Читать книгу Jonah Through the Centuries - Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer - Страница 19

In the biblical narrative, Jonah’s flight from God is explained in Jonah 4:2 – Jonah knew that God is prone to showing compassion. The question then becomes: why did Jonah not wish God to show compassion on Nineveh? Many modern retellings of the Book of Jonah maintain that the key problem is God’s failure to uphold justice and the concomitant failure to withhold mercy. The pivotal issue is the balance between mercy and justice: can true mercy exist in the absence of true justice? Put aptly by the literary theorist Terry Eagleton, Jonah refused to obey God because there did not seem to be any point in obeying him. This issue forms the central question in a range of modern literary interactions with the Book of Jonah, among them Robert Frost’s play A Masque of Mercy, where the central figure Jonah Dove argues that God is obliged to punish the wicked; he must do so in his role as supreme and just deity. God, however, has failed to carry out this task. Taking a more explicit stand, Harald Tandrup envisages Jonah as ultimately rejecting God’s perspective. What is the point when God does not punish the guilty? Other retellings lament Jonah’s failure to be compassionate. The musical rendering by Samuel Adler, Der Mann ohne Toleranz, for instance, mourns Jonah’s inability to accept God’s decision to pardon Nineveh.