by David Plotz
My childhood memory of Jonah stops with him gasping on the beach, but the story continues, and actually gets even better. The regurgitated prophet makes his way to Nineveh, stands in the middle of the city, and announces that God’s going to smite it in forty days. The people of Nineveh heed his warning. The king wears sackcloth, squats in ashes, and orders the entire population to fast in order to gain God’s mercy. Why do the Ninevites even pay attention to Jonah? It makes no sense. He’s a foreigner—he may not even speak their language—he prays to an alien God, and he’s a stranger. How could he mesmerize an entire city? His success seems especially unlikely given our recent experience with prophets: from Isaiah to Jeremiah to Obadiah, prophets are notable principally for being ignored. It’s inexplicable that Jonah would be the exception to that rule.
In any case, the Ninevites’ prayer works. God relents and pardons the city. This leads to the funniest part of the book. Jonah is furious when God forgives Nineveh because His mercy turns Jonah into a false prophet. Jonah has been screaming about the city’s doom, and instead nothing happens. Jonah looks like a fraud. Jonah kvetches that that’s why he fled the Lord in the first place, because he knew God would be compassionate and not actually punish the city. His pettiness—a combination of utter self-involvement and indifference to the saved Ninevites—is awful and yet recognizably human. Jonah is a character right out of a Woody Allen movie.
Showing keen psychological perception, God decides to teach Jonah a lesson about selfishness. He sends Jonah to the desert, and provides him a ricinus plant for shade. Jonah loves the plant. God—sly deity!—then kills the ricinus. Jonah freaks out, and whines melodramatically that he’s so sad about the plant that he wants to die. At this point, God delivers the knockout punch, in the final verses of the book: “You cared about the plant, which you did not work for and which you did not grow, which appeared overnight and perished overnight. And should not I care about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than one hundred and twenty persons who do not yet know their right hand from their left, and many beasts as well!”
Jonah really is the perfect Bible story. God is demanding yet merciful, wise yet tricky. The tale is suspenseful from beginning to end. The hero is deeply flawed, mostly learns his lesson, and behaves with both the grace and the selfishness that are in all of us. There is no unnecessary violence. And it’s extremely funny.
THE BOOK OF MICAH
I don’t envy Micah: Jonah’s a hard act to follow. Rather than trying to match Jonah fish for fish, Micah reverts to the usual prophetic clichés, giving us the same old enigmatic metaphors about God’s coming vengeance against Jerusalem. Along the way, Micah even plagiarizes the entire “swords into ploughshares” speech from Isaiah.
At one point, the Lord declares that he is filing “a suit against Israel.” This is the third or fourth reference to lawsuits in the Bible, and at least the second, I think, that proposes litigation between God and His people. Is the idea of God and His followers in a legal dispute unique to Judeo-Christian tradition? Do other holy texts use the same courtroom metaphor? I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s particular to us, because of the fundamentally contractual nature of God’s relationship with his Chosen People. He and they are constantly making covenants. He promises land or redemption or love. They promise faith and obedience to law. One side or the other then breaks the contract and tries to argue its way out of the deal. I suspect that this ancient litigiousness helps explain why Jews continue to be overrepresented in legal and argumentative professions. The very foundation of our faith is contract law. After you’ve gone toe-to-toe with God in the courtroom, even Justice Scalia must seem like a pussycat.
THE BOOK OF NAHUM
Never heard of him. But I’m delighted to meet him. If the Bible were a bit better organized, Nahum would directly follow Jonah, because he is a gruesome response to the jolly optimism of the whale prophet.
Nahum begins with a spectacular litany of praise to the Lord. There have been lots of hymns to God in the Bible, but this is the most over-the-top in its hyperbolic, florid grandiosity. Nahum was the Muhammad Ali of his day. A taste of his shtick: “He travels in whirlwind and storm, and clouds are the dust on His feet. He rebukes the sea and dries it up…. The earth heaves before Him…. Who can stand before His wrath? Who can resist His fury?…No adversary opposes him twice.”
This patter segues into a denunciation of the Lord’s chief enemy, which is—Nineveh! Yes, the very city that Jonah helped save is now on God’s do-not-call list. Nineveh has conquered Zion, and the Lord wants payback. (Nahum does not explain how the God-fearing Nineveh of Jonah’s story has become the enemy.)
Nahum is both the Muhammad Ali of the Bible and the Ernest Hemingway, because he can also write in a spare, compelling style. From Chapter 2: “Desolation, devastation, and destruction! Spirits sink. Knees buckle. All loins tremble. All faces turn ashen.” From Chapter 3: “Ah, city of crime, utterly treacherous, full of violence, where killing never stops!”
God promises to “lift up” Nineveh’s skirts and humiliate her, also to devour her, also to scatter her people like sheep. The final verse of the book encapsulates the stiletto genius of Nahum. Discussing Nineveh’s destruction, he writes: “All who hear the news about you clap their hands over you. For who has not suffered from your constant malice?” What a shame this book isn’t better known; it’s so muscular and brilliantly written.
THE BOOK OF HABAKKUK
Give Habakkuk credit for posing one of the most important theological questions of the Bible: If you’re so good, God, why are you “silent when the wicked swallow those more righteous than they?” This is probably the biggest question there is about God, and one that still puzzles many believers today. Even so, Habakkuk is a whiner and gloomy Gus, griping about how long he has to cry to the Lord for relief. Eventually, he decides to stand in a watchtower until God answers his complaint.
THE BOOK OF ZEPHANIAH
They call these twelve the “minor prophets,” but that term doesn’t do justice to the dinkiness, the negligibility, the puniness of Zephaniah. He’s not minor-league; he’s Cape Cod league. His three, mercifully short, chapters are third-rate Isaiah, a completely familiar prophetic poem: God’s going to destroy mankind to punish worshippers of Baal. He will trash the Israelites, the Moabites, the Ninevites, etc. Then He’ll redeem Zion. Nothing you haven’t heard forty-seven times, and better, before.
THE BOOK OF HAGGAI
A confusing but lively story, whose chief lesson is: rebuild the Temple, guys!
THE BOOK OF ZECHARIAH
Enter Satan. In a dream, Zechariah sees the high priest of Israel facing off against Satan, who goes by the professional wrestling–style nickname “the Accuser.” This makes sense because, according to the footnotes in my Bible and my Hebrew-speaking wife, “Satan” does not mean devil or Antichrist or anything like that. It is just a Hebrew word meaning “accuser” or “adversary.” The Accuser is no horn-sprouting, pitchfork-wielding, brimstone-stinking, red-satin devil. He appears to be more like God’s lawyer. He’s “standing at His right hand”—God’s right-hand man. The Accuser doesn’t say a word in the chapter. In fact, he just stands by while one of God’s angels cross-examines Joshua. Still, it’s momentous to witness Satan’s first appearance. Question: How did this abashed, impotent Accuser turn into His Satanic Majesty? (Christian readers may be wondering why I’ve overlooked the appearance of Satan in the book of Job. As Jews read the Bible, Job comes after the minor prophets, almost at the end of the book. So we’ll get to it later.)
Zechariah, who’s prone to seriously weird visions (a giant flying scroll and a woman in a lead-sheathed tub representing wickedness), declares that a man called “the Branch” shall rebuild the Temple and rule Zion. David Koresh’s Branch Davidians—who believed the Branch is Christ—took their name from here.
That’s not the only proto-Christian prophecy in Zechariah. Another is that the new king of Israel shall ride into Jerusalem
on a donkey. The more I read of the prophets, the more it becomes clear that the Christian tradition borrows heavily from them. (I know, I know—this is a blindingly obvious observation.) Why does Christianity tell stories about Christ riding a donkey, or coming from Bethlehem, or suffering for our sins—all notions forecast in the prophetic books? Perhaps because all those stories about Christ are true. Or perhaps because the early Christian writers wanted to place Christ emphatically in the Jewish prophetic tradition. They could do this by matching up his biography to predictions in the Hebrew Bible, legitimizing Christ as a Jewish messianic figure.
THE BOOK OF MALACHI
The final prophet! Hallelujah!
God is sick of our heresy and backsliding, our feeble sacrifices and worthless professions of faith. “You have wearied the Lord with your talk,” Malachi chides. When the Lord’s redemption comes, the good will finally take their revenge: “You shall trample the wicked to a pulp.”
SEVENTEEN
The Book of Psalms
150 Short Poems about God
In which the Lord is my shepherd.
PSALM 1
Because this book consists of 150 poems in no particular order, there isn’t a compelling reason to start at Psalm 1 and read through to Psalm 150. You might as well start at Psalm 47 and then read 112 and then 6 and then 65 and so on. But I’m trying to march directly through the Bible, so I’ll dutifully begin with Psalm 1 and trudge forward. The first psalm advises that a righteous man studies the Lord’s teaching “day and night.” It’s eleven-thirty PM, so that’s me.
PSALM 3
The first of many psalms “of David”—psalms that King David supposedly wrote. Given David’s not inconsiderable ego, it’s hardly surprising that the main theme of David’s psalms is: Poor me, I have so many enemies, even though I’m such a righteous man. Thanks for killing those enemies, God!
I love this wonderfully modern line at the end of Psalm 3, where David praises the Lord: “For You slap all my enemies in the face.”
PSALM 6
Another psalm of David. It opens: “O Lord, do not punish me in anger, do not chastise me in fury. Have mercy on me, O Lord.” This is an interesting appeal to the Lord. God often reacts too quickly in the Bible, immediately flying into a rage at human sin and frailty. What’s so appealing about this verse is that David is not denying his own wrongdoing—he knows he’s a sinner—but he wants God to count to ten before smiting, perhaps hoping that the Lord’s fury will subside. As always, David is a superb psychologist, daring to understand, and manipulate, the Lord.
Also, a literary point. Note that the first line—“do not punish me in anger”—is followed by a line that means the same thing: “do not chastise me in fury.” This similar but not identical repetition is a common device in biblical poetry. (Psalm 3, for example, begins: “O Lord, my foes are so many! Many are those who attack me.”) If I remember correctly from my oral literature class in college, such repetition is common in song-poems everywhere. “Oral formulaic” poems contained repetitions so that the bards who performed them could remember them more easily. When the song-poems were eventually written down, the repetitions came along.
PSALM 18
The longest and most spectacular psalm yet, it’s actually an almost word-for-word copy of 2 Samuel 22. It opens with David rattling off an amazing series of nouns to praise the Lord: “my crag, my fortress, my rescuer, my God, my rock in whom I seek refuge, my shield, my mighty champion, my haven.”
It then turns into a story of how God “bent the sky and came down” to rescue David. Egomaniac David, naturally, thinks he deserves nothing less, because he is a “blameless” man. “The Lord rewarded me according to my merit.”
PSALM 22
This psalm surely has special meaning for Christians. David, complaining again, opens the psalm by crying: “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” Even I know these are Jesus’s last words, according to one account in the Gospels.
It is not the only line in this psalm that relates to the death of Jesus. David imagines his killers “casting lots for my garments”—which is what the Roman soldiers did over Jesus’s clothes.
PSALM 23
Probably the most famous poem ever written: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…green pastures…still waters…valley of the shadow of death…my cup overflows,” etc. A key question for a lay reader is: why is this psalm world famous and 149 others are not? I have a theory. Psalm 23 is a pacific poem. One of the revelations I’ve had in reading the Bible is that its most famous passages are almost always its most loving ones. Although there are certainly famous Bible stories that are disturbing—Noah, Sodom, etc.—the celebrated bits are far milder than the book as a whole. (“Swords into ploughshares,” for example, is the most famous verse in Isaiah, and also one of the few nonviolent ones.) Psalm 23 is another case of this whitewashing, presenting a God who is loving, forgiving, and openhearted—even though the God of most psalms, and of the Hebrew Bible generally, is quick to anger, furious, and unforgiving. This God of Psalm 23 is certainly better for marketing.
The King James version famously and majestically refers to “the valley of the shadow of death.” My Jewish Publication Society translation instead offers “a valley of deepest darkness.” I assume my translation is more accurate, but it’s so—blah.
PSALM 25
“O my God, in you I trust.” Let’s stamp that on some coins.
PSALM 29
The usual formula so far is:
Dear Lord,
Please be my salvation and smite my enemies.
Sincerely,
David
This quirky psalm breaks the mold. Instead, it’s a poem about God’s voice. Just His voice: “The voice of the Lord is powerful; the voice of the Lord is full of majesty. The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars…. The voice of the Lord flashes forth flames of fire. The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness…. The voice of the Lord causes the oaks to whirl, and strips the forest bare.” Stupendous! No wonder they always want Morgan Freeman to play God.
PSALM 34
Though you can’t tell from the English translation, this is one of several psalms that are acrostics. In the original Hebrew, each stanza begins with a different letter, starting with “aleph” and going right through the alphabet. (What’s next, sudoku psalms?) The word game doesn’t do much for the poem itself, which is a workmanlike version of the usual prayer for redemption.
PSALM 37
The premise of Psalm 37 is: Don’t worry about the wicked, because God is going to get back at them, big-time. Verse 11 reads: “The meek shall inherit the land.” Did you know that Jesus had borrowed from this psalm for the Sermon on the Mount? I didn’t. Isn’t it a bit of a cheat to steal your best lines from someone else?
PSALM 38
Doctors, nurses, please gather around. This patient presents with an extraordinary and alarming set of symptoms. We need a diagnosis and a treatment plan. Patient David R., please tell us how you feel.
“My wounds foul and fester.”
Really? Please continue.
“My loins are filled with burning.”
Hmm. Yes. That sounds quite unpleasant.
“There is no soundness in my flesh.”
What do you mean by that? Could you elaborate?
“There is no health in my bones.”
What about your heart? Do you have any pain there?
“My heart throbs.”
It sounds dire, colleagues. My initial diagnosis was a sexually transmitted disease. The burning loins are significant, and patient David R. has a long history of extramarital sexual activity. But I wonder if focusing on that sexual history distracts us from his other symptoms. After all, he seems to have severely infected wounds, suggesting that we may be looking at septic shock (“no soundness” and “no health”), along with damage to the heart (“throbs”). I advise a course of intravenous antibiotics, with constant monitoring in the ICU.
Update
, 16:30 hours. Patient David R. has refused treatment, yet heartbeat and other vitals have suddenly returned to normal. He appears delusional, insisting that someone he calls “God” is healing him. “It is for you, O Lord, that I wait. It is you, O Lord my God, who will answer.” Hospital attorneys advise patient David R. that hospital cannot be held liable for complications, disability, pain, suffering, and death that may result from his refusal of treatment. Patient David R. insists that he understands risks, signs waiver, demands return of crown and scepter, and checks himself out.
PSALM 51
A psalm attributed to David, as he did penance for Bathsheba. David begs for mercy and confesses his terrible sins. Sincere or not, David’s powerful confession is a source of remorseful language we still use today. David begs to be “whiter than snow.” He asks God to make a “pure heart” for him. Most interestingly, for those who believe in original sin, he says, “I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.”
PSALM 53
OK, these are getting kind of dull. Reading one psalm is a joy, reading two is a pleasure, reading three is a chore, and reading a dozen or more at once is like sitting next to a desperate insurance salesman on a transatlantic flight.
PSALM 58
The Bible describes violence and revenge better than any other book I’ve ever read. It’s bloodier than Stephen King, icier than Cormac McCarthy. Here the psalmist asks God to take out his enemies: “[B]reak the teeth in their mouths…like grass let them be trodden down and wither. Let them be like the snail that dissolves into slime…. The righteous will rejoice when they see vengeance done; they will bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked.”
PSALM 65
A psalm for farmers. What a beauty! It thanks God for irrigating the land, providing grains, “softening” the soil with gentle rain, providing grass for the flocks. “You crown the year with your bounty.” Amen to that.
PSALM 69