"No In-Between in Abortion Debate" — For a Very Dangerous Conflict

A long letter to the editor of, or submission for a short column in, The Ventura County Star, in a continuing debate on abortion:

Re: Noel D’Angelo’s May 22 letter (part of a "thread")

By recent definitions of life, a fertilized egg is alive with a specific individual life, as is the ball of cells that it forms and on through the stages of embryological development to a fetus and newborn. However don’t say, "All life is sacred" and we can’t destroy such life if you’re eating a bacon burger or a carrot or just used a hand-sanitizer.  Unless you’re a very strict Jain* or vegan, you routinely kill various forms of life or have them killed for you (and often eat them); and even the most life-respecting among us usually wants a robust immune response to invading bacteria, which will kill those bacteria.

If you want to go back to old ideas of life, one idea would be whether or not an embryo or fetus is nephesh for the Hebrew word or the Greek equivalents: So is a fetus a "living being" in a Biblical or more generally ancient sense? Well, one answer is that "living beings" have the breath of life — note Adam’s story in Genesis — and one interpretation there is that a fetus takes on that sort of life with the first breath.**

Necessarily if perhaps arrogantly, we humans usually declare human life is special, and the question with abortion on one side is when and if a human zygote, embryo, or fetus is or becomes human: a person under the law with rights that can be balanced against those of the fully-human mother.

A consistent, coherent, and logical argument can be made if you go from "life-breath" to soul and have humans special because we are "ensouled" and place the moment of ensoulment early in fetal development or perhaps at the moment of conception. Doing so, you have unborn babies in the womb and, to push the argument, unbaptized unborn babies, possibly damned to hell if not allowed to be born and baptized.*** Q.E.D.

A consistent, coherent, logical, historical, and powerful argument can also  be made on how abortion laws have become a fairly recent twist in the millennium-long patriarchal efforts to control and oppress women, and must be opposed if societies are to recognize the full humanity of women. Also Q.E.D.

And people can argue that the United States Constitution sets up a secular Republic and that serious efforts to inflict upon it the rules of a Christian nation is an attack upon that Republic, to be opposed by all who’ve sworn or affirmed to defend the Constitution and our Republic "against all enemies, foreign and domestic."

All of which is why abortion is a highly divisive and dangerous conflict. And it is why we need America to move into the mushy middle and continue to accept the Roe vs. Wade compromise. That position is not logically consistent and elegant and historically informed, but it is tolerable to most Americans.

First trimester of so: We don’t feel that there’s a person yet.

Approaching the time of birth: Not yet with the rights of a full human if weighed against the mother, but getting there, and not to be killed unless that death is really, really necessary.

In between: Some reasonable regulation, which respects the rights of that fully-human mother.

And meanwhile we need a major campaign for effective contraception so that abortion is legal, safe, and indeed rare.

We are dealing here with definitions of "human being" and the nature of our country. These are issues about which people feel very strongly and over which they have killed one another: killing fully-developed, obviously human, human people, and in large numbers (this is part of what World War II was about, and the US Civil War).

Roe v. Wade isn’t intellectually neat and pretty, but it has worked. Most Americans can support it, even against our more logically rigorous fellow citizens. It’s something we can live with.

----------------------------------------------------

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_vegetarianism

** Ward, Roy Bowen. "The Use of the Bible in the Abortion Debate," Saint Louis University Public Law Review 13.1 (1993); 391-408, here III.A.1, "Person" in the Bible, "Nephesh and Breath."

*** https://www.bartleby.com/96/10.html — On those unbaptized babies:

The Day of Doom

By Michael Wigglesworth (1631–1705) Then to the bar, all they drew near   Who died in infancy, And never had or good or bad         235   Effected personally, But from the womb unto the tomb   Were straightway carried, (Or at the last ere they transgress’d)   Who thus began to plead:

[answered at length by "the judge most dread, ending"]

"A crime it is, therefore in bliss
You may not hope to dwell
But unto you I shall allow	355
The easiest room in hell.”

Usage Note: "Bigotry," "Racism" ... and Cave 76

But when we come to sin upon reason and upon

discourse, upon meditation and upon plot, this is […]

to become the man of sin, to surrender […] reason

and understanding to the service of sin. When we come to

sin wisely and learnedly, to sin logically, by a quia [because]

and an ergo [therefore …]. — John Donne, Sermon 138

            The repeat on my 11 AM trash-TV watching today was a Cleveland Show episode on Black History Month, and then I noted a draft for this note on my iMac desktop. So apropos of little, but unfortunately usually relevantly, here's a word or two on a term it's unlikely you know, plus some loaded common usages.

Bigotry, Xenophobia: The Amity-Enmity Complex and "Cave 76"

            Like a fair amount of anthropology from the first part of the 20^th century, the idea of "the amity-enmity complex" has some problematic, rather gamy associations. Think of it, then, as a fancy way of characterizing what Mel Brooks's 2000 Year Old Man was getting at with the first national anthem: "Let 'em all go to hell, / Except Cave Seventy-Six!" Or we could note that the injunction in Leviticus (19.18) to "Love your neighbor as yourself" got quoted in the Gospels of Mark (12.30-31) and Matthew (22.39) and gets a whole lot of play, while the near-by injunctions to love foreigners, "the stranger," as yourself (Leviticus 19.34) — although part of the point of the Parable of the Good Samaritan — is much less known.

            Generally, we tend to feel amity toward members of our in-groups — the folks of our family and figurative Cave 76 — and sense "stranger danger" with out-groups. What varies is our sense of who's "In" and who's "Out," who's "like us" and who is, "Well, different."

            The amity-enmity complex may have roots deep enough to reach into parts of our biological inheritance as social animals. It doesn't much matter: the tendency is long-standing, a given of our nature, and a trait that makes sense in terms of the evolution of reproducing groups and some sense of "The Selfish Gene."

            Bigotry, xenophobia, fear of the Other, the often-misplaced idea of "Stranger Danger"  — these are relatively "natural" to people, and we have to work to balance them with our curiosity, reason, compassion, and ethics. Biblical teachings get contradictory here, but the Holiness Code in Leviticus says God said to love the stranger (foreigner, alien) as ourselves, "For you were strangers in the land of Egypt," and some of us may be — indeed, some of us at some time will be — strangers again, refugees ourselves. And statistics can tell us (middle-class, White?) American kids are in more danger from people they know than from random people they don't.

Racism

            Race-ISM is an ideology stating that there are certain large groups that form biological races, that those races differ significantly from one another, and that those differences create a hierarchy of superiority and inferiority. Until fairly recently, "race" could be applied to groups that were relatively small, nonbiological, and pretty parochial: note Winston Churchill's (sometimes perverse) comments about "the British race" or the English despising Irish and vice versa on the basis of "race" — back when the world in a sense was smaller, and "country" was another way to say "county." Nowadays, that wouldn't be RACE-ism, because most of us most of the time work on the color-coded big races: White, Black/Brown, Red, Yellow, although manners may have us using non-color terms. (Personally, I like the color-coding because it's so obviously wrong and silly: e.g., the truly Yellow race is the Simpsons.) And the color-coding/biological idea didn't get firmed up until the Early Modern period, which can be documented in a work like Thomas Rymer's attack on Othello, and Rymer's dumb-ass countryfolk — in Rymer's early-adopter racist view —who really liked Othello because into the late 17th century a lot of even sophisticated city-bred Brits hadn't learned that "Blackamoors" were inferior. "A for instance is not a proof," but Rymer's Short View of Tragedy (1693) is useful for dating when specifically racist ideology — in our sense of "race" — started coming in among the English.

And the date makes sense.

            In his "General Introduction" to The Norton Shakespeare (2000), Stephen Greenblatt has an admirable quotation attributed to Elizabeth I referring to Her Majesty's Loyal Pirate, Sir John Hawkins and his first slaving voyage, where he transported "some three hundred blacks from the Guinea coast to Hispaniola." She "is reported to have said of this venture that it was 'detestable and would call down the Vengeance of Heaven upon the Undertakers.'" Elizabeth was Head of the Church of England and knew a wicked act when she learned of one. However, Hawkins's venture grossed £10,000 — a huge sum during the period — and so "she invested in Hawkins's subsequent voyages and lent him ships" (23); business is business.

            John Hawkins et al. a century before Thomas Rymer didn't need ideology to kill some people, kidnap others, and sell them into slavery: Hawkins and crew were goddamn licensed pirates, and highly profitable organized crime is what they did. It's when the loot went to respectable heirs and assigns and new investors that there was a need for ideological rationalization; and ta-da!: theft, repression, murder, greed — and bigotry — got packaged together and theorized, and we got modern RACE-ISM. Injure first, theorize later, then get to injure more, with a relatively clear conscience; and repeat ....

             We're doing better since the 17th c. — even counting two World Wars and other assorted recent atrocities — but it's a long slog.

            The "slog" will be helped if we're careful with our language.

            Since the 17^th century and modern, Western, race-based slavery, we've built into what became American society racial/racialist components, intimately intertwined with class exploitation and other nastiness. What is called "systemic racism," however, is systemic, part of a system, and not something individual, or, frequently visible to those within the system and profiting from it. It shares with prejudice and bigotry the sort of problem pointed at with the mostly-rhetorical question, "Does a fish know it's in water?" All of these are the more insidious insofar as they are semiconscious or even unconscious. But they are not racism, which is an ideology, conscious by definition.

            The distinction is important because bigotry will lay the basis for pogroms and lynchings and other relatively short-term, usually mob-based horrors. Racism, can work in a vicious cycle of long-term, systematized, bureaucratize, theorized, legally-rationalized horrors: US slavery into the mid-19^th century, Jim Crow, final solutions to various ethnic "problems."

            It's hard to argue with a bigot, but they can learn from experience and — in a hypothetically pure form of bigotry — have no ideology to renounce. Racists can be argued with, but, well, good luck with that. Bigotry is like unto the fleshly sins, racism is a more serious, intellectual sin. It comes from twisting reason, and is difficult to reason people out of. Still, if you're dealing with an otherwise decent racist, say of the Huck Finn variety, someone brought up in the system, experience can teach and logic can reach.

            Sometimes.

            It happened with some religious Southerners of my generation, one I knew personally.

            It is our duty, o decent, ethical reader, to help make it happen. To start on that project we need to know the problem and label it carefully.

"Pronatalism": Explaining Sex Rules and Getting Down to Nationalism's Biological Basics

"We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies."

— Steven King, (R-Iowa)

Then a new king […] came to power in Egypt. “Look,” he said

to his people, “the Israelites have become far too numerous for us.

Come, we must deal shrewdly with them or they will become

even more numerous and, if war breaks out, will join

our enemies, fight against us and leave the country.”

 So they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor, […]  

But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied

and spread; so the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites

(Exodus 1.8-12)

            "Pronatalism" is a word we don't hear much any more, not for a generation or so, but it's an important word — increasingly important in a time of heightened nationalism — and needs to be recycled (recycled here from a couple of my essays from 2008 f.).

            "Pronatalism" refers to social policies encouraging the production and successful raising of children. Often these policies have included conscious policies on population; more often, pronatalism has been incorporated into religious beliefs and from there into law and custom.

            It doesn't matter much where pronatalist practices come from. "Cultural evolution" is more than a figure of speech: customs that function to help cultures survive will tend to be retained the way useful genetic traits are retained--and pronatalism, by its nature, has been useful for survival.

            Until recently. Until humankind's population went into the billions, and the unchecked reproduction of humans became a threat to human species-survival. Until some cultures became somewhat democratic and individualistic, and the press of population put stresses on democratic principles and individuality. It has always been difficult to argue that any individual human is special; the argument becomes almost impossible when there are over seven billion other human individuals. "Freedom" has been defined informally as the right to swing your arms until you endanger someone else's nose; some place along the line, population density gets to where there's little room for figurative arm swinging.

            Alternatively, an individual human has the same right as any other animal to urinate in the local stream; the people of a small village probably have the right to put their excrement in the river; towns and cities, however, have no right to dump in the river untreated sewage, poisoning decreasing supplies of water.

            More of that later. For now keep in mind that surviving societies often have built in a strong degree of pronatalism.

            You need to know this if you're to understand the underpinning of the sex laws and "morēs" of the United States, including our rules on marriage and attitudes toward the wide range of sexual activities.

            Start with obvious questions: Why would people care about occasional or even frequent masturbation in private? Why were there ever laws against oral or anal sex, or just about anything done between or among two or more consenting adults in private? The short and most basic answer, one that underlies both religious and secular, official and popular-culture prohibitions, is "pronatalism."

            Humans are highly sexual animals, and across a significant population people will practice all sorts of sexuality. Cultures, though, can evolve ideologies and customs that tend to direct sexuality into practices that are reproductive and nurturing. Consciously or unconsciously, societies can try to limit sex to vaginal sexual intercourse between fertile couples who are likely to conceive, bear, and then raise babies.

            Cultures can try to limit sex to "making babies" by people who'll stick around to raise babies: for a very important example, limiting approved sex to married heterosexual couples who have conception as a goal--and, hence, don't try to prevent conception and who avoid sex when the woman is menstruating.

            Sound familiar? It should if you know the traditional rules for Roman Catholics and Orthodox Jews.

            Under a doctrine of pronatalism, such rules make sense, and pronatalism itself makes a lot of sense in military, nationalistic, and economic terms.

            Pronatalism becomes a bad idea when it's a game many societies play and the human population rises rapidly, when the standard of living rises enough among many of those societies that they strain the environment.

            Think of a billion or two Chinese and Indians starting to live like rich Americans.

            Pronatalism in our time makes sense for individual countries that want to maintain their eminence; pronatalism makes sense for older generations who want to retire and be supported by lots of young workers.

            For the human species, and for humans who like freedom, pronatalism is a problem.

            "Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it" (Genesis 1.28) was good doctrine when humans were pretty powerless to master much, and it may be the one commandment we humans have fulfilled; but it is fulfilled now, and it's time to cut back.

            We--we humans generally--need to move rapidly toward zero growth in our population, which means rethinking the laws, policies, customs, and attitudes based in pronatalism.

            People are going to have sex, but it doesn't have to be reproductive sex; and contraception can be very low-tech, inexpensive, and almost as effective as abstinence in preventing sexually-transmitted diseases. To start, we need a campaign to "Wrap that Willy," making condoms readily available and condom-use a manly thing to do, and a womanly thing to demand.

            For other things to do, look at the pronatalists aspects of human cultures, and try to figure out practical ways to encourage contraception and reproductive restraint.

Good-Friday, 2013, Looking Backward (20 March 2013)

 And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back

where all those people and their homes had been.

But she did look back,

and I love her for that, because it was so human.

So she was turned into a pillar of salt.

So it goes. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five

            Jesus of Nazareth was not the only one crucified at that "place called Golgotha."

            Matthew speaks of "robbers who were crucified with him," and who "reviled him" (27.44). Mark writes of "Those who were crucified with him" in noting the reviling (15.32). John in his Gospel looks to the moment when sunset approached, and "Since it was the day of Preparation, in order to prevent the bodies" of those executed that day "from remaining on the cross on the sabbath (for that sabbath was a high day)" — in itself and for falling on the Passover — "the Jews asked Pilate that [… the victims'] legs might be broken," speeding their deaths, "and that they might be taken away" (more on leg-breaking below). "So the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first, and of the other who had been crucified with him," but not of Jesus, since he'd already died (19.31-34), an important theological point: the Lamb of the Sacrifice has to be whole, unbroken.

            Luke develops the crucifixion scene more fully: "Two others also, who were criminals, were led away to be put to death with him. And when they came to the place which is called The Skull, there they crucified him and the criminals, one on the right and one on the left." In Luke's version, only one of the "criminals who were hanged" reviles Jesus, "But the other rebuked him," the first criminal, "saying, 'Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly; for we received the due reward of our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong" — and this "Good Thief" asks, "Jesus, remember me when come in your kingly power," to which Jesus responds, "Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise" (23.39-43 [all Biblical quotations: RSV]).

            The executions involving Jesus wasn't the mass crucifixion of, say, the savage suppression of the Spartacus rebellion — some 6000 prisoners of war crucified — or the end of Monty Python's Life Of Brian; but the Gospels have Jesus crucified along with two others, definitely criminals under Roman law, possibly guilty of robbery.

            It's these other two I'd like to look back on.

            In discussing the past as "A Foreign Country," the title of chapter 1 of his 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker quotes from "a forensic investigation of the death of Jesus Christ, based on archeological and historical sources," one published in 1986 in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

            The JAMA article describes a full-out crucifixion, with scourging and nails, and I suspect nothing quite so elaborate was done for the usual executions of slaves or for mass executions such as that ending the slave uprising under Spartacus. As the Wikipedia "Crucifixion" article notes, crucifixion served "to provide a death that was particularly slow, painful […], gruesome, humiliating, and public, using whatever means were most expedient for that goal. Crucifixion methods varied considerably with location and time period." Still, the Jesus of the Gospels was crucified at Jerusalem, a provincial capital, in a major case considered by the Sanhedrin, King Herod, and Pontius Pilate, the resident Roman Prefect; we're told explicitly that he was whipped and mocked (e.g., Matthew 27.24-31) — so it's likely Jesus and the other two condemned suffered the horrors of the entire crucifixion process.

            The prisoners were stripped naked and scourged with "a short whip made of braided leather embedded with sharpened stones. […] The prisoner's arms would then be tied around a hundred-pound cross bar, and he would be forced to carry it to a site where a post was embedded in the ground. The man would be thrown onto his shredded back and nailed through the wrists to the crossbar. The victim was hoisted onto the post[,] and his feet were nailed to it, usually without a supporting block." Especially without support, "The man's rib cage was distended by the weight of his body pulling on his arms, making it difficult to exhale unless he pulled his arms or pushed his legs against the nails. Death from asphyxiation and loss of blood would come after an ordeal ranging from three or four hours to three or four days. The executioners could prolong the torture by resting the man's weight on a seat, or hasten death by breaking his legs with a club" (12; ch. 1, section on "The Roman Empire and Early Christendom").

            Pinker is appalled by crucifixion, which he wouldn't inflict even on Hitler.

            And yet this is the method not only of The Sacrifice of the Christ — a unique event in history — but, in the Gospels, for punishing two men who were guilty indeed (so the "Good Thief" says on the cross) but may have been guilty of no more than robbery. And, of course, crucifixion was standard for slaves.
            Consider, though, a worst-case possibility.

            Luke talks only of "criminals," and in it's possible that the crime was rebellion: crucifixion was also standard for rebels, and one or both of the criminals might have been insurrectionists, early Zealots. In that case, they'd be religious-nationalist extremists, dedicating to murdering Roman occupiers and Jews who cooperated with the Roman oppressors. That is, from the point of view of the authorities — both Roman and Jewish — and, undoubtedly, of many ordinary Jews, they'd be terrorists.

            But, again, they might have been just thieves: the English regularly hanged thieves well into the 18^th century, and hanging into the Victorian period (until 1866) was "short drop": i.e., letting the condemned person strangle for ten to twenty minutes.

            So Jesus "was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried, and the third day he rose again[…], and ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father" and "shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead," as the Creed saith.

            If you believe, and if you accept Luke's version, the "Good Thief" is in Paradise with the Christ and can look forward to resurrection and "the life of the world to come."

            But if Luke's right, the Good Thief gets his salvation as part of a formula not only accepting Jesus as Messiah but also accepting that he is being tortured to death "indeed justly," he and the other criminal having "received the due reward of our deeds."

            The bad thief is a real putz for reviling Jesus on the cross; both criminals are bad in this way in the Gospels by Matthew, Mark, and John.  If anyone can and should say "I feel your pain," it would be someone also undergoing that pain. So there's a serious failure in empathy and sympathy if these guys mock Jesus.  And it's a really, really, really imprudent failure if Jesus is the Christ and, in orthodox doctrine, therefore not just a suffering man but also God.

            Still, I think I'd be in a bad mood spending time on the cross waiting to die, and if the guy next to me may be God, I think I'd want help, and I don't think — whatever I'd done wrong — that I deserved to be stripped and humiliated and publically tortured and hanged naked with nails through my wrists and pissing and shitting for any passer-by to see, and then, as an act of relative mercy, getting my legs broken so I wouldn't violate Shabbat and spoil Passover by continuing to live after sundown.

            In Slaughterhouse-Five (1969; ch. 5), Kurt Vonnegut has his fictional author, Kilgore Trout tell his story "about a visitor from outer space [who] made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low." However, in the story of Christ's passion, "the Gospels actually taught this: 'Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected.'" Jesus may not have looked like much but he was "actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought...: / Oh, boy — they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time! / And that thought had a brother: "There are right people to lynch." Who? People not well connected."

            In Trout's retelling, the Jesus figure actually is a nobody, just a bum who says wise things; but at his death, "The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of the Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this: / From this moment on, He will punish anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!"

            That's a good re-telling of the story, and with it and Steven Pinker in mind, I'm going to return to the Gospels and ask you to believe the worst about the two criminals: that they were followers not of Jesus of Nazareth but of the other Jesus of the story, that "notorious prisoner, called Barabbas" (Matthew 27.15-26). Let's say the two criminals were insurrectionists and religious fanatics: zealous murderers, assassins, thugs … terrorists.

            "Jesus who is called Christ" most directly died for Barabbas; and Steven Pinker says he would not crucify even Hitler.


            Zealots, thugs, and assassins must be removed from society, maybe even killed. But in 2013 and following we should look back on the two criminals on the cross and resolve never again to torment a bum or torture even terrorists. 

My Favorite Anti-Hero: Jonah (25 July 2013)

         My favorite anti-hero is Jonah, "the son of Amittai," the title character in the one comic book in the Bible. Now, in its full-scale historical sweep, the Christian Bible is a "Divine Comedy" of a rather bloody sort: the tragedy of The Fall of Man leading through an eventful but largely sad and violent history of humankind to the Incarnation and Sacrifice by torture of the Son of God, then moving on the rebirth of the Resurrection and then, for a conclusion, "a new and better world coalescing around a central couple" of Christ in glory, and the saved — the Church, the Bride of Christ — at the end of The Book of Revelation. 

  But looking at the Bible from Genesis to Revelation is getting technical, and technical in the fairly limited sense of Rich Erlich's correcting Northrop Frye's chemical imagery in talking about the conclusion of a comedy (in Anatomy of Criticism, 1954). So I'm using a technical usage of comedy with the Christian Bible and one I've applied to a pretty vast narrative arc — covering human history, as Bible Christians see it — and getting me into dangerous territory: the prejudice against comedy is sufficient that many English-speakers habitually contrast "comic" with "serious," as if you can't have serious comedy; and a fair number of Christians get pissed off if you tell them they have a comic religion. Many of them were taught in school that Dante Alighieri ca. 1302 called his major work La Commédia, with the Divina added later, but that doesn't stop them from seeing "comic" as a put-down.

            The opinions of at least one of my scholarly betters notwithstanding — Rabbi Ken Ehrlich, the former Dean of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati sees the Book of Jonah as tragic; that expert opinion respectfully noted, I'll stick with the reading of Jonah as comic. The book starts in alienation, with the great City of Nineveh all sinful and (therefore) separated from God, and ends in reconciliation and integration, with a reformed Nineveh reconciled to God. And along the way Jonah converts a boatload of sailors and he himself goes from misery in the depths to release and freedom and pulling off the greatest Prophetic success of all time in saving Nineveh.

            (That "depths" part is literal. Jonah isn't swallowed by a whale but by a "huge fish." Whales are air-breathing mammals and have to surface; fish don't. That fish goes to the bottom and stays there until Jonah at least mouths the proper formulas about the lesson in mercy that God is going to pretty great lengths to teach him.)

            Anyway, the Book of Jonah has a classic comic happy ending, just not for Jonah, in Jonah's view of things. Jonah is kind of dense, the object of a satire.

            And in addition to his Book's propagandizing for a universalist view of a merciful God (with a sense of humor), that's what I like about Jonah, that he's such a nebbish — and a bit of an alazon and, in a useful word that has not gone into scholarly vocabulary, a putz.

            Jonah is a nebbish as an unholy fool, and he's the alazon of a festive comedy: the curmudgeon who excludes himself from the celebrations at the end of a comedy, like Malvolio in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, or Shylock in a simplistic reading of The Merchant of Venice.

            In the synagog, Jonah's story caps the High Holidays: it's the last reading from Scriptures, on the afternoon on Yom Kippur: it's the stressed book in synagog liturgy, elevated even beyond the great respect it holds among Christians.

            Anyway, Jonah is up there with the biggies of the tradition. His story ends a Days of Awe cycle that begins with God's remembering Sarah in her old age and giving her and Abraham a son, Isaac: thus giving the Jewish version of how the Arabs are blood relatives to Jews, but we get the better land (Genesis 21). The story of Sarah and Hagar and Ishmael is followed by The Binding of Isaac, with Abraham's reaching out his hand to slay his son, his favorite son, whom he truly loves: either the act of a murderous fanatic or (if Søren Kierkegaard is right), the leap into the absurd of a Knight of Faith. However you see Abraham here, he's a big-time figure, as are the others in the High Holy Day readings: Hannah and the great prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah, and recounting the Day of Atonement ceremony of the High Priest, plus a major Martyrology from the Roman persecutions.

            "Heavy matters! Heavy matters!", as a Shakespeare character says in a very different tragi-comic context.

            And then Jonah shuffles in.

            The word of the Lord comes to Jonah and in the standard summons to prophecy commands him to go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim against it. And Jonah immediately sets forth — hauling ass in more or less in the opposite direction to Tarshish, which was probably near the Straits of Gibraltar: in any event, in the opposite direction to pretty much the end of the earth.

            Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrians, the enemy city for a while, and Jonah wants nothing to do with it: a Hebrew prophet may be without honor in his own country, but he's dead meat in a place like Nineveh. Worst that can happen, the Ninevites kill him, horribly; second worst: by some miracle his mission is successful and the goddamn Ninevites don't get the destruction they deserve.

            So Jonah runs away, and we get the storm at sea and Jonah going down and sleeping in the figurative bowels of the ship, a womb with no view, so to speak. The brave pagan sailors try to save the ship — throwing off cargo and calling to their gods — but the Lord keeps the storm raging and they throw lots to determine the cause and, of course, "the lot fell upon Jonah" (1.7).

            To a degree hard to believe nowadays, the ancients believed in divination and omens and portents and all; more important, Jonah is a story, and it's rare in a well-made story that you'd get a divination scene like this where the lot falls wrong, unless, of course, that's the point of the story.

            In any event, the bones or dice or straw-pulling or whatever points out Jonah, and the sailors throw questions at him trying to find out who he is, all of which he answers with " I am a Hebrew; and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land," which is kind of a strange answer. As a student of mine elegantly if flippantly put it, for all Jonah's use of orthodox and cliché answers about Yahweh as planetary Creator and Ruler, Jonah acts as if God were "back in Jerusalem, in a box in the Temple" (1.1-10).

            The sailors try to save the boat, but the storm gets worse, and Jonah tells them to throw him overboard: Jonah has a thing about giving up. The sailors decline to sacrifice Jonah; but when the storm gets still worse they very reluctantly "took up Jonah, and cast him forth into the sea: and the sea ceased from her raging. Then the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and offered a sacrifice unto the Lord, and made vows" (1.13-16). Note the spelling there: Lord, as in "Adonai," as in the traditional replacement for Yahweh: the sailors, at least for now, have given up their gods and gone over to Jonah's.

            From Jonah's point of view, his trip toward Tarshish has been a disaster: going from bad to awful, and leading to his isolation from human society and a symbolic death. From the point of view of God, angels, and people listening to the story, though, this is typically cruel comedy, but with a touch of pathos as Jonah sinks into the sea.

            But then — ta-dum! — comes the most famous part of the story, for "[…] the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights" (1.17)— an important point in the Christian reading of Scripture, prefiguring (in this reading) the death, burial, and resurrection of the Christ, and maybe "the Harrowing of Hell," which is a neat bit of doctrine — and must have made a great Medieval mystery play — if no longer fashionable.

            A prefiguration of the Christ or not, in Jonah's story we definitely have The Descent of the Hero, twice over. Going into The Belly of the Beast is a substitute for descent into the Underworld; and, in Jonah's experience, that great fish dives and dives deep (2.1 f.). From Odysseus in The Odyssey to Christ in The Descent of Christ into Hell and The Apostles' Creed to Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back to Ellen Ripley in Aliens, heroes and (of late) heras have descended; and Jonah descends, if not exactly in a heroic exercise of choice.

             Jonah combines images nicely — we're in a poetic section of the Book — and says that from the belly of the fish and "from the belly of hell," or Sheol, he cried out, and "When my soul fainted within me I remembered the Lord: and my prayer came in unto thee, into thine holy temple" (2.7). Okay, he's learning: Yahweh the cultic deity may be back in that box in the Temple — in and around the Ark in the Holy of Holies — but God is, pretty obviously to the audience, also the God Jonah told the sailors he worshiped, the creator of sea and land, and firmly in charge of sea, sky, storms, and the occasional really big fish. And if that is the case?

            If that is the case, the Lord God might well also be the God of the Ninevites, and the Revised Standard Version translates the difficult next verse of the Hebrew with the strongly universalist, "Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their true loyalty." And a couple lines later God "spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land" (2.10).

            And here I need to pay a debt to a literalist, Fundamentalist, propagandizer for hearing the Word — and a guy who taught this literary critic and eventual film critic a crucial lesson about seeing a text.

            A couple students invited me in to teach Jonah (and later Ecclesiastes) to their BASIC group: "Brothers and Sisters in Christ," associated with the local Campus Crusade for Christ. Their minister wasn't about to let a non-Christian infidel such as I in with his flock so he stayed and — the Spirit coming upon him — kind of broke into my shtick here at Jonah's, let's say, landfall, and described in detail what someone would look like if he'd just been puked up after three days in the guts of some humongous fish.

            I was about to jump to the second part of the story and the story's theological and philosophical significance as a mashal, here, a parable and satire. But in the world of the story there is that moment when Jonah was vomited up, and on theological, philosophical, moral, and LitCrit grounds the minister was right: we owe Jonah a look.

            The dude just had one really rotten experience, and part of the genius of the story is the balance between what should be our sympathy for Jonah from a human point of view balanced by an objective view of this poor dumb schmuck from a god-like, audience point of view. (Authors and audiences are to fictional characters as God is to humans: potentially omniscient, e.g., in reading characters' thoughts, omnipotent in being able to, say, move them faster than the speed of light.)

            So look down on Jonah standing there getting the call for the second time, "Arise, go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it what I tell you" (3.2). And Jonah trudges off dripping slime and arrives at Nineveh and walks a third of the way into the city — it's a three-days walk across, that's how big Nineveh is — and speaks his oracle to the Ninevites: "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown." And that is it: "Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown" — the collected prophecies of Jonah. You don't have to believe the Prophets or like them (here and there they say some awful things), but the major Prophets did know their poetry. Jeremiah on exile, imaged as a resurrected Rachel wordlessly mourning: "A cry is heard in Ramah — / Wailing, bitter weeping — Rachel weeping for her children" (31.15). Isaiah on proper repentance: "To loose the fetters of wickedness, / To undo the bands of the yoke, / And to let the oppressed go free" (58.6). Even by much lower standards, Jonah's line is really lame.

            Maybe the idea here is like a bit in Paddy Chayefsky's play, Gideon, where the Lord intentionally chooses a loser like Gideon for a general and intentionally commands him to use battle tactics even Gideon knows are stupid; God wants everyone to be very sure that if the Hebrews won, it had to be a miracle, literally a miracle.

            And, oh, there is a kind of miracle at Nineveh. One line from Jonah, and the Ninevites repent, from the king and his nobles all the way down the Assyrian social hierarchy. Sackcloth, fasting, sitting in ashes, tears, turning away from evil — the whole moral conversion, repentance routine. "And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not" (3.5-10).

            Yay! The greatest prophetic triumph in the Bible. And Jonah's reaction? "But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry. And he prayed unto the Lord, and said, I pray thee, O Lord, was not this my saying, when I was yet in my country? Therefore I fled before unto Tarshish: for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil" (4:2).

            Now the Jewish tradition of story-telling from The Binding of Isaac story to Stanley Kubrick's version of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is to just hit the high points, so maybe the Narrator here just left out Jonah's saying back in Judah what he says here he said; or Jonah's lying to God. For sure, Jonah repeats here a very important cultic creed. In Exodus 34.6, at Sinai in the renewal of the Covenant, the Lord "descended in a cloud and stood there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord. The Lord passed before him [Moses] and proclaimed 'The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin […]'" — with the ellipsis marking the "but" part often stressed in arguments for an Old Testament God of Judgment: that God will punish the guilty unto the third and fourth generation. (And if the Revelation to John gets it right, a New Testament God who will punish the wicked forever.) Jonah, though, quotes only the part on grace, mercy, and kindness. He knows the cultic line but even now he doesn't really believe it. Or, he believes and doesn't approve: not if mercy extends to Assyria and the Ninevites.

            If I were scripting this moment as a shot in film, I'd put a "beat" here, a pause in which God's answer to Job's little outburst is silence. Jonah continues, with a word from logic: "therefore." "Therefore now, O Lord, take, I beseech thee, my life from me; for it is better for me to die than to live" (4.3) Again with the giving up! Identifying with Jonah, we'd find this very sad; looking down on him as a satiric anti-hero, it's just pathetic, and there's much to be said for God's answering question — hey, it's a Jewish God; He's going to answer your question with questions — God answers with the rhetorical question, "Doest thou do well to be angry?" or, "Are you that deeply grieved?" (4.4).

            Jonah doesn't answer but cuts out and sits, we are told explicitly "on the east side of the city" and makes a booth there "and sat under it in the shadow, till he might see what would become of the city." My Bible-as-Lit teacher, Lloyd E. Berry, noted that back in mythic times, city-killing fire and brimstone come out of the east, so maybe Jonah sits on the east side just in case God overshoots. In Berry's (comic) reading — I'm not saying anything original here — Jonah still has hope that God will destroy Nineveh and the Ninevites (4.4). Then God prepares a gourd, or some sort of plant (the God of the Universe does plants as well as storms and fish) and has it grow over Jonah as a kind of umbrella, for which Jonah, gracious for once, is grateful (4.6).

            So then God comes up with a worm that kills the plant, arguably carrying micro-management of the cosmos to an extreme, but moving toward teaching Jonah a lesson, and the world a lesson about what Jonah represents. "And it came to pass, when the sun did arise, that God prepared a vehement east wind; and the sun beat upon the head of Jonah, that he fainted, and wished in himself to die, and said, 'It is better for me to die than to live.'" Again we see God doing weather and Jonah doing despair, and parody. Jonah under the plant, after the greatest prophetic feat in history, despairs. Elijah, having defeated and, by our standards, murdered, the priests of Baal, is pursued by the forces of Queen Jezebel, finally (about 130 miles later) ending up under a broom tree. "Enough!" Elijah cries out. "Now, O Lord, take my life […]" (1 Kings 19.1-4). It's not great parody, but it's a nice little touch for those who know First Kings: Jonah is no Elijah.

            "And God said to Jonah, 'Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd?' And Jonah said, 'I do well to be angry, even unto death.' Then said the Lord, 'Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for which thou hast not labored, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night: And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more then six score thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?" (4.9-11).

            Ken Ehrlich declined to read "and also much cattle" at a service, but the annotators in Tanakh — a fairly recent Jewish translation (5746, 1985 C.E.) — and in the Oxford Revised Standard Version (1962), call attention to it.

            The Tanakh editors note that "Infants and beasts are not held responsible for their actions." The Oxford editors say, "The point of the book is that God loves every creature in his universe, even the cattle."

            I used to follow that assertion by the Oxford editors by asking my class "What do you see as 'The point of the book'?" and add, "It should have one." Jonah "is read in the Church as part of Holy Week," and, again, it has a place of high honor in the Synagog. "If the Book of Jonah is a mashal in the sense of 'satire,' what's being satirized? If Jonah is the butt — target —what does Jonah represent?"

            To help my students answer that question I added, in the manner of a Jewish God or parent — or fairly typical teacher — more questions, starting with, Is it wrong to look forward to the Day of the Lord as the day the Ninevites get it, when all your enemies get it? How about the enemies of God? John tells us in The Book of Revelation, climaxing the Christian Bible: "But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the polluted, as for murderers, fornicators, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their lot shall be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death" (21.8) — is it OK to want them not just to die horribly but to die "the second death"? Or, if that's a matter of Divine Justice, how about getting back to the Assyrians and how one should feel about conquerors? Should you forgive foreign oppressors who have killed your children? Or try to repay them "in kind"?

                             Fair Babylon, you predator,
                             a blessing on him who repays you in kind
                             what you have inflicted on us;
                             a blessing on him who seizes your babies
                             and dashes them against the rocks! (Psalm 137.8)

Jonah is the anti-hero of a Divine Comedy that is also a profound satire. Jonah is nobody special (as prophets go), the average human being as Hebrew, a "synecdoche" for Israel: God's chosen who should be bearer of the Word of mercy and grace, a light to the world. Instead Jonah is a run-of-the-mill believer, whose values are tribal and just starting to move into nationalism, a guy (or gal) who mouths formulas that are the product of a logic he really won't follow: One God, one Loving Parent, one humankind, — and therefore those bloody Assyrian (or whatever) pig fellators are our kin. Even the Assyrians might have a call on God's mercy and can demand our compassion: inclusion within the circle of humanity The Book of Jonah makes some serious satiric demands on us, calling us to high ethics and a kind of nobility.

            Unlike Jonah, whom we should find so laughable.


            So the competition is tough, but as anti-heroes go, Jonah is my favorite.