Tag: the sign of Jonah

The Sign Given in the Temple: Sacrificial Violence is Ended

When asked for a sign, Jesus says he will only give the sign of Jonah, but then in the Temple incident, when asked for a sign, he says, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (Jn 2:19). Both signs refer to his death and resurrection, though in the Temple Jesus uses the active verb “destroy” to indicate the manner by which he would die. Both incidents are surrounded by violence: the violence of the sea, the violence of the Temple sacrifices, the violence of Nineveh, the violence of the Jews and Rome, and it is this violence in both the sign of Jonah and in the Temple incident that accounts for his death. The sign of Jonah entails the anger of Jonah toward his enemies, duplicated in the Pharisaical anger turned on Jesus (see here), the same anger directed at protecting the Temple, which will kill Jesus.

Jesus is like Jeremiah, who predicted the destruction of the Temple and whose life was then threatened: “When Jeremiah finished speaking all that the LORD had commanded him to speak to all the people, the priests and the prophets and all the people seized him, saying, “You must die!” (Je 26:8). In this sign, Jesus ties his death to the threat he poses to the Temple, and all that it represents. His claim of the Temple being a “robber’s den,” is not so much that bad people have corrupted a good system, but as in Jeremiah and Isaiah, the Temple itself is behind the robbery. The English word “robber” may not capture the meaning of léstés, an armed thief who steals by use of threat of violence. Cleaning up this system, is more than getting rid of the money changers. God, in Jeremiah, claims the institution is a den of “robbers” (7:11) and that setting up this system of sacrifices was not his idea: “For I did not speak to your fathers, or command them in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices” (Je 7:22). It is not that the moneychangers are charging unfair rates, but the Temple is incurring a violent debt and making thieves of all involved in its operation. God describes it as a place of institutionalized murder, oppressing “the alien, the orphan, or the widow, and shedding “innocent blood in this place” (7:5). The issue is destruction of the entire system, which Jesus intimates in saying “destroy this Temple,” and in describing its end.

As God says in Isaiah, “I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed cattle; And I take no pleasure in the blood of bulls, lambs or goats” (Is 1:11). God hates the system: “I hate your new moon festivals and your appointed feasts, they have become a burden to Me; I am weary of bearing them” (Is 1:14). He equates the system with murder: “So when you spread out your hands in prayer, I will hide My eyes from you; Yes, even though you multiply prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are covered with blood” (Is 1:15). We may tend to read these verses as saying they are killers in spite of the Temple, but what is described is a system that is inherently violent, obviously in the slaughter of animals but also in promoting scapegoating sacrifice. “Bring your worthless offerings no longer, incense is an abomination to Me. New moon and sabbath, the calling of assemblies— I cannot endure iniquity and the solemn assembly” (Is 1:13).

Jesus disrupts the sacrifices in the Temple, (echoing Jeremiah that it is a den of violent thieves), as the institution is robbing people of their life. It shelters murder and violence as part of Jewish identity.[1] The driving out of the animals is not simply concerned with money, but is a symbolic ceasing of the sacrificial economy; a momentary saving of the animals from slaughter as a metaphorical end to the murderous system. During his action in the Temple, Mark says “he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple” (Mk 11:16). Some translations call this “merchandise” but it is not items for sale but the items necessary for the sacrifices as in Hebrews 9:21: “all the vessels used in worship.” According to Anthony Bartlett, “In short, there is a whole paraphernalia necessary for the conduct of sacrifice – shovels, barrels, buckets, bowls, pans, trays, censers, etc. These would have been used to ferry wood, ashes, oil and grain offerings, grain cakes, and the animal body parts remaining in sin offerings, peace offerings/thanksgiving offerings sacrifices (cf. Leviticus 2-7).”[2] Jesus was disrupting the entire system of the Temple, of which the money changers were one small part. The sellers and consumers, patrons and priests, or all that are involved are interrupted. He symbolically halts the entire system, and in his person he makes it obsolescent. He predicts this will cause his death, but that is part of the point, so as to expose the violence at the heart of the system; the violence that killed him and which he defeated in the cross and the resurrection.

The driving out of the animals puts a direct focus on the sacrifices but all understood the animals are symbolic. The sacrificial victims Jesus is driving out of the Temple represent his sheep, delivered from sacrificial violence. In Matthew Jesus seems to accentuate the point, healing “the blind and the lame” who came to Him in the temple” in the midst of this incident (Mt 21:14). These are oppressed by the Temple system, but Jesus opens a new way for these “sinners” the Temple did not pretend to help. “All who came before Me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not hear them. I am the door; if anyone enters through Me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly. I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd lays down His life for the sheep” (Jn 10:8–11). Jesus implicates all who were previously shepherding Israel: “All who came before Me are thieves and robbers.” His is a universal statement, but of course the bandits (those who would “kill and destroy” the sheep), along with all the patrons are saved from the robbery of this death dealing system. By the time John writes, the Temple, along with its sacrifices and priesthood, are long gone, but all understood even in the synoptics, Jesus had provided a door out of the sacrificial economy and entry into an alternative Kingdom. The Sheep Gate into Jerusalem accentuated the purpose of the Temple to sacrifice, and Jesus opens a new sheep gate: “Truly, truly, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep” (Jn 10:7). This shepherd lays down his life for the sheep, driving them from the deadly system to which they were subject.

Halting the sacrifices, also entails an implicit political dimension involving Rome. When Israel decided to cease offering sacrifices in the Temple on behalf of the emperor in 66 AD, according to Josephus: “This action laid the foundation of the war with the Romans.”[3] An army, the size of the Roman Army that eventually destroyed the Temple, would have been necessary to permanently halt the sacrifices, but Jesus symbolically accomplished the same thing. The disruption produces a sacrificial crisis, of the sort which would eventually consume the Temple and Israel. The priests and Pharisees foresaw this possibility, which was behind their decision to kill him: “If we let Him go on like this, all men will believe in Him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation” (Jn 11:48). Jesus death would not ward off Rome’s eventual sacrifice of Israel in its own sacrificial economy, and Christ is aware he is potentially unleashing unprecedented violence: “The whole of archaic humanity, and one thousand years of intense Jewish religious history culminating in the present crisis of Roman occupation, would have risen up against him.”[4] The Jews momentarily forestalled the all-out violence by collaborating with Rome in Jesus death, but eventually a new round of sacrificial violence would consume the Temple, but Christ had made provision for a new Temple and a new, nonviolent, way of being human.

Combined with the imagery of the triumphal entry, it is clear the violent world of warring kingdoms, attached to Israel and the Temple, is being halted by a new kind of king and kingdom: “Behold, your king is coming to you; He is just and endowed with salvation, humble, and mounted on a donkey, even on a colt, the foal of a donkey” (Zec 9:9). This is not a king prepared for battle, but one equipped to end the sacrifices of war, religion and violence. He is described as (ani) humble, poor or oppressed. Elsewhere such a one is a victim of murder: “The murderer arises at dawn; He kills the poor and the needy, and at night he is as a thief” (Job 24:14). The humble are the victims, not the victimizers; one who must give up his coat as part of a pledge, and likely homeless and without another cloak (Deut 24:12-13). This humble and meek King does not come to sacrifice, but to halt violent sacrifice: “I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the horse from Jerusalem; and the bow of war will be cut off. And He will speak peace to the nations; and His dominion will be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth” (Zec 9:10). This is the imagery Jesus is purposely echoing in his entrance into Jerusalem and the Temple.

This is also why John the Baptist marks the end of this violent type kingdom: “From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and violent men take it by force” (Mt 11:11–12). John is the last in the line of those who, like Elijah, possess “the kingdom in a way that is alien to the kingdom itself.”[5] The violence of the kingdom, the sacrificial economy of the Temple, the warring destruction of Israel, was not the kind of kingdom God would establish. This violent sort of kingdom is finished with Jesus: “May no one ever eat fruit from you again!” (Mk 11:14). The fig tree representing the Temple is dead and finished. As he says right after the Temple incident, the Temple Mt. is subject to being cast into the sea, and the disciples can already live out their faith, in its absence (Mk 11:22-26). As Bartlett points out the two incidents are tied together in a mutual explanation: “It is much more intelligible to hear him referring exactly to this event, using the withering of the fig tree as a parable of what will now happen to the Temple and its sacrificial order.”[6] The fig tree will bear no more fruit, the Temple system is finished, and can now be discarded into the sea. “The mountain Jesus is speaking of is the temple Mt., and the movement is entry into a fulness of forgiveness, no longer dependent on the ritual of sacrificial violence.”[7]

Jesus is himself the alternative to the Temple, exposing its continual blood sacrifice and ongoing violence, made evident as that which sacrifices Jesus. He is sacrificed in an effort to preserve the Temple and its deadly economy, and in the process he displaces sacrificial religion. The sign of Jonah and the sign of the Temple, stand against the scapegoating sacrifice of Nineveh and scapegoating Temple sacrifice. Jesus knew that halting the sacrifices, would produce the sign of Jonah in his murder, the destruction of the Temple of his body and his resurrection, defeating this order of violence and sacrifice. Just as Jonah is three days in the earth symbolically delivered from death (sheol), Jesus, the destroyed Temple, is three days in Hades or Hell, cleansing the world of hellish violence and providing resurrection life, free of sacrificial violence in a new Temple order.

[1] Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Nonviolence (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022) 167.

[2] Bartlett, 166.

[3] Josephus, Bellum Judaicum II: 408, cited in Bartlett, 142.

[4] Bartlett, 146.

[5] Bartlett, 155.

[6] Bartlett, 163.

[7] Bartlett, 162.

The Sign of Jonah as the Major Semiotic Shift of Scripture

“An evil and adulterous generation craves for a sign; and yet no sign will be given to it but the sign of Jonah the prophet” (Matt 12:39).  

Taking into account the context of Jonah, contrasting particularly with Nahum, and then accounting for Jesus’ direct and indirect references to Jonah, what unfolds in the Gospels is not just another sign but a semiotic shift, in which one order of signs and meaning is displaced by another (the sign of Jonah). Jesus’ singular sign is not the sort his hearers will recognize as such, because it is a sign of a different order; not another miracle, but a foundational shift as to how signs are constituted. The immediate contrast posed in Matthew is with the expected sign of an “adulterous generation,” judged by the men of Nineveh who “repented at the preaching of Jonah” (v. 41). This generation will also be judged by the “Queen of the South” who “came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon” (v. 42). There is a new order of wisdom, greater than Solomon, in the sign of Jonah. It exceeds the imagined wisdom of this crooked generation and even exceeds the pinnacle of Hebrew wisdom. The sign of Jonah taken up by Christ, in Anthony Bartlett’s description, “is a deliberate manipulation of familiar biblical DNA to produce a remarkably new mutation.”[1]

Jonah, like Ruth, stands against the prejudice and exclusivity of the Jews in its story of Jonah’s mission to Nineveh (the capital city of Assyria, the foremost enemy of the Jews), but it is also a reversal of the Hebrew view of God, in which God punishes the wicked and rewards the good. No one, in Jewish estimate, could exceed the evil of Nineveh, and yet in the book of Jonah, God cares for the Ninevites in the same way he cares for the Jews. Jonah counters the theodicy typified by Deuteronomy, that taken up by the Maccabees and inherited by the Pharisees in the time of Jesus, in which rewards and punishment can be traced in the rise and fall of nations. The problem is Jerusalem is threatened by Assyria but God would save Nineveh, the capital city of this enemy. To accentuate the problem the pagans, in Jonah, are more responsive to God than God’s prophet (serving perhaps as a typical Jew).

Having received his call to preach to Nineveh, Jonah flees toward Tarshish, the Timbuktu of his day beyond any known outpost of Israel and its God, and in the opposite direction of Nineveh. We only learn at the end of the book that he is fleeing, fearful that God would have compassion on the Ninevites (4:2 echoing Exodus 34:6-7): “Please Lord, was not this what I said while I was still in my own country? Therefore in order to forestall this I fled to Tarshish, for I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, and one who relents concerning calamity.” Jonah fears Nineveh will repent and God will relent in punishing them; an unusual problem for a prophet. Where Abraham argued that God should not destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, cities which received no prophet, Jonah wants the opposite response, which is probably the prevailing Jewish attitude, and seemingly a parody of this attitude (captured in Nahum). When the city repents, Jonah becomes downcast and angry (4:1), echoing the attitude of Cain before he kills his brother (the same word). The murderous anger of Jonah reflects a deep-seated violence which explains his original flight.

In response, “The Lord hurled a great wind on the sea and there was a great storm on the sea so that the ship was about to break up” (1:4). According to Bartlett, “The scene is reminiscent of creation itself where ‘a wind from God swept over the waters’ (Gen. 1:2). We are in the realm of primordial divine action, and in the biblical repertoire of signs the violence of the storm must echo Genesis, including the episode of the flood.”[2] The pagan sailors cry out to their gods, and question Jonah, urging him to pray: “So the captain approached him and said, ‘How is it that you are sleeping? Get up, call on your god. Perhaps your god will be concerned about us so that we will not perish’” (Jonah 1:6). While they are willing to scapegoat Jonah by throwing him in the sea, he makes for an odd scapegoat in his willing and detailed instruction: “Pick me up and throw me into the sea. Then the sea will become calm for you, for I know that on account of me this great storm has come upon you” (Jonah 1:12). The sailors display an uncommon decency, doubling down in their efforts: “However, the men rowed desperately to return to land but they could not, for the sea was becoming even stormier against them” (Jonah 1:13). They even offer up a prayer to the Lord, seemingly having converted to the religion of Jonah: “Then they called on the LORD and said, ‘We earnestly pray, O LORD, do not let us perish on account of this man’s life and do not put innocent blood on us; for You, O LORD, have done as You have pleased’” (Jonah 1:14). The sailors, more than Jonah, are sensitive to spilling innocent blood, and rather than the usual release from guilt with the death of the sacrifice (Jonah tossed overboard) their fear is not assuaged: “Then the men feared the LORD greatly, and they offered a sacrifice to the LORD and made vows (Jonah 1:16) like true Israelites (Ex 14:31). The sailors and all of Nineveh are more quickly changed than Jonah, who shows no sign of repentance.

Jonah is angry at God’s mercy and would prefer to see his enemies suffer rather than have them repent and be saved. According to Bartlett, “Jonah fulfills textually and emotionally the very same character as the violent storm and the evil it brings about. The text has doubled back on itself, returning Jonah to the same murderous state he embraced when he was thrown into the raging sea – and beyond that to the very first murder of history, thus once more knitting together the themes of human and cosmic violence.”[3] The king and the Ninevites and God all turn from the violence, but the violence endures among the Jews. In identifying with the sign of Jonah, Jesus understands the poor light this shines upon the Jews’ murderous attitude toward him, but it is precisely this violence that constitutes his death and resurrection as the sign of Jonah. He brings the resolution missing in Jonah and the Jews.

Though John does not mention the sign of Jonah, he closely echoes the story (in 6:16-21). The sea, often equated with chaos (and as in Daniel, the gods of violence and chaos), is where Jesus reveals his divinity, tying the ἐγώ εἰμι to his power over nature in calming the storm and walking on the water (as if we now see YHWH trampling down the waves (Job 9:8 and Ps 89:10) and offering the comfort of his presence in the storm (Gen 26:24; 46:3; Jer 1:8; 1:17; 26:28). In the portrayal of the synoptics, the disciples panic in a storm while Jesus sleeps, and they double down on their rowing before waking Jesus, to save them from “perishing.” Much like Jonah is vomited by the great fish, Jesus and the disciples arrive suddenly at the distant shore of the Gadarenes where he encounters a horde of demons and sends them (back?) into the sea (Mark 5:1–20) and the demoniac becomes an evangelist to the Decapolis. Jesus defies the expectations of the Jews and even his disciples by saving the wrong people, like Jonah.

This Jewish understanding, on the order of the friends of Job, pictures the world as a closed system in which those who do good prosper and those who do evil are made to suffer. In this equation, good nations and individuals should thrive, and those that are wicked should suffer and be defeated. A “sign” in this closed system would accentuate the values of this system, by heaping miraculous favor on the chosen or by furthering the suffering of the wicked. A sign might be on the order of Joshua at Jericho, where the walls come tumbling down allowing the genocide in which “both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys,” were meant “with the edge of the sword” (Joshua 6:17–21).

Instead, Jonah depicts not only the people but all the animals putting on sack-cloth, fasting, and repenting (Jonah 3:7-8). It depicts God’s great compassion, a counter-sign to that of the flood, which brought total destruction to “animals and creeping things and birds of the air” (Genesis 6:7). Jonah cares more for his plant, providing him shade, than he does for the multitudes in Nineveh (Jonah 4:9) to say nothing of “the many animals.” For him, Nineveh’s evil should evoke divine wrath, as in the flood or at Jericho, but God fails to destroy Nineveh, the very people oppressing the Jews. God tries to evoke a bit of empathy from Jonah, noting that a plant, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow” (4:10) does not really compare to “that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals” (4:11), but the response of Jonah is an open question.

Jesus also elicits the sympathy of the Jews (in the same conversation he raises the sign of Jonah), using sheep to challenge their legalistic attitudes surrounding the sabbath: “What man is there among you who has a sheep, and if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will he not take hold of it and lift it out? How much more valuable then is a man than a sheep! So then, it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath” (Matt 12:11–12). The Pharisees do not want sheepish signs, any more than Jonah wants a compassionate God. They need a sign on the order of Elijah’s fire from heaven, consuming their enemies. Fire from heaven burning up Romans, Samaritans or sinners, might be a good sign, but the sign of Jonah is precisely not a furthering of the scapegoating of Jewish enemies; rather it is an exposure and displacement of scapegoating sacrifice. It is counter to the Deuteronomic guilt, in which calamity is caused by human guilt, and in which God’s vengeance follows fixed laws, and by which he can thus be manipulated to achieve a calculated end. Jonah’s anger at the compassion of God is on the order of Jewish anger at Jesus’ compassion for sinners, for the lame and the sick. Neither Jesus nor the God of Jonah meet Jewish expectations.

Jonah, a parody of the typical biblical prophet, serves for Jesus as a parody of the Pharisees. Like Jonah, they are displeased and angry at Jesus, precisely because he is making a mockery of their narrow views of God. Jonah gets so angry he wants to die, not because God is vengeful, but because he is loving (Jonah 4:2). The Pharisees, like Jonah, would prefer unrelenting anger to unrelenting love and neither wants a God who will extend his love into the depths of hades, or who will take up the cause of all of humanity as the “suffering son of man.” The Pharisees want a real sign; in the same way Jonah wants the destruction of Nineveh, so Jesus evokes the end point of Jonah’s and Jewish violence, in that both overlap with death and hades: “just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matt 12:40).

Jonah equates his journey to being trapped in the grave or sheol: “Water encompassed me to the point of death. The great deep engulfed me, weeds were wrapped around my head. I descended to the roots of the mountains. The earth with its bars was around me forever, but You have brought up my life from the pit, O Lord my God” (Jonah 2:5–6). Jonah metaphorically goes to hell in the belly of the fish, which delivers him to Nineveh, the capital of Assyria (Jewish hell on earth), not for vengeance but for repentance. Though Jonah may not repent of his hellish attitudes, Nineveh repents of its violent evil, and Jesus, like Jonah, descends to sheol, he preaches to the dead (I Pet 3:18-19; 4:6), he harrows hell, and this is why the sign of Jonah is a non-sign for the Pharisaical. It is a discontinuation of one order of signs, and the establishment of new order of meaning. The orders of heaven and hell, punishment and revenge, fixed rules in which evil and good can be clearly sorted are thrown into question.

Jonah is ironic, rule-bending and rule-breaking, and is in some estimates a mocking jab at the narrow minded, vengeful understanding of God on display in the book to which it is adjacent, Nahum. Nahum has a very different understanding of God and of the deserved destiny of Nineveh. “The oracle of Nineveh: The book of the vision of Nahum the Elkoshite. A jealous and avenging God is the Lord; the Lord is avenging and wrathful. The Lord takes vengeance on His adversaries, and He reserves wrath for His enemies” (Na 1:1–2). Jonah and Nahum, back-to-back, portray opposite understandings of the character of God and the plight of the wicked. In Nahum, a closed system of scapegoating justice, requires annihilation of the enemy: “He will make a complete end of its site, and will pursue His enemies into darkness” (Na 1:8). Rather than harrowing hell, God is hell for the enemy Nineveh: “Who can stand before His indignation? Who can endure the burning of His anger? His wrath is poured out like fire and the rocks are broken up by Him” (Na 1:6). Nahum presents a glorious image of the destruction of Nineveh, the sort of sign every Jew might expect: “Woe to the bloody city, completely full of lies and pillage; Her prey never departs. The noise of the whip, the noise of the rattling of the wheel, galloping horses and bounding chariots!” (Na 3:1–2). These people will get what they deserve because God is a known quantity, a warrior God, fighting on behalf of Judah. “Horsemen charging, swords flashing, spears gleaming, many slain, a mass of corpses, and countless dead bodies—they stumble over the dead bodies!” (Na 3:3).

This is not the sheepish God of Jesus and Jonah, but one who delights in the destruction of the wicked. Where Jonah pictures the possibility of repentance and salvation for the worst of sinners, Nahum closes this possibility: “There is no relief for your breakdown, your wound is incurable” (Na 3:19). This God delights in the smashing of the head of the infants (3:10), and there is no danger this God will relent in his anger until Nineveh is completely destroyed: “And the LORD will by no means leave the guilty unpunished. In whirlwind and storm is His way, and clouds are the dust beneath His feet” (Na 1:3). This God uses natural calamity, not for purposes of repentance, but for ultimate destruction. Where God in Jonah is too merciful, too loving, and too concerned for the least (in Jonah’s estimate) the God of Nahum and his people, have no room for grief: “Nineveh is devastated! Who will grieve for her? Where will I seek comforters for you?” (3:7). This is the sort of good news Jonah’s Jews like to hear. There is no question that God punishes with the same sort of violence and oppression leveraged against the Jews, and which Israel would, given the opportunity, use on her enemies. The cruelty of nations is not the issue in the holy wars but the victory of Israel and the Jews is the prime concern.

Considering the long rule of Assyria, from the ninth century until the death of Ashurbanipal in 626 B.C.E., and the fact that the Assyrians made Judah a vassal state and destroyed Israel, the hatred expressed in Nahum is understandable. The way in which the Jews understood God was thrown into question by their long subjugation, and the only explanation was for a future devastation. Warrior gods prove themselves in war, and by this standard the God of the Jews seems distracted or apathetic. Not only does Nahum not rebuke Judah (the usual prophetic explanation for their suffering is their sin) but he makes excessive promises: “For never again will the wicked one pass through you; he is cut off completely” (Na 1:15). Nahum has no sour notes about sin and repentance for Judah, but only bad news for Nineveh, the kind of sign to warm a Zionist heart.  

The book ends with a question, which along with Jonah as a whole challenges Jewish self-identity and the identity of God: “Should I not have compassion on Nineveh, the great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know the difference between their right and left hand, as well as many animals?” (Jonah 4:11). Could it be that God cares for all people, even Ninevites (or Palestinians), and that he even cares for animals? This is not normally open for consideration in the sacrificial, scapegoating world of the Jews. The danger is Christians too will miss the significance of the sign of Jonah, in maintaining a Pharisaical calculus, aimed at sending the good to heaven and evil sinners to hell forever, when the truth is God will search out hell itself for the souls of the perishing.

[1] Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Nonviolence (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022) 126.

[2] Bartlett, 127.

[3] Bartlett, 129.