3. THE FLIGHT. I. 3.

And Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord, and he went down to Joppa, and found a ship going to Tarshish; and he paid its fare, and went down into it, to go with them to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.

Singular perhaps in the whole history of human civilisation is the character of Hebrew prophecy. Earnest men felt themselves seized and uplifted by the Divine spirit with a force they were unable to resist. Yet they were only mortals, with all the weakness and frailty appertaining to mortality. Their strength was limited and their courage fluctuated. In the midst of a soaring flight of enthusiasm, they were often checked by unforeseen obstacles and unheeded dangers, or overwhelmed by a sense of the almost superhuman aspirations of their uncommon career. But in this struggle between the Divine impulse and the human bounds lies the enduring and pathetic interest which brings those extraordinary men near to our hearts and sympathies. In more than one instance, such a conflict is strongly presented to our minds in the Biblical records; it appears, at the beginning of Israel's national life, in Moses who, though armed with the most remarkable powers and signs, yet implores God, 'Send, I pray Thee, by the hand of anyone whom Thou wilt send;'a and it appears, with a strength and a depth that have perhaps never been equalled or approached, at the termination of the Hebrew commonwealth in Jeremiah who, at first anxiously deprecating the sublime charge, soon feels himself strong 'like a fortified town and an iron pillar and a brazen wall,' to undertake the spiritual warfare against princes and

a Exod. iv. 13

a

nations; but then, utterly bent down by failure and persecution, and assailed by mockery and derision, 'a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth,' resolves to teach and to warn no more; and yet, ere long, finds silence impossible, since, as he protests, the word of God, violently pressed back, became in his heart like burning fire shut up in his bones; he wearied himself to bear it but he could not-and so resumed his ungrateful task. That conflict is apparent in Elijah who, virulently pursued by the cruel queen, fled into the desert and prayed that he might die; in the simple-minded Amos who, though chased from province to province, exclaimed, “The lion roareth, who will not fear? the Lord God speaketh, who will not prophesy?' in Ezekiel, who gathered all his energies to keep free from 'the briers and thorns and scorpions' besetting his path;d and it is also brought before us in Jonah as pourtrayed in this Book. He is well aware of the Divine mission and knows that he is appointed for a great work of instruction and amendment-there came the word of the Lord to Jonah the son of Amittai;' but when he prepares himself for execution, all the difficulties and perils of his scheme rise threateningly before his mind, and he abandons it in despondency-and Jonah rose to flee from the presence of the Lord.' Thus, in this point, the author is at least not in disagreement with the true nature of the prophetic office. He might, indeed, like Ezekiel, have imagined that a Hebrew prophet would find deference and obedience more readily among a strange nation than among his own people who were 'a rebellious house, shameless and hardhearted;'e but could he undervalue the troubles and trials to which the unwelcome messenger exposed himself in endeavouring to

rebuke a community like that of proud Nineveh? He, therefore, represents Jonah, who had intended to travel eastward, as escaping in a direction diametrically opposite, and as anxious to reach Tartessus in Spain, the extreme western boundary of the earth known to the ancients. He thus makes him totally and absolutely desert the great enterprise courageously conceived in moments of a higher fervour. This seems, psychologically, to be the only satisfactory explanation of Jonah's attempted flight.

It is not surprising that his conduct has been employed as a proof of the alleged doctrine that the Hebrew seers were considered to prophesy, not from their own impulses, but under Divine constraint, even against their will and inclination, and sometimes uttered the very reverse of what they intended or desired to say; for the history of Balaam has rendered us sufficiently familiar with this paradoxical view of prophecy ; yet it is just the free meeting and blending of the Divine and human spirit, that constitute the mystery of prophetic endowment, whether God graciously descends to man, or man resolutely rises up to God, while a want of harmony between the one and the other is the very negation of prophecy. The affinity between the two was supposed to be so generally possible that Moses expressed the wish that all Israel might be prophets, and Joel predicted the time when God would pour out His spirit upon all flesh.' The strangeness of the theory to which we have adverted is manifest from its corollary that the prophets, known to speak under Divine compulsion, were held blameless when their predictions failed to be realised; and as, in such cases, God Himself, as the real author of the oracles, required a justification, the Book of Jonah was written to exemplify such an apology. But how utterly is this at variance

Tartessus see תַּרְשִׁישׁ A About

Comm. on Genes. pp. 243, 244.

b See Bible Studies, i. 49, etc.

c Num. xi. 29; Joel iii. 1. 2; Isa. liv. 13; etc.

d See infra on iii. 10.

with the Biblical doctrine! Anyone who pronounced predictions that were not fulfilled was regarded as a 'false prophet', that is, as no messenger of God, but as an impious deceiver to be punished with death, because he did not satisfy the only valid test of true prophecy, which was the complete unity with the Divine Mind;a while the assumption that any oracle of God, conveyed through one of His chosen instruments, was not realised, would have been denounced as horrid blasphemy.

But what cause does the author assign for Jonah's flight? Does he allude to the impediments which made the prophet anticipate the failure of his enterprise? Though silent in this place, he subsequently states a motive which is indeed astonishing: Jonah abandons his scheme, not because he dreads failure, but success; not because he longs to see Nineveh saved, but annihilated. From the tenour of the Book, it is impossible to discover any other reason for his uncharitable wish than the sting of offended self-love and vanity, since he foresaw that his announcements of destruction would not be fulfilled. It has indeed been surmised that his ill-feeling was patriotic vexation at the undesirable rescue of his people's most dangerous enemies who were sure inflict upon them disaster and ruin.d But in the whole story, the Assyrians are brought into no connection whatever with the people of Israel. Was the author justified in imputing to an old and honoured prophet such littleness, nay such meanness? That he

a Deut. xviii. 20-22; comp. xiii. 2-6. b Infra iv. 2.

c Philo, De Jona c. 6, 'propheta, in suam respiciens artem, prophetiam nempe, vidit civitatem etiam post praedicationem suam incolumem;' and c. 40, 'non adeo eum salus civitatis laetum reddere quibat, quantum praedicationis suae inconstantia gravem dolorem inducit;'

c. 41, 'fugiebam ut meae famae honorem integrum servare decernerem.'

d So Jerome ('scit propheta ... quod poenitentia gentium mina fit Judaeorum; idcirco amator patriae suae non tam saluti invidet Ninives quam non vult perire populum suum'), Rabbinical and many modern writers.

himself approved neither of the flight nor its supposed motive, is unmistakable from the later development of the tale. Did tradition afford a foundation for such a surmise? It would, in this instance, have been unusually capricious, had it attributed baseness to a man to whom it also attributed the rarest courage and the most highminded self-denial. We must, therefore, ascribe that feature to the author himself, who thus wronged both his hero and his composition. Hardly less unworthy of the prophet Jonah is the conjecture of the Rabbins that 'he was solicitous for the honour of the son, but not for the honour of the Father,'a that is, that he was anxious to spare to the Israelites the humiliation of seeing a heathen people more willing to repentance and reformation than they were themselves in spite of incessant instruction and warning, while he was indifferent to the glory of God as the merciful Father of all nations. This suggestion would stain all Israel with that conceit and selfishness with which the author charges Jonah alone. And when did the Hebrew prophets ever evince so tender a regard for the false susceptibilities of their countrymen? When did they ever hesitate, for the sake of exhortation, to place them, in intelligence and the fulfilment of all natural duties, beneath the pagans, nay even beneath the irrational animals? And why should a public teacher in the vigorous time of the second Jeroboam have been more averse to holding up the mirror to them by the example of a complete conversion of pagans than the author of this story, who most strikingly describes such a change, and who lived in an age when the self-conscious opposition of the Jews to the heathen was much more sharply marked?

However, although we have a right to argue with the