And Much Cattle

The book of Jonah ends in the middle of an argument, and the prophet does not get the last word. In fact he gets no word at all. God asks him a question, and the book stops.

The argument is about a city God spared. Jonah has already explained himself, and his explanation is the reason he ran away in the first place: "I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil." He is angry that God turned out to be exactly what God had always said He was. Then God makes a gourd grow up over Jonah's shelter to shade him, and the next morning a worm kills it. Jonah grieves for the plant, and his grief is real. So God sets that grief beside the city: "Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow." "And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand?"

Sixscore thousand is a hundred and twenty thousand people. What it means that they cannot tell their right hand from their left is left unexplained. People usually guess that it means little children, or a whole people living in the dark, and those remain guesses. Then the book closes with God's care reaching even the animals: "and also much cattle." It is a plain, homely ending, and nothing comes after it. Jonah's reply is not recorded. The question was put to a man who had been right about God and was still pleased by nothing, and it has been left with every reader since. How would you answer it? Before you do, notice what the question shows you. God's pity reaches a whole city of lost people and even their cattle, and that same pity reaches you.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 164 is Greater Works (John 14:12).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two