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    Sympathy for Jonah: Reflections on Humiliation, Terror and the Politics of Enemy-Love
    Sympathy for Jonah: Reflections on Humiliation, Terror and the Politics of Enemy-Love
    Sympathy for Jonah: Reflections on Humiliation, Terror and the Politics of Enemy-Love
    Ebook104 pages1 hour

    Sympathy for Jonah: Reflections on Humiliation, Terror and the Politics of Enemy-Love

    By David Benjamin Blower and Ched Myers

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    The story of Jonah is sacred to all three Abrahamic faiths and remains a recognizable legend even in the most secularized corners of the West.

    And yet the maritime prophet's story has been trivialized as a quaint children's tale, his character has been blasted by unsympathetic commentators, and even his alleged tomb has now been destroyed by Islamic State militants who, in 2014, took the city of Mosul on the Nineveh Plains.

    Now that Nineveh is once again in the grip of tyrannical violence and communities across the West and the Middle East are deep in a time of discord and soul-searching, we might do well to recover the story of Jonah, a guiding light, who marches into the very heart of empire and confronts it with the radical politics of the kingdom of God, even as his own certainties are shaken to the core.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherResource Publications
    Release dateJul 8, 2016
    ISBN9781498237284
    Sympathy for Jonah: Reflections on Humiliation, Terror and the Politics of Enemy-Love
    Author

    David Benjamin Blower

    David Benjamin Blower is a writer, musician, and theological agitator from Birmingham, UK. He is a prolific recording artist and the author of Kingdom vs. Empire (2013).

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    • 5/5
      Brief, but pithy, Blower asks and tries to answer the questions about Jonah we tend to avoid--why wouldn't he go to Nineveh? What was so effective about his preaching? What was that business with the "great fish" anyway? I agreed with his answers, but just thinking about the questions raised by the story of Jonah is an exacting and rewarding effort.

    Book preview

    Sympathy for Jonah - David Benjamin Blower

    9781498237277.kindle.jpg

    Sympathy for Jonah

    Reflections on Humiliation, Terror and the Politics of Enemy-Love

    David Benjamin Blower

    foreword by Ched Myers

    9443.png

    Sympathy for Jonah

    Reflections on Humiliation, Terror and the Politics of Enemy-Love

    Copyright © 2016 David Benjamin Blower. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

    Resource Publications

    An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

    199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

    Eugene, OR 97401

    www.wipfandstock.com

    paperback isbn: 978-1-4982-3727-7

    hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-3729-1

    ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-3728-4

    Manufactured in the U.S.A.

    For Kate, Jesse-John & Rosa

    Table of Contents

    Foreword

    Acknowledgments

    Introduction

    Chapter 1: The Whale

    Chapter 2: The Boat to Nowhere

    Chapter 3: The City of Fishes

    Chapter 4: The Two Horses

    Chapter 5: The Interruption

    Epilogue

    Bibliography

    Foreword

    by Ched Myers

    This evil generation seeks a sign, but none shall be given to it except the sign of Jonah. —Luke 11:29

    David Benjamin Blower’s little book on the little book of Jonah—and don’t be fooled by the adjective in either case—begins as an exploration of the biblical tall tale as sea shanty, then as musical both comic and tragic. Along the way the Birmingham musician (and performance artist, activist and theologian) manages to liberate Jonah from scholarly shrugs and Sunday School trivialization, not to mention from racist and anti-Semitic hermeneutics.

    Both church folk who treat the Jonah narrative as mere morality tale or children’s entertainment, and academics intent on dehistoricizing it, have utterly missed what Blower calls its radical Interruption of imperial history and its political orthodoxies. He puts it succinctly: The grace of God is awful to us, because the proper response to evil is to fear it and desire its destruction not to love it and desire its redemption. Make no mistake: this ethos revealed in Jonah poses a challenge to our credulity far more profound than does a magical whale tale.

    To undomesticate this fable, Blower rightly recontextualizes it in terms of the awful violence of the Assyrian empire, which he analogizes as an ancient Nazi regime. Indeed, the Assyrian capital of Nineveh was so infamous in the consciousness of biblical Israel that it merits special mention in the genealogy of empire that culminates the primeval Creation/Fall story (Gen 10:11f). And it earns ample prophetic antipathy, particularly in the oracles of Nahum and Zephaniah, which though even shorter than Jonah, spare no disdain for the Assyrian conquerors.

    Woe to the bloody city, all full of lies and booty—no end to the plunder! rants Nahum. His ensuing portrait of Assyria’s violent militarism—of which Israel was on the receiving end—is dramatic and poignant, but hardly exaggerated:

    The crack of whip, and rumble of wheel, galloping horse and bounding chariot! Horsemen charging, flashing sword and glittering spear, hosts of slain, heaps of corpses, dead bodies without end—they stumble over the bodies!¹

    Similarly, Zephaniah longed for the day in which Yahweh would

    destroy Assyria; and make Nineveh a desolation, a dry waste like the desert . . . This is the exultant city that dwelt secure, that said to herself, I am and there is none else. What a desolation she has become, a lair for wild beasts! Everyone who passes by her hisses and shakes his fist.²

    For people who have been brutalized by imperial presumption and aggression, ancient or modern, such bitter lament and vengeful hopes for destruction can surely be understood.

    Which is what makes the book of Jonah such a curious (if admittedly reluctant) counterpoint. The divine assignment here is not to eliminate the adversary, but to turn them around. This is a call so terrible, Blower acknowledges, that even when the story’s curtain falls the protagonist still cannot accept it. Perhaps even more extraordinary is the story’s imagination that Nineveh might actually repent! The portrait of King Sennacharib (think Hitler) in sackcloth, in my opinion, was meant as a political cartoon, skewering at once both the empire and the prophet. As Blower recognizes, such self-deprecating satire is common in the Hebrew Bible (though unique in the literature of antiquity). But this trope, however fantastic, underlines the fact that ultimately, if humanity is to survive, the murderous logic of empire must be turned around. And nothing less is God’s will for history.

    This appears to be the lesson that Jesus drew from the old prophetic tale, as he took up John’s proclamation of repentance after the Baptist was disappeared in an imperial prison. For as Jonah became a sign to the people of Nineveh, the Nazarene warns in Luke 11:30, so will the Human One be to this generation. I can’t think of any person or character in history or fiction, writes Blower, who seemed so completely bent on the Jonaic practice.

    Christian theology has, as Blower points out multiple times, both overlooked and underestimated the Jonah story, on its own terms and as a kind of interpretive key to the Jesus story. Both stories culminate at a tree, the Cross revealing what was implicit under the branches of Jonah’s broom: namely, that only the loving power of a nonviolent resistance that seeks to redeem the oppressor can defy and dismantle the evils of empire, then and now.

    I commend this brilliant reading of one of the Bible’s most mishandled texts. Full of theological, psychological and political insight, it faithfully re-presents the scandal of both Jonah and Jesus. Now, brother Benjamin, I await the musical!

    1. Nahum

    3

    :

    1

    –

    3

    2. Zephaniah

    2

    :

    13

    ,

    15

    Acknowledgments

    My thanks go to Ched Myers and Jonathan Blower for their invaluable suggestions and contributions to this little book. I also beg the indulgence of the reader regarding the many footnotes in it, since, try as I might, I could not get it to go in a straight line.

    Introduction

    The Fisherman’s Tale & the Tomb

    If I did go around for a while, like a man telling tall tales, assuring people that I had written a musical of the book of Jonah, it was not with the intention of misleading anyone. I exaggerated, to be sure; partly because it is, after all, a fisherman’s tale and exaggeration feels quite natural to it, and partly because I didn’t know what else to call it.

    As I tried to explain the thing to a friend, he told me frankly that it was a reading of the Book of Jonah, with some songs popping up here and there. I must say that this description dissatisfied me. One cannot contemplate the story of Jonah without a touch of theatre. We would wear hats and eye patches and sack-cloth. We’d light candles for the sailor’s vows, and we’d recreate the whale’s belly using a red torch.

    No doubt, this little project sprang partly from the Englishman’s usual fascination with maritime lore, sea-monsters and ancient cities and civilizations. But if there was any frivolity involved, a little time spent with the prophet Jonah would soon cure me of that. And yet I had no idea how deep and dark Jonah’s well would eventually

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