My Friend Jonah

I have a soft spot for Jonah, the biblical prophet who, upon being sent by God to
the Assyrian Capital of Ninevah to preach its doom, boarded a ship in the
opposite direction instead, was - on his own urge - thrown overboard in a storm,
swallowed by a large sea creature (presumably a sperm whale) & spewed out by
the same 3 days later to finally fulfill his God-given mission in Ninevah.
Maybe one reason I like him is because according to Richard Rohr and Andreas
Ebert, Jonah is the biblical "patron saint" of the Enneagram personality type
NINE, the type I can personally identify myself with best.
My "better half," Sparkles talked to someone about Jonah today, and she said
she's always amazed about how little people actually know about him (as well as
the rest of the Bible).
Even Ebert & Rohr seem to dismiss Jonah's story as a fable in the foot notes to
their book, but a little bit of research would render such an attitude as ignorant, to
say the least. I suppose church Christians simply have to "unlearn" too much
stuff they were taught in their cementaries - er, seminaries - about how and why
all the miracles in the Bible didn't really happen...
If you type in the word "Ninevah" in Google, probably the first place you'll wind up
will be Wikipedia, an excellent online encyclopaedia created by Internet users
around the world & a sheer endless source of information. You'll even be given
the exact geographical coordinates there, which will zoom you right into a
satellite shot of the archaologic site of that ancient city, next to the city of Mosul,
in the province of Ninawa in Iraq, a place where Iraqui insurgents moved after the
infamous Battle of Fallujah in 2004.
Nineveh's location is marked by two large mounds, one of which is called
Nabī Yūnus, which means "Prophet Jonah," and on which a muslim shrine
in honor of the Jewish prophet stands. (If you think that's ridiculous, you should
read the Quran, which revers many Hebrew characters, including Jesus,
Abraham, Isaac, and of course Ishmael, etc.)
You'll even find reports of Christians in the region who observe an old traditional
fast, based on the fast and repentance of Jonah's Ninevites, which led to their
redemption. God simply changed His mind & decided not to destroy them (- yet!
-), much to Jonah's dismay, as you can find in the Bible. - Or accounts of an
ancient Babylonian historian/priest named Berosus who wrote of a mythical
creature named Oannes who was to have emerged from the sea to give divine
wisdom to men. "Oannes" being one possible way to spell "Jonah" in the ancient
Greek Berosus used.
There is even an extensive treatize on Jonah's Whale, mentioning 2 other
occasions in the 18th century in which men are recorded to have survived being
swallowed by a whale.
Finally, you get to the sad truth about what's happening at this historically
significant site right now, with the remainders of the archaeological evidence of
the Biblical accounts of Ninevah's king Sennacherib (as found in 2.Kings chapter
18 & 19) being carried off by looters & thieves, thanks to the chaos the "almighty"
U.S. of A. are wreaking in that misfortunate country, along with the United
Nations.
Probably all this evidence for the accuracy of the Bible must have really been a
thorn in the flesh of the New World Order.
If there's one thing we learn from history, it's that we never learn from it, Toynbee
said, and thus we see yesterday's Davids turn into today's Goliaths, and modern
world empires heinously steal the last remains of former ones, only to meet the
same doom as the former.
David Berg and his Children of God predicted the destruction of America in a "40
Days" warning in 1973, but nothing happened. I believe that God was as merciful
to the Americans as He had been to the Ninevites 2700 years earlier. But
eventually, Ninevah was destroyed. Another prophet, Nahum, was sent, and in
612 B.C. the Babylonians and Medes raked that great city to the ground.
In the light of what I know about what's going on in the U.S.A. today I can only
assume that the later Ninevites must have deserved the judgments just as
today's corrupt leaders will.