The inside was dark. That was the first thing that struck me as the great fish’s metallic jaws clanged shut on me. And I don’t mean dark like the night, either, not even the darkest sliver of a moonless Mesopotamian night with nary a flicker of starlight in the distance, let me tell you. It wasn’t dark like any of that but maybe like the darkness we knew inside our mothers’ wombs if we could only remember it. But even then you wouldn’t know what I’m talking about. The unborn child has its promise of birth into Yahweh’s glorious light, while I— poor put-upon prophet!—had no promise at all that I would ever emerge from the belly of that fish with my eyes open.

I gazed into its pungent depths, its Piscean bowels, as if at nothing. I am not a cleanly man, mind you, I don’t bathe myself in the baths of iniquity like Egyptian Pharoahs and their sinewy naked harlots, temptresses from the Sphinx’s loins. No, I am a respectable man, comfortable with my odors and my solitudes, but when I gazed into that impenetrable blackness all my other senses were awakened as never before. The fishy intestinal stink became itself the blackest bile that spewed forth from this mouth from which I now speak to you. The fish swallowed, then, and I was cast down into such abject helplessness that all I could do was submit. Yahweh had again spoken to me, this time with the stinking aura of His wrath. Without hope of this-worldly redemption, I pulled at my hair and my matted, vermin-infested beard. I fell on my knees—splash! they went in the putrid cesspool that was my prison—and prayed. Yes, I prayed to Yahweh my God from the belly of the fish.

Out of the belly of Sheol I cried to Him!

“Hear my cry!” I said. “What is this that You have done to me, Yahweh? Did I ask for any of this trouble? You summon me from my peaceful living and tell me to travel to the very pits of degradation, to the sink of sin you call Ninevah. Yahweh, that wasn’t the gig I had in mind, much too rough a crowd for my liking. You might as well have sent me to the Pharoahs of old, into the captivity of Israel’s forefathers. There I could have labored and diverted my eyes from them, awaited the ministrations of a more noble prophet. But I wanted none of that, just to be left alone to prophesy comfortable moralisms to my own people. Who have been sorely afflicted by those barbarians, You above all I shouldn’t have to tell. And worst of all that I should deliver warning when they might heed me then and receive Your mercy. You are the God of Israel , Yahweh, why should You concern yourself with pagans? But, hey, it’s Your Program, after all. I guess You’ve shown me, haven’t You? So let’s just speed this digestive process along so I can be out of my fated misery. And Yahweh, my God, in dying I repent of my willfulness and even of these complaints that are raised to You just now from this abysmal confinement that You’ve seen fit to send me. Mighty are the ways of Yahweh, far be it from me to question them. I only ask that You redeem me with Moses and Aaron in the Kingdom on High. And swiftly, please, for the stench and slimy humidity of this foul pit is more than mortal senses can long endure.”

Thus spoke I, Jonah, prophet of Galilee, from the belly of the fish. As my lucky star was after all shining, Yahweh spoke to the fish who obeyed Him and spat me out on dry land. I was covered in an afterbirth of Piscean fluids, transparent and sticky, so I rolled in the sand in a futile attempt at its removal. In the end—fearfully lest Yahweh change His mind, reveal that He was only further playing with his willful silly prophet—I crept back into the water just deep enough to baptize myself in its salty waves. The combination of salt and sand and rock finally shed me of that unwanted skin and I ran again from the dreadful sea. I ran from that shore and fell as it were dead beneath the shade of a great plant that Yahweh prepared to shelter me. There I slept, and awaking at last I drank fresh water at a stream that passed near to the towering plant that Yahweh had placed there. I ate of the fruit that fell beside me from that shelter, and then Yahweh spoke to me again. What He had to say was nothing new. Not that it was any surprise to me. This Yahweh, let me tell you, is nothing at all if not persistent. Talk about one-track minds? If He’s told a story once, He’s told it a thousand times, like we haven’t heard enough of it already or don’t have anything else to do but go traipsing after His every whim.

And to think I had thought to elude Him? If you know what’s good and safe, you won’t ignore His warning. I’m not telling you this out of any feeling of sympathy, either, let me tell you. As far as I’m concerned, you Ninevahns could just sink into the quicksand of your own iniquity, leave us Hebrews to the promised blessings of our Father Abraham. But I am commanded, so here I stand. I had thought to escape Him, by stowing away on a ship bound for Tarshish, but He found me there and sent a mighty tempest that would have destroyed the whole ship and crew had I not allowed myself to be thrown into the sea as fish bait. And fish bait I was, and worse will you be if you don’t heed the warning of Yahweh that, much against his will, this reluctant prophet delivers to you.

For Yahweh did speak to me beneath the shelter of that plant, after first allowing me to rest from that Piscean travail, after showering me with fruit from its branches and nourishing me with water from its stream. And He said to me, “Jonah, you foolish dove,” (for ‘dove’ is the meaning of my name), “I send you on a mission of peace. You must arise, go to that great city Ninevah. Preach to it the message of redemption that I shall give to you.”

So it is that I’ve begun speaking to you people now as I traverse the immensity of this latter-day Gomorrah. So it is that, my personal distaste for you notwithstanding, I deliver the message of Yahweh: “Yet forty days, if she repent not of her iniquity, Ninevah will be destroyed.” Though I somehow doubt that He means for it to happen. For the life of me I can’t see why He should bother with the redemption of such an unholy people as you, who have always dishonored His Israelite nation. Didn’t He say, after all, that we of the Covenant are His chosen people? Strange are the ways of Yahweh, incomprehensible to the mind of His messenger, who hearing, can only obey.

The End.