent. Hence some translations use phrases like 'everything that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord'. Like logos, rhema also carries within it a sense of not just meaning word, but also meaning the idea, the matter, the thing or the concept. So even if we insert 'word' there it needs to be thought of as a far wider and more conceptual meaning than simply words, whether written or spoken.

This is not simply a placing of spiritual food above physical food, biblical texts above other texts or the word of God above earthly common sense, it is about acknowledging an interconnectedness about all that comes from God even after it has been processed by human thought and action.

We should note that both heavenly providence and earthly process are involved in the production of manna. It is provided by God but needs to be prepared by human hands in order for it to be ready for human consumption. Our mistake in our interpretation of 'man shall not live by bread alone' is one of subtle emphasis. It is not about separating out the earthly from the heavenly, nor is it about adding God's word to human endeavour, but rather about God's actions baked into the bread, God's living involvement and interaction with the world becoming the first ingredient of what we seek to create. God becoming the first thought not the afterthought. Man shall not live by bread in its 'loneliness' but in its interconnectedness with God; by everything that comes from God and by realising that everything created comes from the very breath of God - 'In the beginning was the word and the word was God.'

The food is the same food; the bread is the same bread. We don't replace earthly bread with heavenly bread. We transform our experience of the bread by acknowledging the presence of God in the creating of this bread; by realising the presence of God's divine nature within the food. Suddenly we find ourselves back in the realms of communion theology. Considering the statement 'it is not on the bread in its loneliness that the human will live' in terms of communion theology helps us to understand what it is all about and simultaneously enriches our understanding of Communion.

We might say; 'man shall not live by bread a lone, but also by the wine'. Man shall not live just by the physical body of Christ, thinking perhaps of the Church as the body of Christ but also by the spirit of God poured out for all people represented in the wine.

I have spoken in another blog about the symbolism of the breaking of the bread and the pouring out of the spirit in the cup; that there is a model of how to be church in the pattern of Holy Communion, in the constant re-breaking of the structure of the church in order to allow God's spirit to flow. We can also think of this in more abstracted terms of structure and flow.

Tradition is perhaps the structure that, important though it is, needs to be constantly re-broken and redefined and the flow of the spirit of God is that which keeps everything new. And we only know how to do this if we are constantly listening to God, constantly looking for God's actions in the world and God's hand upon our lives. The structure and flow or the breaking and pouring out both echo that bringing down and lifting up from the first part of Deuteronomy 8:3; the hunger that is created by that bringing down and our subsequent openness to being filled with the holy spirit that is poured out for all.

"And he brings you down and it makes you hungry and it makes you eat the unknown food that you do not know and your fathers did not know, in order to cause your knowing, that it is not on the bread in its loneliness that the human will live, because, on all emissions from the mouth of Yahweh will the human live."

Deuteronomy 8:3 Part I: God brings us down in order to lift us up

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[1] Some traditions suggest a difference between 'rhema' as the spoken and 'logos' as the written word of God, but studies of the Greek language don't seem to support this.

Deuteronomy 8:3 Part I: God Brings us down In order to lift us up

וַֽיְעַנְּךָ֮ וַיַּרְעִבֶךָ֒ וַיַּֽאֲכִֽלְךָ֤ אֶת הַמָּן֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר לֹא־יָדַ֔עְתָּ וְלֹ֥א יָדְע֖וּן אֲבֹתֶ֑יךָ לְמַ֣עַן הוֹדִֽעֲךָ֗

Recently I decided to retranslate Deuteronomy 8:3 from Hebrew to English, partly out of curiosity and partly because I thought it might help me with some of my studies into the theology of Holy Communion.

Most Translations will do their best to be faithful to the original, but will have a strong emphasis on making sense in the language into which it is being translated. By contrast I attempt to retain as much of the raw Hebrew style as I can, but where there are peculiarities of grammar or words that just won't translate in a linear way, I like to play with them in a poetic way; to tease out some bridge of meaning between the original language and my own. This is my translation set next to a couple of more standard translations;

  I used a little poetic licence in the opening phrase 'and he brings you down.' Most translations begin with and he humbled you, which is right, but is perhaps too gentle; too polite. The verb anah (ענה) can be translated as 'to oppress' or 'to humiliate'; 'brings you down' seemed to do the trick in the context.

NRSV	NIV	My translation
He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD. He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD. He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.	He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.	And he brings you down and it makes you hungry and it makes you eat the unknown food that you do not know and your fathers did not know, in order to cause your knowing, that it is not on the bread in its loneliness that the human will live, because, on all emissions from the mouth of Yahweh will the human live.

Hebrew grammar can be very ambiguous and most translators presume that this the start of Deuteronomy 8:3 is a sequence of three things that God does, he humbled you and he caused you to be hungry and then he fed you with manna, but if we think of the second and third 'he's as 'it's it transforms the nature of this sequence. The name of the food, manna (ענה) is a kind of play on words, as it means something like 'what is it?' This makes sense, because it was indeed unknown food and the sentence goes on to say 'which you did not know and your Fathers did not know'. Instead of being a list of things that God does directly, we can think of this as a sequence of events set off by God first humbling you; then that humbling causing you to hunger and the hunger causing you to eat the unknown or unfamiliar food.

The pattern of humbling, hunger and openness to the new, seems to be a method that God uses to shift the faithful from times of stagnation and fatigue towards times of renewal and transformation.

A related, but slightly different pattern is noticeable in many biblical passages; the pattern of faith, testing, and reward. It can be seen in Abram and Sarai's waiting for a son, Joseph being sold into slavery and imprisonment, the Israelites enslaved in Egypt, the exodus, the exile, even the crucifixion and resurrection Jesus.

Two examples that relate to Deuteronomy 8:3 can be seen in the stories of Noah in Genesis 6-9 and Jesus being baptized before being tested in the wilderness in Mark 1, where there is an act of faith followed by 40 days of testing. The reward for Noah is survival but with Jesus the reward is more complex as it is ultimately us who seem to receive the reward and not him.

In both stories the faith comes before the trial; before the dark time. As Christians, we often think that when we have faith we will automatically suffer less. Our faith might give us strength to withstand suffering, but it certainly doesn't prevent us from experiencing it. In fact in many biblical stories as in modern life, it is that very faith that places us in the very heart of the suffering. Sometimes the faith that is ultimately drawing us towards the light, first takes us directly into the dark places of life.

People often ask 'If God is good, why does God allow bad things to happen?' I would not want to suggest that all suffering comes under the banner of this pattern of faith, testing and reward, but certainly when we read these stories we can see that suffering is not just an accidental by-product of free will, or something that the Devil has brought into the world against God's intentions. We see in these stories that suffering, the dark places and the wilderness moments in life are an intrinsic part of the human experience; a fundamental part of the universe God created.

The beginning of Deuteronomy 8 echoes the number 40 heard in the stories of Noah and Jesus in the wilderness as it speaks of the 40 years the Israelites spent in the wilderness. It speaks also of this as a time of testing;

Deuteronomy 8:2 (NIV)  ² Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands.

However, in verse 3 we are seeing that pattern of faith, trial and reward as if from the inside; from God's viewpoint, the mechanics of the theology that underpins this process. God brings us down in order to create that hunger within us, so that we will be ready to eat unknown food, so that we will be prepared to take on the unfamiliar.

Faith	→	The faith of the individual, though flawed and possibly stagnating, gives an opening for God to bring that person down	↘	Humbling
Trial	↙	The bringing down leads to a time of trial	←
	→	The time of trial creates hunger within the individual	↘	Hunger
Reward	↙	The hunger leads to an openness to receiving from God, the reward	←
	→	This place of reward is a new and unknown situation for which the recipient was not previously prepared.	↘	Unknown Food

 If we look at the Church in Britain today, isn't that exactly where we are? Isn't God bringing us down in order to create that hunger within us? Decline in the Church is often seen as either a failure on the human side of the equation, or as God abandoning that part of the Church in some way.  Whilst the human part in the failure to grow the Church should not be ignored, it seems likely that God was not surprised by the decline that is occurring in the Church and sought to use this as part of the bigger plan.

A triumphant and powerful Church, whilst successful, easily becomes complaisant, reliant on human strength and organisation; it becomes hierarchical in a top-down way and, instead of being a servant to the people, it can quickly become a master and a judge. The need for the Church to be brought down in order to regain that hunger for the humble grace of the cross is apparent when we stand back and look at the bigger picture from the vantage point of Deuteronomy 8:3.

Deuteronomy 8:3 Part II: The Lonely Bread

Jonah and some cows

Jonah is often seen as a story for children; particularly young children. But why do we consider this story of a defiant prophet with suicidal tendencies to be a good story for that age group? This morning I did a year 9 assembly at which I read a version of the story based on my own translation from the Hebrew. Perhaps even year 9 students are a little young for this story, but young people around the age of 13 are beginning to engage with some pretty complex emotions. So I endeavoured to adjust my translation for that age. I had already translated chapters 1, 3 and 4, but hadn't got round to translating the tricky poetry of chapter 2 (the bit with the fish) and I felt like I wanted to shift the emphasis away from whales and more towards the dark and sometimes surreal humour of the book. So I dealt with the fish chapter in one line and endeavoured to bring out some of the hidden humour of the rest of the text, I think it works. Anyway, here it is, see what you think...

 

Jonah

The Lord spoke Jonah son of Amitai, saying;

“Get up, go to Nineveh, the great city and call out to her (because the city was she), and because their evil has, how should I say, wafted up in front of me.”

So Jonah, obviously, decides to run away to Tarshish (the opposite direction from Nineveh) so that God wouldn’t be all up in his grill.  So he went down to Joppa and found a ship bound for Tarshish, Jonah hired her (for the boat was a she) and he went with her, and some sailors, to go to Tarshish to hide from the Lord and his big old face.
 

However, the Lord threw a great storm over the sea, and the ship, well she was working on a plan to get all smashed up on the rocks.

And the sailors were afraid and each man cried out to his own God and they threw the cargo from the ship to the sea to lighten the load. But Jonah went down to the belly of the ship and lay down and had a little sleep in her, like a little baby in the womb.
 

And the captain came down and visited him and said to him “what is with you sleepy head? Get up and call out to your God, then perhaps God will think of us and we won’t be destroyed”

And each sailor said to his friend, let’s roll some dice and each number will represent a someone on the boat, and whoever’s name comes up is the person who is to blame for this storm. So they rolled the dice and Jonah’s number came up. Not a good lottery to win.
 

So they said to him “explain how this evil has landed on us, Who do you work for? Where are you from? What land do your people come from?”

And Jonah said to them “I am a Hebrew and I fear the Lord God of the heavens, who made the soggy sea and the dry land.”

And the men feared with a fearsome fear and they said to him, “what have you done?” because they’d pretty much sussed out that he was running from God’s big old face,  and they’d sussed it out mainly because he’d told them that’s what he was doing.
 

So they said to him “what shall we do with you in order to make the sea hush his noisy face?” because the sea was a he, and because he was getting very stormy by now.

And Jonah said to them “Just chuck me in the sea, so that the sea will hush its face, I know this is all my fault, just chuck me in.”

Even so, the sailors tried to row the boat to safety, but they couldn’t because the storm was getting rougher all the time.
 

And so they cried out to the Lord, Jonah’s God this time, and they said please Lord do not let us perish with this man, and please don’t let his innocent blood be on our hands just because of what’s gone on between you and him.

So they picked up Jonah and threw him to the sea, and the sea… well he stood still from his raging.

And the men feared a great fear of the Lord, and they sacrificed a sacrifice to the Lord, and they vowed vows.

 

…So Jonah’s in the water, get’s swallowed by a fish, he sings a little sad song whilst he’s there about getting wrapped up in seaweed, and then the fish pukes him up on a beach.

 

Again the Lord spoke Jonah son of Amitai, saying;

“Get up and go to Nineveh, the great city and call out against her and call out the proclamation which I am speaking to you.

And Jonah got up and went to Nineveh according to the word of the Lord, and Nineveh was a big city, even to God, it would take you three days to walk around all its streets.
 

And so Jonah began to do a one day walk around the city, and he called out and said to them “yet forty days and Nineveh will be overthrown.”

And – massive surprise, the men of Nineveh actually trusted God, and they called a fast, and they all wore sackcloth to show they were very sorry, from the oldest to the youngest.

And the word reached the king of Nineveh, and he got up from his throne and he took off his fancy robe and put on sackcloth and he sat on some ashes to show how sorry he was.
 

And he had these words proclaimed across Nineveh “the man and the beast, the herd and the flock let them not eat anything let them not graze and let them not drink the waters. And the sackcloth will cover the man and the beast, and let them call out to God in strength and let each man turn from his way of evil, and from the violence which is in their hands. Who knows? God may turn and repent, he may turn from his burning anger and maybe we will not perish.”

And God did indeed notice that they had turned from their evil ways, and decided not to destroy them.
 

Which of course, to Jonah, was somehow a bad thing, a great evil, and he was full of anger. And he prayed to the Lord saying “please Lord, didn’t I say this would happen? That’s why I ran off to Tarshish; I knew that you’d be all kind and gracious and loyal to these people and not punish them for all the evil they’ve done. Why don’t you just take me now, I mean, what’s the point of my life? I’d be better off dead than alive.
 

And the Lord said “Ah, You’re angry are you? well good for you”

And Jonah went out of the city so that the city wouldn’t be all up in his grill, and he made a little shelter and he sat in her shade (for the shelter was a she) and he hid there so he couldn’t see what was going on in the city. 

And the Lord assigned a plant and to grow over Jonah to help shade his head from the hot sun and stop him being a miserable so and so. And Jonah rejoiced on account of the plant, with great rejoicing.
 

And then God assigned a worm in the rising dawn of the next day and she struck the plant, (for the worm was a she) and the plant withered.

And so it was with the rising of the sun that God assigned an easterly wind, and the sun beat down on Jonah’s head and he felt cross and miserable. And again he said “I’d be better off dead than alive.”
 

And God said to Jonah “Good for you, you are angry because of the plant, And good for me, I am angry until I see justice. You had pity on that plant, even though you didn’t do anything to make it grow, it came in the night and it went in the night.
 

Did you think I wouldn’t have pity on Nineveh, the City that even I thought was big; the city which had a population of over 12,000 people, people that didn’t know their left from their right before you turned up and gave them my word? ...And they’ve got cows!"