Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 164 · June 13
And Much Cattle
“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; and also much cattle?”
The book of Jonah ends in the middle of an argument, and the prophet does not get the last word. He does not get any word at all. God asks him a question and the writing stops.
The argument is about a city that was spared. Jonah has already explained himself, and his explanation is the reason he ran 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 furious that God turned out to be what the creed always said he was. Then a plant comes up over his shelter and dies in a night, and he grieves it, and the grief is real. 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. What their not knowing right hand from left means is never explained, and the usual guesses, small children or a whole population in the dark, stay guesses. Then the last four words in the book: and also much cattle. Nobody has made that clause sound dignified, and the writing stops there. Jonah's reply was not recorded, and there is no reason to treat that as an oversight. The question is put in the second person, to a man who had been right about God and satisfied by nothing, and it has sat unanswered ever since. What would you have said?
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 164 is Greater Works (John 14:12).