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.