Ver. 21. "And saviours go up on Mount Zion to judge the Mount of Esau, and the kingdom shall be the Lord's."
עלו is to be accounted for from the consideration, that the deliverance and salvation imply the entire overthrow—the total carrying away of the people. The Saviour κατ᾽ ἐξοχήν is hidden beneath the "saviours;" compare Judges iii. 9, 15; Neh. ix. 27. But even here, everything is connected with human individuals; and the more glorious the salvation which the prophet beholds in the future, viz., the absolute dominion of the Lord, and His people, over the world, the less can it be conceived that the prophet should have expected the realization of it by a collective body of mortal men without a leader. But the plural intimates that the antitype is not without types,—that the head cannot be conceived of without members. In Jer. xxiii. 4, we read: "And I raise up shepherds over them which shall feed them;" and immediately afterwards the one good shepherd—Christ—forms the subject of discourse.—And the kingdom shall be the Lord's."—His dominion, till then concealed, shall now be publicly manifested, and the people of the earth shall acknowledge it, either spontaneously, or by constraint. The coming of this kingdom has begun with Christ, and, in Him, waits for its consummation. The opinion of Caspari, that the contents of vers. 19 and 20, as well as the close of this prophecy, belong altogether to the future, rests on a false, literal explanation, the inadmissibility of which is sufficiently evident from the circumstance that the Edomites, Philistines, and Canaanites have long since disappeared from the scene of history; so that there exists no longer the possibility of a literal fulfilment.
[ [1]] The fact that, everywhere, the discourse is addressed to the Edomites, proves that here also Edom is addressed. The כי and the כאשר sin this verse, compared with those in the preceding verse, likewise suggest this. Compare, moreover, Joel iv. (iii.) 3, to which passage there is already an allusion in ver. 11.
[ [2]] Namely, the cup of punishment, of divine wrath.
[THE PROPHET JONAH.]
It has been asserted without any sufficient reason, that Jonah is older than Hosea, Joel, Amos, and Obadiah,—that he is the oldest among the prophets whose written monuments have been preserved to us. The passage in 2 Kings xiv. 25, where it is said, that Jonah, the son of Amittai the prophet, prophesied to Jeroboam the happy success of his arms, and the restoration of the ancient boundaries of Israel, and that this prophecy was confirmed by the event, cannot decide in favour of this assertion, because it cannot be proved that the victories of Jeroboam belonged to the beginning of his reign. On the other hand, it is opposed, first, by the position of the book in the collection of the Minor Prophets, which, throughout, is chronologically arranged, and which is tantamount to an express testimony that Jonah wrote after Hosea, Joel, Amos, and Obadiah. Then,—the circumstance that Nineveh is mentioned here, and that too in a way which implies that, even at that time, the hostile relations of the Assyrians to the Covenant-people had already begun, while in the first part of Hosea, in Joel, Amos, and Obadiah, no reference to the Assyrians is as yet found. Even ancient interpreters, as Chr. B. Michaelis, Crusius (in the Theol. Proph. iii. S. 38), inferred from this mention of Nineveh, that the book had been composed in consequence of the first invasion of the Assyrians under Menahem, who ascended the throne 13 years after the death of Jeroboam II. Finally,—the book begins with and. Wherever else, in the canonical books of the Old Testament, such a beginning occurs, it indicates a resumption of, and a junction with, former links in the chain of sacred literature; compare Judges i. 1; 1 Sam. i. 1; Ezek. i. 1. That the expression, "And it came to pass," with which the book opens, is intended to establish the connection with the prophecy of Obadiah, which occupies the immediately preceding place in the Canon, is intimated by the internal relation of the two books to each other. The prophecy of Obadiah bears, throughout, a hostile aspect to the heathen world; it appears to him as the object only of God's judging activity. Jonah, on the other hand, received the mission, distinctly to point out the other aspect of the matter, and thereby, not indeed to correct, but certainly to supplement his predecessor.
The time was approaching when the heathen world was to pour out its floods upon the people of God. It was obvious that the position of Israel towards it became one altogether repulsive, that the susceptibility of the heathen for salvation was denied, and God's mercy was limited to Israel. Narrow-minded exclusiveness received a powerful support from the oppression and haughtiness of the heathen. Whilst other prophets opposed such exclusiveness by their words, by announcing the extension of salvation to the Gentiles, Jonah received the mission to illustrate, by a symbolical action, the capacity of the heathen for salvation, and their future participation in it. The effect of this must necessarily have been so much the greater, as the whole of the little book is exclusively devoted to this subject, as it appeared at the first beginning of the conflict, and as Nineveh is mentioned here, for the first time, in so peaceable and conciliatory a relation, and in close harmony and connection with the announcement of the willing submission of the heathen world to the dominion of Shiloh, spoken of in Gen. xlix. 10. It is remarkably impressive to see how spirit here triumphs over nature—a triumph which appears so much the brighter because the prophet himself pays his tribute to nature; for it was because he listened to the voice of nature, that, at first, he intended to flee to Tarshish. The reason why the commission of the Lord was so disagreeable to him, we learn from chap. iv. 2. He was afraid lest the preaching of repentance, which was committed to him, might turn away the judgments of the Lord from Nineveh, the metropolis of that country which threatened destruction to Israel. He knew the deep corruption of his own people, and foreboded the issue which the extension of the means of grace to the Gentiles might very easily bring about in the end. But yet, he felt almost irresistibly impelled to carry out the commission of God, and in order to cut himself off from the possibility of following the voice which called him to the east, he resolved to go to the far distant west. The voice, however, followed him even there; but the farther he advanced on his journey, the more difficult it became for him to follow it. At a later period, when the Lord granted mercy to Nineveh, he was angry and wished to die, not by any means because he felt himself injured in his honour as a prophet (as was erroneously supposed, even by Calvin), but because he grudged to the Gentiles the mercy which he considered as a prerogative of Israel only, and because he was anxious for the destruction of Nineveh as the metropolis of that kingdom which was destined to be the rod of chastisement for his own people. He was thus actuated by the same ardent love for his people which called forth the wish of St Paul, that he might become an anathema for his brethren,—by the same disposition of mind which prevailed in the elder brother at the return of the prodigal son (Luke xv. 25 ff.), and which at first would manifest itself even in Peter, Acts x. 14 ff. The Jewish sentence (Carpzov. Introd. 3, p. 149), "Jonah was anxious for the glory of the Son, but he did not seek the glory of the Father," is very significant. Jonah exhibits, in a very striking way, the thoughts of his old man, in order that Israel might recognise themselves in his image. But we are not at liberty to say that the prophet represented the people only. It is true that, as one of the people, he also entertained those thoughts; but, besides these, he entertained other thoughts also. The voices of the Lord which he heard were spiritual; and such voices can be heard only when there is something akin in the heart. Not even with one step did Jonah touch the territory of the false prophets, who prophesied out of their own hearts. He retained all his human weakness to himself, and the Word of God stood by the side of it in unclouded brightness, and obtained absolute victory.
There can be no doubt that we have before us in the Book of Jonah the description of a symbolical action,—that his mission to Nineveh has an object distinct from the mission itself,—that it is not the result attained by it in the first instance which is the essential point, but that it is its aim to bring to light certain truths, and in the form of fact, to prophesy future things. The truths are these:—First, that the Gentiles are by no means so unsusceptible of the higher truth as vulgar prejudice imagined them to be. This was manifested by the conduct of the sailors, who, at last, offer sacrifices and even vows to Jehovah; but, in a more striking manner, by the deep impression which the discourse of Jonah produced upon the Ninevites. In this we have the actual proof of Ezek. iii. 5, 6, where the prophet represents his mission as one of peculiar difficulty—more difficult, even, than it would have been if addressed to the Gentiles: "Had I sent thee to them, surely they would have hearkened to thee." Further,—that it is not in His relation to Israel only, but in His relation to the Gentiles also, that the Lord is "gracious and merciful, slow to anger and of great kindness," chap. iv. 2. The view which these words, at once, open up into the future, is, that at some future period the Lord will grant to the Gentiles the preaching of His word, and admission into His kingdom. The glory of His mercy and grace would have been darkened, if the revelation of them had been for ever limited to a particular, small portion of the human race. Nineveh, the representative of the heathen multitude, is very significantly called the "great city" at the very outset, in i. 2, and "a great city for God," in iii. 3, for which, as Michaelis remarks, God specially cared, on account of the great number of souls; compare iv. 11.
If the symbolical and prophetical character of the book be denied, the fact of its having its place among the prophetical, and not among the historical, books, admits of no explanation at all. For so much is evident, that this fact cannot be satisfactorily accounted for by the circumstance that the book reports the events which happened to a prophet. The sound explanation has been already given by Marckius: "The book is, in a great measure, historical, but in such a manner, that in the history itself there is hidden the mystery of the greatest prophecy, and that Jonah proves himself to be a true prophet, by the events which happened to him, not less than by his utterances." A similar explanation is given by Carpzovius: "By his own example, as well as by the event itself, he bore witness that it was the will of God that all men should be saved, and should come to the knowledge of the truth," 1 Tim. ii. 4.