commentator says that they would become proselytes to Judaism, another that they would give alms to the poor. (6) And the Lord appointed a great fish.' The fish is probably an adaptation of an old mythological monster, well known to the Hebrews and kindred races. Thus a prophecy now appended to the Book of Jeremiah speaks of Nebuchadnezzar as swallowing up Israel like a dragon, and foretells that God will bring forth out of his mouth that which he had swallowed up.' If Jonah is the type of Israel, the introduction of the fish monster, albeit to save and not to destroy, is the more appropriate. It is of course idle, and more than idle, to inquire what sort of whale this wonder fish could have been. For the writer did not mean us to take his fish seriously. It is a mere incident of the story. God punishes Jonah for his want of faith and his dereliction of duty, but in the extremity of peril he delivers him. (7) Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord.' Jonah's prayer strikes us at first as inappropriate for the occasion. It is not a prayer for deliverance, but a thanksgiving for rescue. Did our author, finding this psalm (for a psalm it is) elsewhere, and thinking that some of its epithets and phrases suited his hero at this strange crisis of his fate, adopt it himself, or did a later writer from the same cause insert it on his own responsibility? It recalls many a prayerful poem in the psalter, where the speaker is a personification of Israel, or the faithful in Israel, as a whole. And if Jonah was intended as a type of Israel, the use of the psalm was not inapposite. Its phrases about the 'depth and the billows and the weeds' were originally metaphorical. Waves and waters are a frequent Hebrew image for troubles and calamity. But as placed in the mouth of Jonah, these phrases are a sort of poetic equivalent for the prophet's actual situation. And Dr. George Adam Smith points out that 'whether the original author found the psalm ready to his hand or made it, there is a great deal to be said for the opinion of the earlier critics, that he himself inserted it, and just where it now stands. For, from the standpoint of the writer, Jonah was already saved when he was taken up by the fish-saved from the deep into which he had been cast by the sailors, and the dangers of which the psalm so vividly describes.'

(8) And the people of Nineveh believed God.' The religious differences between Jonah and the Ninevites are ignored. This is intentional. It is in fine agreement with the universalism which our author desires to teach. All men are God's children, and whether they know it or not, he is God for all of them alike. The sin of the citizens of Nineveh was not religious in the

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narrower sense of the word, but moral. In matters of religious belief mortal men are largly dependent on their education and environment, and therefore errors are not culpable; but the sins of the Ninevites were within their own control, either to maintain or to abandon.

(9) And God saw their works.' I have already quoted this passage in speaking about the Day of Atonement. The saying of the Rabbis, to which I have there alluded, occurs in the Mishnah, where that law book is describing the customary procedure on the occasion of a public fast. I will cite the passage in full. 'What is the order of the celebration of the fast? The ark (with the scrolls of the Law) is brought into the public place, and ashes are strewn upon it. And ashes are likewise strewn upon the head of the Nasi (the Prince) and on the Chief Rabbi, and all other persons do likewise. And the eldest man among them all speaks words of contrition in their midst: "My brethren, it is not said of the men of Nineveh, God saw their sackcloth and their fasting, but God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and elsewhere it says, Rend your heart, and not your garments.'

(10) 'And God appointed a gourd.' This is usually supposed to be the castor-oil plant or Ricinus communis, also called Palma Christi. Its rapid growth and no less rapid decay may have suggested this incident of our story. It seemed, however, desirable to retain the now familiar 'gourd.'

(11) Thou hast pity on the gourd.' At first sight the argument does not seem quite in order. For Jonah was not angry for the gourd's sake, but for his own, and indeed his feelings were not those of compassion, but of wrath. The word 'pity' is applied by the author to Jonah and the gourd because it is the true and appropriate word for God and the Ninevites. The parallelism is a little forced, but it is quite possible, as Professor Driver has had the great kindness to suggest to me in a private letter, that a sort of a fortiori argument was intended by the author. Jonah is allowed by God to have felt some pity for the gourd, although that pity was born of selfishness. He regretted its loss for its own sake as well as for himself. Now not only were the Ninevites incomparably more worthy to be spared than the gourd, but God was incomparably more ready to feel pity than Jonah, for not only was he their Creator and Sustainer, but pity in his case is an ever-present attitude of his nature, neither evoked by selfish considerations of personal advantage, nor assumed as the fair-seeming counterfeit of personal annoyance. God, the shepherd of man, is, as Plato would say, a true shepherd. His

end or aim is the wellbeing of his flock, and only that. Nor does it matter to him whether the sheep are light or dark, Aryan or Semitic. The touching allusion to the children and the dumb animals fitly concludes this great paean of the divine mercy, unlimited by race or creed. The author is a true artist and sparing of words. No more is needed for his readers to under

stand his purpose; therefore no more is said.

It is worth noting that the seeming lack of parallelism between Jonah's solicitude for the gourd and God's solicitude for Nineveh did not escape the notice of David Kimchi, an acute Jewish commentator of the Middle Ages. He explains it by saying that if Jonah had pity upon the gourd because of his own distress, so God had pity upon Nineveh because of his own glory; for his creatures are his glory, as it is written, 'the whole earth is full of his glory,' and how much more is man his glory, of whom it is written, for my glory have I created him.'

§5. The moral of Jonah-What, then, is the purpose of Jonah ? To our author's contemporaries it must, I think, have been wholly clear; for they surely knew (to use a homely phrase) where their shoe pinched. They must have known the weak spot in their religious creed. Nor is it difficult for us to understand this purpose. It shines through the whole. There is indeed no reason, as Professor Driver says, why, together with his main purpose, the author should not have incidentally taught other religious lessons as well. The moral which the Rabbis drew from the forgiveness of the Ninevites the author doubtless had intended his readers to draw. It may also be that the author intended Jonah's reluctance to execute God's bidding to symbolize Israel's refusal to take up its mission as 'the light of the nations,' which had been assigned to it by the Second Isaiah. 'Israel, as a nation, was entrusted with a prophetical commission to be a witness and upholder of divine truth; but Israel shrank from executing this commission, and often apostatized; it was, in consequence, "swallowed up" by the world-power Babylon, as Jonah was swallowed up by the fish; in exile, however, like Jonah, it sought its Lord, and then was afterwards disgorged uninjured; after the return from exile, there were many who were disappointed that the judgements uttered by the prophets did not at once take effect, and that the cities of the nations still stood secure, just as Jonah was disappointed that the judgement pronounced against Nineveh had been averted.' According to this view the purpose of the book, in the fine words of Dr. G. A. Smith, would be to illustrate God's grace to the heathen in face of his people's refusal to fulfil their mission to

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them. The author was led to achieve this purpose by a parable, through which the prophet Jonah moves as the symbol of his recusant, exiled, redeemed and still hardened people. It is the drama of Israel's career, as the servant of God, in the most pathetic moments of that career. A nation is stumbling on the highest road nation was ever called on to tread. "Who is blind, but my servant ? Or deaf, as my messenger whom I sent?" He that would read this drama aright must remember what lies behind the great refusal which forms its tragedy. The cause of Israel's recusancy was not only wilfulness or cowardly sloth, but the horror of a whole world given over to idolatry, the paralyzing sense of its irresistible force, of its cruel persecutions endured for centuries, and of the long famine of Heaven's justice. These it was which had filled Israel's eyes too full of fear to see her duty. Only when we feel, as the writer himself felt, all this tragic background to his story, are we able to appreciate the exquisite gleams which he flashes across it: the generous magnanimity of the heathen sailors, the repentance of the heathen city, and, lighting from above, God's pity upon the dumb heathen multitudes.'

But the primary and main object of the book was surely, as Professor Driver says, 'to teach, in opposition to the narrow, exclusive view, which was too apt to be popular with the Jews, that God's purposes of grace are not limited to Israel alone, but that they are open to the heathen as well, if only they abandon their sinful courses, and turn to him in true penitence. It is true, the great prophets had often taught the future reception of the heathen into the kingdom of God: but their predominant theme had been the denunciation of judgement; and the Israelites themselves had suffered so much at the hands of foreign oppressors that they came to look upon the heathen as their natural foes, and were impatient when they saw the judgements uttered against them unfulfilled. Jonah appears as the representative of the popular Israelitish creed. He resists at the outset the commission to preach to Nineveh at all; and when his preaching there had been successful in a way which he did not anticipate, he murmurs because the sentence which he had been commanded to pronounce is revoked. That repentance might avert punishment had often been taught with reference to Israel; and Jeremiah lays down the same truth with reference to the nations generally (Part I, p. 416). The aim of the book is thus to supply a practical illustration of Jeremiah's teaching; and in the rebuke with which the book closes, the exclusive spirit of the author's own contemporaries stands condemned.'

We can see how this exclusive spirit was generated and what were its excuses. The Jews were conscious of possessing a religion better, purer and truer than the religion of all the nations around them. They had been taught that God had chosen them and favoured them specially, and it was only the greatest spirits among them who realized that this choice was rather for the sake of others than for themselves, and that this favour was rather the grace of purification through adversity than the petting of a pampered child. God had elected them. And yet God was impartial, and the common father of all. That they failed to understand. Surely their enemies, Babylon and Persia and Greece, must also be the enemies of their God. Surely the cruelties which their foes inflicted upon them would be avenged by their divine Protector. Two propositions needed reconcilement. God is good and just; the 'nations' are God's enemies and will suffer punishment. The reconcilement was effected by the theory that the 'nations' were wicked, wicked because they were Israel's oppressors, and did not worship the one and only God. National antipathies, sharpened by wrongs and persecutions, were kindled into a flame by false religious fanaticism. If the foe repented and were pardoned, where would be his deserved punishment, where the luxury of revenge? The mind was darkened by suffering, the heart was hardened by hatred. Men did not ask themselves the question: Does God create in order to destroy? They could not realize that for Jew and for Gentile alike, the statement and the bidding must hold: 'I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth; wherefore turn yourselves and live.' They could not perceive that if for man's unaided power this turning be all too hard, then for Gentile no less than for Jew must hold the promise: A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you.'

Marvellously did the Jews maintain their courage under all adversity by a pure religious devotion, and an unequalled religious ardour. They loved God deeply, and for him and for his commandments they were willing to suffer and die. But mingling with these higher aspirations and this purer fidelity, they also maintained their courage by the unquenchable hope that before long (when the night was at its blackest) the tables would turn, and the great day of divine vengeance would dawn. They were impatient of the endless delay. Babylon was captured by Persia, and Persia by Greece, yet for them all these changes made little difference. When would all nations alike be conquered and smitten down by God? Against this yearning desire for vengeance, which we saw reflected and illustrated by the story of Esther, the Book of Jonah utters its inspired and memorable protest. God, being God,