Works 2

After Sodom and Gomorrah—living funerals sealed for an age, and the burnings of punishment marked by the long decay of ashes; and the apples that spring forth in vain to the eyes alone; and likewise wrought there the death of sea and salt: if any man there, keeping his punishment with body transformed (i.e., Lot's wife). Almost upon others too the fire above had struck down its showers—a city it was. Such was the transgression of the just one called Nineveh. For what fear has a mind turned aside? Among the common throng all the lessons of punishments are vain, where error holds sway. But the good Lord, patient with us and slow to punish, the Almighty, will hurl forth no wrath, unless he first warn and strike upon hardened breasts, rousing through his august mind the foreseeing prophets. For the Lord had commanded Jonah to foretell to the Ninevites the destruction their deserts had earned; but he, conscious that the Lord spares the submissive, and—

that the threatened punishment yields to suppliants, and that He, easily inclined to good, was wont to relent—he refrained from going, lest he should sing in vain a doom about to give way to peace. Soon his counsel was flight: if indeed there is any such means of escaping God and eluding the right hand of the Lord, beneath which the whole trembling world is held in check. But is it reason—what the prophet does out of his holy heart? On the lip of the shore, in a faithful harbour most renowned, the city of Joppa is washed over against the coasts of the Cilicians. Thence, then, in haste Jonah climbs aboard a ship for Tarshish; the same God carries his deeds; nor, in the end, is it a wonder if, fleeing the Lord on land, he finds him on the waves. For suddenly a little cloud had stained the air, with a sulphurous fleece from a seed conscious of the wind; and little by little the mass coalesced together with the sun, and shut up the cheated day with a marshalled host of darkness.

The sea becomes a mirror of heaven: a black circuit stains the waves. The upper air rushes into darkness and the sea rises up, while the clouds in vain touch the midmost billows. The glory of the winds, which the whole tempest mingles in its whirl—a diverse fury raged against the fugitive Jonah; one single ship was the battleground of both sky and strait. It is beaten this way and that; the whole forest (of timbers) trembles under the wave-breaking blow; below, the spine of the keel is shaken, the yardarm quivers, and the shrieking toil bristles up from the deep. Even the mast itself, doubting whether to be broken, is bent. Meanwhile the sailors' groaning and their voice attempt everything for the sake of ship and life: to bind fast the lingering coils, to lash up the head-rope, to strain to draw tight the bolts, and to drive back with the breast the reluctant turns of the cable.

A part of the inner sea heaves up by turns a foul, heavy stench. But others seize the merchandise and hurl overboard all the cargo, striving to conquer the perils by loss. There are wretched cries at every shattering of the deep, and they stretch out their hands to the godhead of no true gods — they whom the might of sea and sky does not fear; no less it drowns them, buried in their ships, beneath the wrathful whirlwind. Yet the guilty man himself, unaware of all this, lay snoring under the hollow vault of the stern, sounding out sleep through his swollen nostril. Even then in his slumber he was prefiguring the figure of the Lord. The steersman who tends the duties of the prow rouses him, slumbering at peace and proud in tranquil quiet, jostling and rebuking: 'Why,' he says, 'in such a crisis do you take your dreams as usual, and in so great a tempest of the deep do you alone hold on? Look, the wave engulfs us; our one hope is in the gods.'

'You too, whoever your god may be, speak your vows and prayers, invoking and bending in supplication your father's deity.' So then they resolve to learn by lot who is nearer to the fault, who is the cause of the storm. Nor does the lot lie: it falls on Jonah. Then they ask: 'Who and whence among men, who in the end as to his affairs, of what people, of what renowned home are you?' He confesses himself a servant, exceedingly fearful and faithful to God, who lifted high the heaven, who set the earth in place and poured out the seas; and he reveals himself a fugitive of God Himself, and the causes thereof. They grew stiff with dread: 'What fault then is yours against us? What is now to be done? By what pact shall we appease the waters?' For the savage straits swelled greater and far greater still. Then the Lord's prophet, with the upwelling of the spirit, begins: 'Behold, I am the tempest, I am the whole madness of the world;'

'In me,' he says, 'the sky rushes down upon you and the sea rises up; in me the land is far off, death is near, no hope of God remains. Nay, cast me headlong, and lightening the ship of its cause: throw this one great burden, willing, into the sea.' But they strive in vain to turn their course back homeward; for neither would the helm let itself be turned, nor would the hard beam of the yardarm consent to be shifted. At last, turning to the Lord:

'Do not give us over into the gaping jaws of death for the sake of one soul, nor will us to be sprinkled with the blood of a righteous man, if thus Your right hand leads.' And now there, rising from the deepest gulf, a sea-monster, scaly and unrolling the shell-clad column of its body, drove on its own waves with the sea shaken, of its own accord seeking its prey, which, as it pitched headlong from the height of the lofty stern, it greedily swallowed down into its slimy maw; and it received the living feast into its long belly, and together with the man devoured the fury of sky and sea. The wave of the deep is stilled, the shadow of the air dissolved; here the waves, there the winds are rendered friendly. And as the calm keel marks out a safe path, the foamy traces gleam white in the dark-blue furrow. Then the sailors gladly venerate the Lord and offer Him thanks in sacrifice:

The vessel is borne on, and the prophet in the belly. [The prophet Jonah, taken up, sails on elsewhere.] The vessel cleaves the waves, and beneath the deepest waves Jonah is carried down, his soul still breathing within the beast — enclosed yet not drenched by the waters, the innermost of the sea yet outside it. Among the half-eaten flesh and bodies dissolved in rotting decay, learning now, even now, his own funeral rites: yet it was destined to be hereafter a sign of the Lord, not of destruction; rather, he was made the glory of heaven.