014 My Friend Jonah

I have a soft spot for Jonah, the biblical prophet who, upon being sent by God to the Assyrian Capital of Ninevah to preach its doom, boarded a ship in the opposite direction instead, was - on his own urge - thrown overboard in a storm, swallowed by a large sea creature (presumably a sperm whale) & spewed out by the same 3 days later to finally fulfill his God-given mission in Ninevah.
Maybe one reason I like him is because according to Richard Rohr and Andreas Ebert, Jonah is the biblical "patron saint" of the Enneagram personality type NINE, the type I can personally identify myself with best.
My "better half," Sparkles talked to someone about Jonah today, and she said she's always amazed about how little people actually know about him (as well as the rest of the Bible).
Even Ebert & Rohr seem to dismiss Jonah's story as a fable in the foot notes to their book, but a little bit of research would render such an attitude as ignorant, to say the least. I suppose church Christians simply have to "unlearn" too much stuff they were taught in their cementaries - er, seminaries - about how and why all the miracles in the Bible didn't really happen...
If you type in the word "Ninevah" in Google, probably the first place you'll wind up will be Wikipedia, an excellent online encyclopaedia created by Internet users around the world & a sheer endless source of information. You'll even be given the exact geographical coordinates there, which will zoom you right into a satellite shot of the archaologic site of that ancient city, next to the city of Mosul, in the province of Ninawa in Iraq, a place where Iraqui insurgents moved after the infamous Battle of Fallujah in 2004.
Nineveh's location is marked by two large mounds, one of which is called Nabī Yūnus, which means "Prophet Jonah," and on which a muslim shrine in honor of the Jewish prophet stands. (If you think that's ridiculous, you should read the Quran, which revers many Hebrew characters, including Jesus, Abraham, Isaac, and of course Ishmael, etc.)
You'll even find reports of Christians in the region who observe an old traditional fast, based on the fast and repentance of Jonah's Ninevites, which led to their redemption. God simply changed His mind & decided not to destroy them (- yet! -), much to Jonah's dismay, as you can find in the Bible. - Or accounts of an ancient Babylonian historian/priest named Berosus who wrote of a mythical creature named Oannes who was to have emerged from the sea to give divine wisdom to men. "Oannes" being one possible way to spell "Jonah" in the ancient Greek Berosus used.
There is even an extensive treatize on Jonah's Whale, mentioning 2 other occasions in the 18th century in which men are recorded to have survived being swallowed by a whale.
Finally, you get to the sad truth about what's happening at this historically significant site right now, with the remainders of the archaeological evidence of the Biblical accounts of Ninevah's king Sennacherib (as found in 2.Kings chapter 18 & 19) being carried off by looters & thieves, thanks to the chaos the "almighty" U.S. of A. are wreaking in that misfortunate country, along with the United Nations.
Probably all this evidence for the accuracy of the Bible must have really been a thorn in the flesh of the New World Order.
If there's one thing we learn from history, it's that we never learn from it, Toynbee said, and thus we see yesterday's Davids turn into today's Goliaths, and modern world empires heinously steal the last remains of former ones, only to meet the same doom as the former.
David Berg and his Children of God predicted the destruction of America in a "40 Days" warning in 1973, but nothing happened. I believe that God was as merciful to the Americans as He had been to the Ninevites 2700 years earlier. But eventually, Ninevah was destroyed. Another prophet, Nahum, was sent, and in 612 B.C. the Babylonians and Medes raked that great city to the ground.
In the light of what I know about what's going on in the U.S.A. today I can only assume that the later Ninevites must have deserved the judgments just as today's corrupt leaders will.

(First Published May 24, 2006)