o unto thee, Bible fans! As always, this week’s BotB installment explores the murky backlog of the Old Testament — specifically, the final dozen books penned by the minor prophets (or as I like to call them, “Guess What God’s Angry About Now?” Parts One through Twelve). This time around we'll be examining what is probably the most famous of the minor prophet Books — sorry, Haggai — the Book of Jonah.

Whether or not you've read B of J, chances are you're at least peripherally aware of the plot: there's this guy named Jonah, stuff happens, dude gets swallowed by a whale, more stuff, the end. (Or maybe you're familiar with the tale in its current incarnation as Jonah: a VeggieTales Movie, a film that tries to indoctrinate children to the Bible's teachings through the seductive glamor of a talking asparagus.)

Prior to my research for this article, my awareness of the story started and ended with a childhood pop-up book where you got to feed Jonah to a whale by pulling on a paper tab. If done properly, onecould make it look like the whale was repeatedly barfing up Jonah before gobbling him back up again, barf and all. I don't mind telling you it was completely awesome.

My background reading on BoJ uncovered that scholars have found weightier things to take away from the story than the theological implications of a God allowing a whale to boomerang barf a man for eternity. BoJ, it seems, is an allegory about how bad it is to hog all the good news about Christ, and that god-fearing Christians owe it to heathens to tell them exactly how displeased God is with them at all times. Gosh, that's nice of them.

This is a lesson our hero Jonah learns firsthand — a lesson driven home while gobbling up room temperature shrimp from the dank floor of a whale's stomach. I'll give God this — He knows a thing or two about wearing down the resistance of His subjects before making any points. After three days sitting within a few feet of an intestinal tract the diameter of a school bus, I bet I'd be all ears too.

(Of note on said biblical scholars: a lot of them have gotten their vaginas in tight little knots over when the Book of Jonah was written, who wrote it, and whether or not it actually happened. There’s assloads of discussion on the subject if you actually care, but since I don’t you won't find it here. It was work enough just reading a story about a guy who lives in a whale for half a week because he made a universe-creating sky-god angry — I’m not humoring anyone by debating what time in the afternoon it all went down.)

I'm not the first person to notice that For God’s "chosen ones", the people of Judah sure were either starving to death or getting invaded a lot. It's the sort of thing that seems like a gross inconsistency until you actually stop to think about it. Imagine you were neighbors with a bunch of wanks who kept name-dropping God like He was letting them into the Viper Room while you had to wait outside with your chick like some idiot. As if you wouldn't attack them too. Let’s see how well God’s special little fuck-buddies can dodge a spear, huh?

This highlights the problem with any philosophy centering around a belief that you're God's divinely elected chosen: namely, that everybody else isn't. Even if you soften the blow by calling them the “Not-as-Chosens” or the “Maybe He’ll Pick You Next Times”, at the end of the day it'd be hard not to skip around like you're fourteen and God's your first boyfriend. That can't be doing you any favors with the God-Was-SO-Close-To-Choosing-Yous.

Making things worse, every time the people of Judah suffered a famine or an invasion or a plague — which, if history is any indication, seemed to happen roughly every Thursday — they had to come up with an explanation for why God would let hardship fall upon His Chosen People. Their answer: it was the fault of those damn non-chosens, all inter-marrying with the chosen ones, messing everything up with their weird values and crazy gods. I know it sounds pretty out there that religious worship could somehow lead to xenophobia — but seriously, somehow it happened.

Nobody likes getting blamed for someone else’s problems, especially when that someone is walking around like they own the place; not to put too fine a point on it here, but the people of Judah sound like total assholes. Hence the Book of Jonah, which attempts to chill them niggas out by preaching tolerance.

That wasn't a typo, by the way. BoJ is about tolerance. For reals: we've finally hit a book in the Old Testament where the lesson isn't that God likes to kill you. Before any of you get too concerned that the Lord's been working too hard, though, keep in mind: God chooses to get His message of tolerance across by threatening a city with wholesale execution, kidnapping one of His prophets, imprisoning him in the belly of a sea mammal, then using hamfisted allegory to make His point. Bullying, murder threats, bad metaphors and insane dream logic. Yep. That’s our God, alright.

Big G appears before Jonah, one of his prophets, with a holy mission: go to the city of Nineveh. Hold onto your Bible hats, now. In a surprising plot twist, it turns out God’s mad at them. I know! God wants Jonah to tell the Ninevites that they have angered Him for reasons He chooses not to delve into, and that they have forty days before He destroys the city. In terms of opening opening scenes it's a total grabber, getting a lot of exposition out of the way while hooking you in with the promise of expensive action sequences.

Jonah complies happily with God’s commands, waving and laughing as he walks slowly backward until God's out of sight behind a cloud — at which point he spins on his heel and windsprints to the nearest harbor, where he hops on a ship in the opposite direction. Nice.

The story would have you believe, by the way, that Jonah disobeyed God because of all that stuff we went over last page — as a Person of Judah, he didn’t want to give the "unchosen" Ninevites the opportunity to possibly repent before the 40-day deadline, thus earning them God's love. Seriously, even for the Bible: what a total dick. I should admit, though, that I wouldn't have obeyed God either. Not because I wanted to keep all the good Jesus bulletins to myself — I just have enough self-preservation instincts to know a death mission when I hear one. The city of Nineveh didn't actually believe in Jonah’s God, keep in mind. Imagine hopping on a plane right now and waltzing down a main street in Iran, telling everyone how angry Jesus is and that they’ve got a month to shape up before He kills them all. You don't have to be a xenophobic prick like Jonah to realize you'd be about one “Let me hear you say ‘Oh! Oh! Ohhhhhhh!’ if you know God hates Nineveh! Just the ladies!” from being strung up by your testicles and beat like a Jew-piñata.

Motivations aside, Jonah boards a ship bound for Tarshish and sails away as fast as the wind will carry him. You know, 'A' for effort to Jonah for having the stones to get direct orders from God and make a run for it anyway, but I’m subtracting marks for strategy. If you’re going to go on the lam from someone, I think it’s wise to check if they’re omniscient first. If they’re, say, God, for instance, that makes them very omniscient. Might be best to go right to plan B and save the gas money.

It takes Big G all of five seconds to (a) place the city of Nineveh on a map and (b) notice Jonah heading rapidly in the opposite direction. God takes a big hit off His omniscient detective pipe and puts the pieces together. Furious, Big G conjures a violent seastorm that threatens to swamp the ship. Hmm. Conjuring up violent seastorms to shipwreck sailors seems more up Neptune’s alley, really. Maybe Big G subcontracted the job out.

Everyone on the ship panics over the tidal waves and lightning — everyone except for Jonah who, not even kidding, goes below-deck for a nap. Wasn’t this whole shipwreck business for his benefit in the first place? Apparently having the Lord of All Creation conduct a vendetta-at-sea against him is a little too boring for him to keep his eyes open for. Man, seriously: what a prick. All hands race around the deck, abandoning their cargo and bailing water out of the ship in a frantic effort to save their lives. Jonah continues sleeping. His bailing hand was probably sore from all that sticking his own thumb up his ass all day, I'll bet.

Evidently I’m not alone in thinking Jonah’s a total dick, since the Tarshish captain races below deck and starts slapping Jonah in the mouth, shrieking at this shiftless idiot to help them not die. "How can you sleep?” he yells. “Wake up and call on your God! Maybe He will take notice of us, and we will not perish!" Oh, whatever. The story never establishes which deity the Tarshish captain prays to — but whichever it is, he certainly drops it like a hot potato the second he actually needs some deistic intervention. Wake up and call on your God? He might as well be saying, “My false god’s a hollow sham! Quick, call your real one!”

This grates at me less from a theological standpoint so much as it’s just sloppy storytelling. The Tarshish captain freely admits Jonah’s God not only exists, but has the power to help them? Then why isn’t he worshipping Jonah’s god? They couldn’t have thrown a quick scene in here with the Tarshish captain trying to get in touch with Zulu or whatever, failing, then running to Jonah? It’s hard to take spiritual lessons seriously when everyone but our protagonist seems to have chosen their religion through the same elimination process as a Kirk/Picard debate. “Well, Jehovah is the one true god… but on the other hand, this fake god Ammon has such nice hair!”

By now the only thing blowing fiercer than the storm is the story's plotline. Above deck, it's somehow just as clear to everyone else as it was to the Captain that the storm was sent by Jonah’s God. Holy weather patterns must have a look unique from conventional meteorology. Eager to resolve the issue, the Tarshish sailors draw straws in order to figure out which one of them angered the Lord. I wouldn’t even know where to start with how idiotic that is, so let’s just skip to the part where it works anyway.

Jonah, the one person in a group that believes in God's existence who actually worships Him, is flushed out as the one God wants dead. Nice moves there, God. Good hustle. The Tarshish sailors listen to Jonah explain himself, nod sympathetically, then throw him over the side of the boat. Say what you will about the religious failings of Tarshish sailors: these guys are problem solvers. The second they pitch Jonah over the side, the roiling seas calm and the skies become clear. Everyone makes vows to God and offers a sacrifice to him (which seems like a waste of perfectly good goat. Didn’t they technically already make one?)

Jonah, meanwhile, gets bored of drowning and takes another nap. No, not really, though it sounds like something he’d do. Actually, Jonah is immediately swallowed by a whale, and spends several nights sitting around in its stomach. Eager to kill some time and without a PSP, Jonah sings songs of thanksgiving, praising the Lord for delivering him from drowning by sending the whale to eat him. Geez, Jonah — have some dignity. Jonah’s time spent in the belly of the whale is otherwise a mystery, though I’d like to think he whiled away the hours praising God for teaching him the value of celibacy by fucking his girlfriend in front of him.

You know, Jonah — there is one way out of here. But you're not gonna like it.

After an undisclosed period of time (my secondary reading says three days, though I don’t see any direct mention of it in BoJ), the whale vomits Jonah back onto dry land. God asks Jonah a second time to go to Nineveh and preach His message. I imagine God asking this here with the exact same cadence and phrasing as the first time, like the last three days didn’t even happen. Jonah wisely keeps his head down and does what he’s friggin’ told this time.

The city of Nineveh. Nice digs.

Jonah arrives in Nineveh and relays Big G’s divine message: He is displeased, and Nineveh will be overthrown in forty days. Here's the odd part: the Ninevites watch Jonah — a filthy, seafood-reeking lunatic ambling around their city yelling about impending doom — yet don’t once try to give him change or politely ignore him. Did homeless people not exist in 780 BC? Evidently not. Either that or they did exist, but in 780 BC “crazy homeless guy” and “prophet of the Lord” were so indistinguishable it was just safer to assume anyone with a brain disease who smelled like shit and didn’t own property was a direct conduit to Jesus.

Whatever their reasoning, the Ninevites immediately pronounce Jonah’s message the "real deal", declaring a citywide fast and donning sackcloth. Upon hearing Jonah’s proclamation, even the King of Nineveh immediately disrobes, covers himself in sackcloth and — I love this — sits down in the mud. I don’t care what time period you’re living in, that’s hilarious.

God sees Nineveh’s penitence and decides not to blast Nineveh to ashes after all, meaning that Jonah’s prophecy doesn’t actually come to pass — which, in the ion-storm-in-Star Trek logic of the Old Testament, means Jonah must have been telling the truth. I guess it’d be hard to complain if you were a Ninevite and after forty days your city wasn’t ground under the Lord’s bootheel. Still, tell me you wouldn’t feel a little stupid, sitting around in the dirt wearing a sack of potatoes for pants.

Afterwards, Jonah and the Lord share a smoke on the outskirts of the city, leaning against a tree and discussing the events of the day. Jonah, enormous prick that he is, gets angry at God for allowing the unchosen Ninevites not only to worship Him, but, you know, live.

“Have you any right to be angry?” the Lord justifiably replies, all “Oh, I have to explain myself to you now, is that it?” To His credit, Big G doesn’t even smite Jonah on the spot, cover his balls with leprosy or have him swallowed up by a humongous clam or anything — a move that would have seemed pretty reasonable given some of His past actions. (This is the same dude who got so mad once He threatened to kill every fish on the planet, remember.) Rather than smiting jonah, God does the other thing that God does best: explains his point through a clumsy metaphor a five-year-old could understand.

(I’m starting to empathize a little with God at this point, actually. At first He struck me as a bit of an attention whore, always threatening people with death if they didn’t worship Him. Now that I’ve gotten a taste of the pigheaded stupidity He had to deal with on a day-to-day basis I’m not so quick to judge. Seriously, it’s like trying to get a class full of special needs students to drink their juice boxes and take a nap. After the fifteenth time someone starts choking on their mattress or peeing in the hamster cage I’d break out the fucking NyQuil too.)

God sits thick-as-a-shitbrick Jonah down in the desert and makes a vine grow out of nowhere, so that it gives him shade. Jonah claps and hoots like an idiot at this, because Whee! Shade! But the next morning (evidently Jonah was content to sit under a vine for an entire day), God sends a worm that chews on the vine until it withers. Now shadeless, Jonah sits miserably while Big G brings the scorching heat and skin-flaying wind, crockpotting his prophet till the meat falls off the bone.

“There,” says God. “Are you ready to use your big people voice now, Jonah?”

“Guess so,” mumbles Jonah, putting his hands in his pockets and digging his foot into the sand.

God spells out his Lord of the Flies-level metaphor for the six people on the planet who haven't figured it out yet, of which Jonah counts for fully three. “Dig it: you were happy when the vine gave you shade, even though you didn’t plant it or help it grow. You were sad when it died, even though you just sat there like an idiot and didn’t tend to it."

Jonah nods. Nope. This is all so flying over his head.

"I created the vine," says the Lord. "I tended to it. I killed it. It was my call, because it was my vine. I don’t care if it gave you shade. I don’t care if you hated the vine. I don’t care if you called it Jessica and wanted to marry it. It’s not your call.”

“I don’t follow,” says Jonah. "You're saying you shouldn't have spared Nineveh and I was right?"

God sighs and grabs the bridge of his nose. “Pretend the vine is the city of Nineveh.”

“Give me the Cliff’s Notes,” says Jonah, cutting to the chase.

“You’re not God,” says God, grabbing Jonah by the ears like his skull was a big vase. “Don’t you ever fucking question my judgment in front of people again, or the next time I send a whale, you won’t be sitting in its belly. You’ll be bent over a rock while it rapes you with its big whale dick until I tell it to stop. You hear me, you insufferable prick?”

Jonah finally gets it. The end.

God: “Holy crap, I am huge pissed at those Ninevites. Seriously. Jonah, go tell those idiots to screw their heads on straight.”

Jonah: “Hmm. Naw, I think I’ll pass.”

[God throws Jonah in a whale for three days]

God: “Are you God?”

Jonah: [sniffling] “No, sir.”

God: “You’re damn right you’re not.”

[they make out]

I came across a handful of scholarly debates on the BoJ while doing background reading. One of the biggest points of contention, oddly, was an ongoing debate as to whether the events of BoJ were historical or allegorical. Yep. People went to school and spent months preparing meticulously detailed essays that attempted to pinpoint the exact year God put Jonah in a fish's tummy to make him sad about not sharing. It's like getting scientists to calculate the precise heat index given off when I'm being hugged by Jesus in a sweater. Parents, if you needed any more proof that you should send your child to a trade school instead of flushing your money down the toilet on a liberal arts degree, contemplate the thousands of dollars it'll cost you to let him or her sit up all night writing essays about what color the whale might have been in the Book of Jonah. Two words: Plumber's. College.

I should point out here that the Big JC himself chimes in his two cents on the issue in Matthew 12:39-41, proclaiming the Book of Jonah to be genuine history. So there you go. If you're content to have the issue of whether or not a chapter in a book is fictional settled for for you by another character later in the same book, then it's time to punch out, Columbo, 'cause you just solved the case.

As for me, I remain dubious. I'll give credit where it's due — Jesus could do some pretty cool shit with fish, and a brisk jog over a lake when there were mackable ladies around to impress was no sweat for him. Walking on water? That's awesome no matter how you look at it. But Jesus wasn't an all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful ass-kicker. He was a man, put on Earth to die extremely gruesomely and make us all feel really guilty about it. Son of God or no—he’s not omniscient, he’s certainly not a historian, and he wasn’t around in Jonah’s time. I don’t care how much wine he brews out of tap water, if Jesus is claiming to have definitive evidence of the historical accuracy of a story written centuries before he was born, Jesus is probably talking out of his ass to impress you.

The most definitive proof I can think of that BoJ is fiction that throughout the story, entire hordes of non-believers abandon their religious beliefs and bow before God with only the slightest nudging. First the Tarshish sailors get with God at the first sign of rain. Then the entire metropolis of Nineveh dons sackcloth, plops ass-first into a mud puddle and converts to the glory of the Lord on the say-so of a complete stranger who walked into town that morning and told him his god wanted them all dead. If it was seriously this easy to gain followers back then, it’s no wonder God had to threaten them back to the fold in the first place. If a hot dog cart had beaten Jonah to the city by a day, everyone in Nineveh’d be worshipping the Oscar Meyer weinermobile.

If God's bit with the vine is any indication, Don't Presume to Know the Will of God seems like the big moral lesson here. But it's muddied up a little by the fact that Jonah's such a colossal prick. It's like in Frankenstein, when the evil scientist creates some freak of nature and the moral is that Man Shouldn't Try To Play God — the entire moral hinges on the outcome of playing God being some hideous abomination. What if the scientist playing God was a decent guy who loved his kids, and his attempts at playing God were successful? Well, Okay, It Worked This Time, But You Still Shouldn't Try To Play God On General Principle, I'm Just Saying isn't really as convincing.

Ditto BoJ's moral. Man Shouldn't Presume to Know the Will of God works when the "man" in question is Jonah, and the "will" he's presuming is that God wants every man, woman and child in Nineveh dead. God stepping in here and clarifying things leaves you with a good feeling. However, what if God had come to Jonah and told him to kill every man, woman and child in Nineveh? (A decision far more in line with how the Lord usually settles matters in the OT.) Now you're left with Man Shouldn't Presume to Know the Will of God, So Long As God's Taking the Moral High Ground — a mouthful of a maxim, and hard to embroider on a pillow.

Man Shouldn't Presume to Know the Will of God is a perfectly servicable moral here — though in a world where God doesn't come down very often to argue his intentions with you personally, I propose the back-up moral If You're Presuming to Know the Will of God Because of a Conversation You Had With Him, Right Or Wrong, You're Probably Fucking Crazy.