Prophecy or Clubber Lang Predicts Pain

Chapter 1 sets up the plot faster than Speed Racer’s Mach 6. God instructs Jonah to visit enemy territory in Assyria to call out the people of Nineveh for their Junior Healy behavior (v. 2). Jonah reacts in the most unintentionally humorous way possible: he tries to duck out on omnipresent God by hopping on a ship charted for Tarshish. He doesn’t just avoid going to Nineveh, he maps the farthest point from the Assyrian capital and packs his bags (v. 3). But there’s no escaping God’s view of the nine realms. As Heimdall would say, “You think you can deceive me? I, who watch all? I, who can sense the flapping of a butterfly’s wings a thousand worlds away? Or can hear a cricket passing gas in Neflheim?” And sure enough, the shore is barely out of sight when God uses his Maxine Hunkel wind powers to rock the boat. It gets so intense it threatens to sink the vessel. The crew scarf down all of the Dramamine and dump the cargo overboard, while below deck Jonah sleeps through the commotion like Morty Melnick. But when the captain wakes him up to join the crew in casting lots to see who’s to blame, Jonah naturally draws the shortest straw and confesses his half-wit plan to outrun God. He instructs the reluctant sailors to toss him overboard and finally they do. The wind dies down the second he hits the water (v. 15). But God doesn’t want him dead. Instead, he sends a “great fish” to house Jonah the same way Monstro did Geppetto (v. 17). Trapped inside the fish for days, Jonah resorts to prayer. Who wouldn’t? His words are heartfelt enough to convince God to give him a second chance.

In chapter 2, the fish yacks the prophet out onto a beach (v. 11). It’s a memorable day for Jonah and the local sunbathers. He doesn’t have time to wash off the stench with a tomato bath before God reiterates his instruction to notify the bad guys that they have 40 days to clean up their act…or else. This time, Jonah doesn’t mess around. Chapter 3 sees him throw together a “The End is Nigh” sign and march into Nineveh, alerting citizens of their immanent doom. When they hear the futurecast, the entire city makes an about face, commoners and king alike. They can’t set things right fast enough. Nineveh makes a full-on Earl J. Hickey apology tour. They even include the livestock. And it works. God lets the remorseful baddies off the hook (v. 10). This is good news, right? Not according to Jonah. Instead of being psyched his message saved thousands of lives, chapter 4 reveals the runaway prophet isn’t a reluctant spokesman, he’s a worldclass jackass: “I knew you’d pull this shit! That’s why I didn’t want to come here in the first place” (v. 2, English dub). Jonah is actually upset God is being nice to someone other than the Hebrews. That’s why he ran. He didn’t think the Assyrians deserved God’s kindness. Take a breath, bro. At the moment, the Assyrians are being more compliant toward God than Israel. Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think? Quick, someone cue up Alanis Morissette.

Jonah is so bummed out by God’s tolerance he decides he’d rather die than witness the Assyrians go on living. God’s inclusiveness to “outsiders” is more than he can handle. Jonah doesn’t want to see the Assyrians become recipients of what he views as an exclusive Hebrew privilege. He understands God’s nature, but refuses to accept that his compassion extends to everyone. In verse 3, Jonah goes into full Bruce Nolan “Smite me, O mighty smiter!” mode. By now, God must be exhausted from repeating himself. He didn’t choose Israel because he liked them more than other nations. He chose them to be an outreach program, so others would join up and enjoy the same benefits: remote access, loyalty rewards, exclusive events, emeritus status. But Jonah isn’t interested in new members. His elitism keeps him from wanting to extend God’s outreach. Dude is a bigger snob than the guys behind the counter at Championship Vinyl. Despite God’s best effort to convince him all life matters, patriotism overrides his compassion (v. 11). Jonah is still death wish angry and listening to Metallica’s “Kill ’Em All” on a loop when the book comes to a close. It’s another Samson situation, with God using an undeniable douche bag to get something done (scene select Judges 13-16 to rewatch). If we’ve learned anything, it’s that God is crazy flexible in his approach. He only works in mysterious ways if you’re not paying attention.

The job Jonah wants so badly goes to the prophet Nahum over a century later, when Nineveh’s downfall is predicted and “no one turns back” (Nahum 2:8). Yay! Death and destruction.

Amos isn’t a priest or educated court bro. He’s a blue-collar guy known for wearing the same pair of cargo pants every day. That doesn’t make him an ignorant bumpkin, though. It’s just that speaking tactfully isn’t high on his list of priorities. God doesn’t mince words, so neither does he. His judgment comes down harder than Maximum Dave Hoberman. God puts Israel on rape, pillage and burn notice and, in chapter 4, levies some social justice on the rich “cows” who treat the lower class like Squid Game contestants (v. 1). These ladies are worse than Abby and Martha Brewster. Amos warns them “the days are coming upon you [w]hen they will take you away with meat hooks” (v. 2). That’s enough to make you cringe and cheer simultaneously. There’s a lot of hardline clean-up-your-act talk in chapter 5 (see vv. 4, 6, 14), before God finally tells the Hebrews to stop wasting time with offerings and festivals, because he ain’t listening (vv. 21-23).

In chapter 7, Amos’ pitch-black forecast against Israel inspires local pastor Amaziah to insist the prophet takes his Debbie Downer routine somewhere else. This backfires worse than a Shooter McGavin insult when Amos informs Amaziah his wife will start hooking for a living, his kids will die in a knife fight, his property will be seized and his ashes will be stored in a Folger’s tin (v. 17). And while Amos downplays his prophetic street cred, he predicts his countrymen’s doom in no uncertain terms: “The end has come for My people Israel. I will spare them no longer” (8:2).

God tells Hosea to marry a working girl in the opening verses of chapter 1 to illustrate Israel’s tendency to cheat on him (v. 2). Hosea picks Gomer and for a minute it looks like she may be a reformed Vivian Ward, settling down to have a kid with Hosea. But three verses later she’s already prego again and this time Hosea isn’t sure it’s his. Gomer gets a lawyer and defends her seven single acts of indiscretion more vehemently than Samantha Cole. The same goes for kid number three. God instructs Hosea on what to call each child, with each name becoming more ominous than the last. He really drives his point home with the third kid, calling him Lo-ammi (aka, Not My People) (v. 9). Since Israel has logged more infidelities than Grace Hanadarko, it’s not hard to understand his frustration.

In chapter 3, God sends Hosea to retrieve Gomer from her latest john and take her back in (v. 1). Subtle. Like Israel, old habits die hard for Gomer and Hosea is left to sort things out. As Dante Hicks would say, “My girlfriend sucked 37 dicks!” A large portion of the book is God slut-shaming Israel: “My people consult their wooden idol … they have played the harlot, departing from their God” (4:12). He calls Israel a harlot so many times here a legal name change appears to be in order. God clearly isn’t interested in being included in a sacrificial threesome alongside Silver Surfer and Bao, the god of dumplings. Once again, he downplays sacrifice and burnt offerings to remind everyone that he prefers loyalty and kindness (6:6, also note Micah 6:6-7). He sounds like a jilted ex when he points out, “A craftsman made it, so it is not God” (8:6). After centuries of whoring around with other gods, Israel has yet again pushed God to the brink. Their punishment is irony when they fall victim to Assyria’s Paulie Cicero protection racket, with God only offering a snippy “I told you so” on the backend (12:10). But if that humiliation isn’t enough, he threatens them with beast mode if they don’t renew their vows with him: “I will be like a lion … a leopard … like a bear robbed of her cubs” (13:7-9). It’s looks like God is all out of bubble gum—but according to chapter 14 he’s not happy about it. He tells Israel if they yeet their idols and return to him he will “love them freely” and drop the whole thing (v. 4). It’s no wonder God comes off as unstable sometimes, he’s attempting to be monogamous with Hank Moody.

The first thing you should know about the prophet Isaiah is that he read the Harbrace College Handbook for fun…twice. MLA and APA styles? Oh yeah. He’s an educated man of the courts. A wiz with words. The bard of Scripture, who just so happens to be the Kwisatz Haderach. With 66 chapters, his self-titled book of poetry and prose makes Amos and Hosea look like high school dropouts. In fact, Isaiah’s vocabulary is unmatched in the Tanach. As Hedley Lamarr would say, “My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives.” Isaiah’s long career peaked during Hezekiah’s reign and his book is full of condemnation and warnings, comfort and hope—and a futurecast that extends to Jesus or the Jetsons, depending on who you talk to. In chapter 6, the prophet offers a peek into God’s unusual interview process, which is a hallucinogenic dream sequence where Isaiah sees God and thinks he’s going to die, before proving to be more tolerate than Aldous Snow. He’s hired on the spot. If anything, Isaiah is over-qualified. Thanks to him, God’s judgment sounds as beautiful as it does brutal. As Jimmy Dix would say, “We’re being beat up by the inventor of Scrabble!”

There are plenty of familiar themes here, but, once again, it’s God’s involvement that stands out. He doesn’t go on holiday and leave Judah vulnerable. He plays puppet master with their rogues’ gallery. God calls Assyria “the rod of my anger” (10:5), Babylonia “My mighty warriors” (13:3) and Cyrus the Great his “shepherd” (45:1). But he predicts these powerhouse nations’ eventual downfall, too. God goes full Motörhead in chapter 20, instructing Isaiah to rock out with his cock out for three years ahead of Egypt being stripped bare (vv. 2-4). Metal! No one comes out unscathed. And right in the middle of it all is the terrifyingly casual chapter 40, where the poetic text claims God can cup all four oceans in the palm of his hand, views the nations of the world as “less than nothing” and compares humans to insects (vv. 12-25). God makes Galactus look like subatomic Ant-Man. That’s right. Size does matter.

But God isn’t eager to lay waste or call it quits. He searches for someone good enough to stand between him and Jerusalem’s destruction, but can’t find anyone (check out Ezekiel 22:30). And despite being immeasurably pissed, he remains available: “I permitted Myself to be found by those who did not seek Me” (65:1). But not only is Judah not looking, they don’t like to be reminded. According to Jewish lore, Hezekiah’s disreputable son Manasseh has Isaiah sawed in half, and not in the cool David Copperfield kind of way, for his less than flattering criticism of king and country (note 2 Kings 21:16).

Jeremiah’s book is Scripture’s longest publication, and, unlike most of the other self-titled books, this one reveals quite a bit about its author. He’s a cleric. He’s the son of Hilkiah (the priest who discovered the lost book of Moses in 2 Kings 22). In chapter 1, God bombs the abortion clinic stating he made Jeremiah specifically for the job: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” (v. 5). He’s notably young. Jeremiah even argues his age disqualifies him, but God reminds him Doogie Howser became a doctor at fourteen and all Jeremiah has to do is play Simon Says. The text says he’s from the town of Anathoth, but his vocabulary indicates he may have grown up in Capeside, Massachusetts with Dawson Leery. Chronologically, he’s is the first person in Scripture to refer to the Hebrews as Jews. He starts his career in the middle of Josiah’s reign.

The prophet gets his first assignment in chapter 2, hitting the streets to call out Judah for breaking contract with God. Is there an echo in here? We’ve heard this before. Israel has already been lost to captivity. Simon says, take a hint. Other nations don’t swap their gods like baseball cards (v. 11). Like a lover scorned, God makes a bigger scene throwing them out than Drew Purify. He’s even a little snarky about it: “Where have you not been violated?” (3:2). God uses Jeremiah like an Uzi, but the Jews don’t flinch. They treat the prophet’s constant warnings like a test of the Emergency Broadcast System interrupting their favorite TV show. Jeremiah is basically Dr. Samuel Loomis running around Haddonfield on Halloween night. No one is listening and he knows it (6:10). But that doesn’t stop God. In chapter 7, he reams them for flushing the Ten Commandments and treating him like a Get Out of Jail Free card (vv. 9-10). Simon says, you can’t have it both ways. God’s criticism is harsher than Roger Ebert’s review of Freddy Got Fingered and the backlash lands squarely on the young prophet. It gets so bad in chapter 11, Grace Farrin leads Jeremiah’s neighbors in a plot to kill him (vv. 19-21). After the close call Jeremiah wants to know why good things happen to bad people, but doesn’t get the answer he’s looking for when God once again plays the long game, saying he’ll bring justice in “the year of their punishment” (v. 23).

In chapter 14, God actually tells Jeremiah to stop praying for the people—and not for the first time (v. 11, also see 7:16 and 11:14). The prophet continues to make his appeals anyway, but God rejects the requests with emphasis. Jeremiah’s entire existence is to bring the people down. God needed a Bernie Lootz to stand near the Jews and now everybody’s luck has run out. In chapter 16, God tells Jeremiah not to get married or start a family (v. 2). Why? Because “[t]hey will die … they will be as dung on the surface of the ground” (v. 4). As Billy Madison would say, “He called the shit poop!”

After dropping a prophecy bomb in the temple courtyard, a high priest assaults Jeremiah in chapter 20 and makes him spend a night in the clink (v. 2). But the prophet is even more savage in the morning when he tells the priest point blank: you will die in Babylon (v. 6). It’s a hard knocks life for Jeremiah. His next-door neighbors want him dead. Fellow clergymen are jailing him. His pets’ heads are falling off. It’s no wonder he rues the day he was born: “Born under a bad sign. Been down since I began to crawl. If it wasn’t for bad luck, you know I wouldn’t have no luck at all” (vv. 14-18, Booker T. Jones translation). The hassle-free years of King Josiah don’t get much mention here, but once Jehoiakim is put in charge Jeremiah’s reputation turns into a Rodney Dangerfield routine.

(The second half of the book isn’t chronological for some reason, so it takes a little extra page turning.) In chapter 25, Jeremiah celebrates his twenty-third anniversary of Simon Says with the troubling news that Nebuchadnezzar is prepping the war machine. Yep. Jerusalem is about to be reduced to Colonel Kilgore’s favorite scent. Simon says, the end is nigh. The Jews’ event calendar is booked solid for the next 70 years. Every day is scheduled with Babylonian enslavement (v. 11). Time to hire a new event coordinator.

Chapter 36 sees God instruct the prophet to write down everything he’s told him to date (v. 2). Since Jeremiah is locked up again, he calls on his intern to transcribe and read the material in public for him. The incriminating recap goes on longer than the crimes of Tuco Benedicto Pacífico Jaun María Ramírez. When word gets back to Jehoiakim he burns the book faster than the Tetragrammation Council (v. 23). But whatever. God just has Jeremiah print out another copy at Kinko’s. Despite the real-time warning, nothing changes—not even after Nebuchadnezzar steals away their king and Jerusalem’s Ivy Leaguers. After a renaming ceremony, Nebuchadnezzar instates Zedekiah as king over the remaining citizens. At this point, the Jews look like hapless victims refusing to get out of the path of an Austin Powers steamroller death.

God gets visual again in chapter 27, instructing Jeremiah to wear a yoke everywhere he goes to symbolize the people’s impending enslavement (v. 2). The prophet encourages everyone to submit to Nebuchadnezzar to avoid an even worse fate. But he isn’t the only psychic friend in town, the Stupendous Yappi also roams Jerusalem and contradicts Jeremiah at every turn. He even makes a scene out of breaking Jeremiah’s yoke. The two face off like Cassie Holmes and Pop Girl in chapter 28 with God having the final say when he informs Yappi this will be his last year on the planet and, sure enough, he dies singing “Auld Lang Syne” while celebrating the new year (v. 17).

In chapter 29, Jeremiah sends snail mail to the exiles already in Babylon, encouraging them to accept their circumstances and settle in for the long haul (vv. 5-6). It isn’t until the Chaldeans return and siege Jerusalem five years later that King Zedekiah asks the prophet for advice, a decision he immediately regrets when Jeremiah predicts Jerusalem’s absolute destruction. He’s subsequently arrested in chapter 37 and tossed into the Pit of Despair. Jeremiah is only mostly dead when Zedekiah releases him to inquire if God has changed his mind. He hasn’t (v. 17). God is still about to ground the Jews for 70 years….in someone else’s bedroom. Zedekiah locks the prophet back up, but upgrades him to his old room at the Graybar Hotel. This isn’t enough for some top officials and, with the king’s permission, they attempt to drown Jeremiah in chapter 38. But after hearing a second opinion, Zedekiah decides murder is a bit extreme and has the much-maligned prophet dried off and brought in for a private consultation. Leery but no less honest, Jeremiah strongly suggests surrendering to the Chaldeans. As Lady Shiva would say, “I hope, in time, you will come to realize how wrong you are about Gotham. It cannot be saved, only cleansed. And from the ashes, reborn.” But Zedekiah doesn’t listen and two years later a starving and weak Jerusalem is breached.

Chapter 39 finds Zedekiah trying to escape out the backdoor, but he’s bagged and taken to Nebuchadnezzar, who makes sure the death of his sons is the last thing he sees before blinding and imprisoning him (vv. 6-7). Yep. It’s a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. As forecasted, the Chaldeans smash and torch Jerusalem. By the time they’re done the city looks like the casualty of a Godzilla rampage. During the invasion, Jeremiah is discovered and released. By now, he’s spent more time behind bars than Papillon. The leader of the Chaldean forces allows him to choose his own adventure and, in chapter 40, Jeremiah decides to stay behind with the shell-shocked survivors who managed to dodge death and exile to become serfs. Nebuchadnezzar appoints Gedaliah as their governor, but a conspiracy is immediately hatched by the king of Ammon, who hires Jef Costello to rub him out. The hit is apparently advertised in the Pennysaver, but Gedaliah refuses to believe the plot and, in chapter 41, unwittingly RSVPs a seat at the Red Wedding, where he’s taken out alongside friends and cabinet members—even the Chaldean sentries present are croaked (v. 3).

The Jews are barely holding it together when news of the assassination gets out. The few who remain freak out. Jerusalem is in ruins, their Bowery King is dead and Chaldean overlords have been executed. As Tucker McGee would say, “We’ve had a doozy of a day.” Fearing retaliation, the people ask Jeremiah to contact God on the red phone to find out if they should hole up in Egypt. Not surprisingly, God doesn’t care for the idea and encourages them to stay and rebuild. But the Jews hit the road anyway in chapter 43, dragging Jeremiah with him (vv. 4-7). No sooner do they arrive than they light up incense to Ra. God sends word to Jeremiah that Nebuchadnezzar is coming to town and it’s about to be déjà vu all over again (v. 11). But the Jews have already bought “I ♥ Egypt” t-shirts and are dismissive of the warning (what else is new?)—and, in chapter 44, they even notify God where he can stick it (vv. 16-17). Simon says, have it your way.