“I Will Not Be Concerned for Nineveh”: Rereading Jonah’s Ending

It was a regular class in Intermediate Hebrew with Prof. Mark Smith at Princeton Theological Seminary during the Fall 2025 semester. We were working through the Book of Jonah, and finally we reached the famously abrupt ending. Like most readers before us, we translated Jonah 4:11 as a question: “Should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city…?” The flow felt natural, as the story reached its proper climax. After all, the comic characterization of Jonah seems to demand a lesson: the stubborn prophet must be corrected by a merciful God.

Then our professor interrupted, gently: “Look at the text again. Do you see any interrogative particle?” We looked again. There wasn’t. No הֲ (ha), or any other marker of interrogation. Only this unsettling clause:

וַאֲנִי לֹא אָחוּס עַל־נִינְוֵה

And I will not be concerned for Nineveh…

That single question—I mean the absence of question—throws the entire interpretation into tension. What if God is not really concerned about Nineveh? Perhaps, we have inherited a Jonah framed by good closure, while the text itself refuses to close. Perhaps our valuable traditions have smoothed the prophet into a comic character, and God into a moral maxim. But what if Jonah is not a caricature, and God is not delivering a catechism? What if the ending is a mirror—and God is mirroring Jonah?

I am not discrediting any of the major translations that consider this as a question. Even as I agree with them, the textual problem also opens possibilities to think beyond. This is just a curiosity of “what ifs.” Holy ambiguities open. And with them comes a necessary humility: neither God nor Scripture can be flattened into easy categories; neither Jonah nor his God is safe for moralizing.

The Grammar of Jonah 4:11: MT and LXX

Most English translations add a question mark to Jonah 4:11. There is nothing wrong with translating the verse as a rhetorical question; it offers clear conclusion and invites readers toward divine compassion. Yet, strictly speaking, neither the Masoretic Text (Hebrew) nor the Septuagint (Greek) supplies clear interrogative terms.

Of course, it is contextually acceptable to read it as a question without any interrogative marker. However, the point is not that a question is impossible, but that the text does not require one, and the declarative yields a theologically coherent reading consistent with the book’s pathos.

Grammatically, a declarative reading is possible. Read that way, the line becomes startling: “I will not be concerned for Nineveh.” Suddenly God’s words no longer stand over against Jonah’s frustration; they resonate with it. The closing statement unsettles our plot, our lesson, our certainty of how the book must close.

This syntactic ambiguity may be the key that unlocks the book. If the closing line is not a rhetorical justification for mercy but an utterance of divine irony or grief or even a question of divine mercy itself in the narrative framework, the theological balance shifts. The God of Jonah is not simply teaching compassion; he is participating in lament over a morally inverted world.

A Note on Context

The book of Jonah is a Judean text. It was likely written after the fall of Samaria in 721 BCE. It may even come from a time after the fall of Nineveh in 612 BCE. The story places Jonah in the 8th century BCE, who looks forward to the fall of Nineveh. However, the readers already know how Nineveh ended. In that sense, “I will not be concerned for Nineveh” becomes a Judean reflection on imperial collapse. To understand the text, one must first understand the Judean experience under the brutality of the Assyrian empire.[1]

Since its rise to power in the 8th century BCE, the Neo-Assyrian empire expanded westward and subdued many kingdoms. Eventually, both Israel and Judah became its vassals. By the late 8th century BCE, the northern kingdom of Israel fell with the capture of Samaria. The Assyrian emperor Sargon II, who claims credit for Samaria’s capture (c. 722/21 BCE) after its siege by Shalmaneser V, boasts in his inscriptions of his “achievements” in conquering cities and deporting countless people. Yet, ironically, he also speaks of his “mercy.” Recounting his eighth campaign (c. 714 BCE), Sargon II inscribes about sparing the cities of Appatar and Kitpat without destroying them: “They begged me to spare their lives, and they kissed my feet so that I should not destroy their fortified emplacements. Accordingly, I appointed a representative over them for the well-being of their land….”[2] In another stela, he says, “I pardoned 6,300 guilty Assyrians; and showed mercy on them; and I settled them in Hamath.”[3] But is sparing cities or subjects truly an act of mercy? Imperial “mercy” is often a curse of life under domination over the blessing of death. It is a coerced survival within the system that terrorized them. The spared ones must continue to live in the “mercy” of the empire that mutilated their world.

However, the ironic “mercy” of Assyrian empire is only a passing reference in comparison to its cruelty and terrorism. This reminds of the Lachish reliefs in the Assyrian palace that narrate the story of Sennacherib’s siege and victory over the city of Lachish, a Judean city (c. 701 BCE cf. 2 Kgs 18:  13–14). It depicts the Assyrian imperial brutality. One of the reliefs (see below) shows Assyrian soldiers flaying two men alive, while two little boys[4] stand by, forced to witness the horror. It is a piece of propaganda carved in stone, but it is also a record of trauma — an image of empire at its most merciless. This is an imperial terrorism to bring the citizens into submission. God knows the impact of terror on the children who were made witnesses of the trauma. Who knows how the traumatic memory is imprinted on their hearts as they grow up with it.

From Nineveh, Room XXXVI of the southwest palace, panels 9-10. The British Museum, London. Photo © Osama S. M. Amin.[5]

Sennacherib, in one of his inscriptions, also boasts of taking 200,150 captives from Judah.[6] This number may be propaganda, yet even symbolically it outnumbers the total deportations under Nebuchadnezzar. While Nebuchadnezzar’s all three deportations of Judeans combined is just 4,600 (cf. Jer 52:28–30), the Assyrian number is roughly 44 times greater than that.

Given this context, God must be just. Jonah is the prophet who wrestles with that demand. When God retracts from destroying Nineveh after its repentance, is Nineveh no longer accountable for its violence? The question lingers beyond the prophet’s lifetime. Jonah’s text resonates after Samaria’s fall, after Assyria’s campaign against Judah, and finally after Nineveh’s own destruction. Within that historical frame, the closing line carries retrospective irony: mercy was extended, yet justice was not erased (cf. Exod 34:6–7).

If Jonah 4:11 Is a Statement

Catherine L. Muldoon, in her book, In Defense of Divine Justice, argues that Jonah’s closing scene reverses the usual moralizing arc. She considers the plant (qiqayon), for which Jonah mourns (4:9), as an imperial imagery, borrowing the prophetic tree metaphors (e.g., the Assyria as compared to cedar in Ezek 31). The verb גָּדַל (gadal, “to make grow”) links YHWH’s nurturing of the plant with his sovereign promotion of kings and empires (cf. Dan 2:21). Its overnight flourishing and ruin sketch the rise and fall of great powers. The worm that attacked the plant and the scorching east wind portend divine defeat of the imperial power. On this reading, Nineveh’s “sparing” is temporary. “Great city” language hints that Nineveh’s greatness will meet a fate like the plant itself.[7]

But as I read Muldoon, a different question arose about the plant: If neither Jonah nor God “laboured” for the plant (4:10), why should either be concerned? If God says, in effect, “I will not be concerned for Nineveh,” a city he did not “covenantally” labour for, then what about the one he did labour for?

This is where, in the narrative’s irony, between the lines, I am trying to read something about the plant for which YHWH indeed laboured: Israel/Judah (cf. Isa 5). How much more will YHWH be concerned about his vine that is now trampled by Assyrian powers (cf. Ps 80)?

I see Jonah’s lament more than personal irritation; it echoes collective trauma. What if Jonah’s grief is not pettiness alone, but also displaced Samaria/Zion-lament? The plant’s one-night life becomes an image of the withering of Samaria/Zion—what God did plant and labour for—and yet allowed to fall before Assyria and Babylon. In this light, Jonah is not the stubborn nationalist corrected by universal grace but a prophet protesting the asymmetry of history: Why is Nineveh spared while Zion is not? Why do empires thrive while covenant communities perish?

If the ending of Jonah is declarative—“I will not be concerned for Nineveh”—then the audience already knows what befell Nineveh in 612 BCE. Jonah’s story, then, stands parallel to Nahum’s: the former exploring divine patience amid injustice, the latter proclaiming the eventual fall of the oppressor. Read this way, God’s final line becomes divine irony—perhaps even sorrow—spoken in solidarity with Jonah. Not as God against Jonah, but God with Jonah.

Jonah 4:11 Extending Exodus 34:6–7[8]

Jonah knows YHWH’s self-declaration (Exod 34:6–7). He quotes it (Jon 4:2): “gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.” He stops before the second half: “yet by no means clearing the guilty.” That omission is not denial; it is tension. Across Scripture (Joel 2:13; Nah 1:3; Ps 103:8; Neh 9:17), this formula expands toward both mercy and justice. Jonah plays that chord. Mercy is invoked now, but justice is not forgotten. Thus, a post-Nineveh frame makes sense: justice had already arrived. Jonah does not contradict Nahum; he illuminates it. They stand as dialectical twins: Jonah explores the emotional and theological cost of waiting; Nahum proclaims the hour when patience yields to judgment. “I will not be concerned for Nineveh,” then, can be heard as retrospective lament—an acknowledgment that Nineveh’s repentance was brief and its survival temporary.

The Conclusion of Jonah and Reading Backwards (with Job)

Jonah ends, like Job, with divine speech that destabilizes our moral equations. In Job 42:7–8 God discredits the friends’ neat theodicy and sides with Job’s honest speeches even if they sound blasphemous to pious ears. This is unexpected of God to disqualify his defenders and side with this one fragile human who heaped all accusations on God’s management of the world.

There is also another twist at the end of the Book of Job. Job 42:6: “I despise myself in dust and ashes.” Traditionally, this statement is read as Job’s words of submission. But Troy W. Martin proposes an alternative, linguistically and textually that the line might in fact be YHWH’s own statement.[9] If so, it is not Job but God who repents, entering the dust and ashes of human suffering. Then, this is a divine self-reversal that reframes the book. Job’s YHWH, we might say, deconstructs himself by the end of his whirlwind speeches.

In that light, Jonah’s finale sharpens. What if “I will not be concerned for Nineveh” is not a rebuke but a cry of grief—YHWH’s participation in the prophet’s concern for justice? Jonah’s silence is not sulking; it is sacred. Words would fracture what only silence can hold: mercy that spares the violent, justice that seems delayed, and the ache of divine empathy. Reading backwards becomes the method: the un-questioned line at the end teaches us to reread the whole book from its holy rupture.

That is why I believe there is a possibility to read Jonah backwards once we reach the end. Reading backwards means that the entire narrative structure we have built collapses at the close—especially if we read that ending as disnarration. In biblical storytelling, disnarration often collapses the expectations of readers; it unsettles what we think should happen. It is common in Revelation and can also be found in Genesis and elsewhere.

So What?

a.       The Character of God

God’s nature cannot be flattened. Any portrayal that reduces God to either endless leniency or mechanistic retribution betrays the Name of Exodus 34. Jonah’s God is patient past our comfort and just beyond our timetables. His mercy is neither naïve nor detached from justice.

b.      The Pattern of Mercy and Justice

Temporary, sensational repentance does not buttress the evil one against judgment. It reminds me of the period of Josiah. According to the narrative of 2 Kings, while God accepted the repentance of Josiah and his people, yet he did not forget what Manasseh had done (cf. 2 Kgs 23:26–27). God chose to postpone judgment to the next generation.

Similarly, in 1 Kings 21:27–29, when Elijah confronts Ahab over his evil act against Naboth, the king tears his clothes, puts on sackcloth, and fasts (just as the Ninevites had done) in response to the prophet’s announcement of divine punishment. So, YHWH responded to Ahab’s humbling by postponing evil over Ahab’s house in his lifetime as a response to his humbling.

This similar pattern appears with Nineveh, if the end of Jonah is a declarative statement. Even as they repented of their violence (ḥāmās in Hebrew), it is as though God also had to listen to the anger of those who suffered that ḥāmās. Forgiveness, in Scripture, is never detached from the cries of victims. This is complicated, yet we must understand it in light of the trauma of exile and Israel’s covenant failure. In Isaiah 40:2, YHWH also agrees that his people suffered beyond the degree of their sin.

 c.       The Prophet and His God

Jonah is a prophet, not a punchline. This reading resists the anti-Jewish misuses of Jonah that caricature the prophet as ethnocentric. The narrative itself honours gentiles early on: the sailors fear YHWH and sacrifice (Jon 1). Jonah’s protest against YHWH’s mercy towards Nineveh is not hatred but heartbreak—a covenantal anguish voiced from the ruins of history. The final line becomes divine solidarity with Jonah’s pain over what Nineveh has done to his people.

Whether Jonah’s story ends with YHWH’s question or an assertion, the book does not end with a resolution. God and prophet sit together in ambiguity. The moral symmetry we hunger for is not resolved but held. The question that remains unasked becomes, paradoxically, the most profound form of divine speech. Whether the book ends with a question mark or a full stop, the story places a question mark on the face of the readers, inviting us into the world of ambiguities. Yet even amid those ambiguities, we can trust in God who was patient with Jonah—or perhaps in a prophet who was patient with God.

If the ending is indeed declarative, then the author is communicating that God is merciful even to the most violent ones, yet that mercy is not naïve. God’s mercy is not so cheap. Moreover, God can be understood—or even protested—only by his covenant partners. The covenant partner must certainly look past their own “unworthiness” when they received his mercy, yet the relationship must look forward. It is like saying, “It was God’s mercy extended to me, but will God remain faithful to this relationship?”

I also think the story is about an adamant God and an adamant prophet—two beings who must sit together east of the city and question each other. As the audience, we must listen without glorifying one and without vilifying the other. The question continues to ring: Is God’s mercy justifiable, and was Jonah rightly angry?

Postscript

So yes—this is why I want to read Jonah backwards. Not to dismantle every view or discredit serious work, but to let this argument live as an appendix, a small after-voice. Jonah’s ending is an invitation to sit between a merciful God and a reluctant prophet, to listen before we judge. All our imaginations about God’s overflowing mercy are beautiful, but when we idolize them, there is a problem. Neither divine mercy nor his justice demands compartmentalization; they coexist without hierarchy.

The story of Jonah, like much of Scripture, does not conclude neatly. It ends with a pause—a divine ache, a prophetic protest, and an open invitation to begin again. It calls us into a space of tension: between divine mercy and divine justice, between repentance and remembrance, between forgiveness and the ache of history.

I know this may sound more like preaching, but I am trying to see Jonah and his God beside Jacob and his God. Jacob wrestles all night and is stricken before receiving the blessing, while Jonah wrestles with God’s mercy and is stricken by the scorching east wind. In both stories, who is winning—both, or neither?

The Bible, I always remind myself, is a book of questions, not a book of answers to all our questions. We must first listen to the questions Scripture itself is wrestling with before we ask, “What is the answer to my problem?” That is what makes Scripture so raw—fully divine, inasmuch as it brings God near to us, and fully human, inasmuch as it exposes our brokenness and our questions before him.

Just as Hezekiah opened the scroll of Rabshakeh and placed it before God when the Assyrians terrorized him, so must we bring everything before God in our laments. Lament brings all things into his presence, yet moves forward with scars and unresolved tensions. Jacob continued to limp for the rest of his life, even as he carried a new name.

[1] The prophetic traditions of Nahum and Isaiah (1–39) provide a broader picture of Judean responses to the Assyrian brutality. For Isaiah’s representation of Assyria, see Peter Machinist, “Assyria and Its Image in the First Isaiah,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 103.4 (1983): 719–37.

[2] F. M. Fales, “The Letter To The God Aššur Recounting Sargon’s Eighth Campaign (714 BCE) (4.42),” in The Context of Scripture: Canonical Compositions, Monumental Inscriptions, and Archival Documents from the Biblical World, ed. William W. Hallo and K. Lawson Younger, Jr., vol. 4: Supplements (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2017), 201.

[3] K. Lawson Younger, Jr., “The Borowski Stela (2.118B),” in The Context of Scripture: Canonical Compositions, Monumental Inscriptions, and Archival Documents from the Biblical World, ed. William W. Hallo and K. Lawson Younger, Jr., vol. 2: Monumental Inscriptions from the Biblical World (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2003), 294.

[4] Jason Anthony Riley, “Children Should Be Seen: Studying Children in Assyrian Iconography,” in Children and Methods: Listening To and Learning From Children in the Biblical World, ed. Kristine Henriksen Garroway and John W. Martens, vol. 67 of Brill’s Series in Jewish Studies (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2020), 92–95.

[5] https://etc.worldhistory.org/photos/siege-lachish-reliefs-british-museum/

[6] Mordechai Cogan, “Sennacherib’s Siege of Jerusalem (2.119B),” in COS 2, 303.

[7] Catherine L. Muldoon, In Defense of Divine Justice: An Intertextual Approach to the Book of Jonah (Winona, MN: Anselm Academic, 2010), chap. 4.

[8] Mark S. Smith, class discussion.

[9] Troy W. Martin, “Concluding the Book of Job and YHWH: Reading Job from the End to the Beginning,” Journal of Biblical Literature 137, no. 2 (2018): 299–318.