Prophets, Historians and Reading Jonah’s Behavior in the Pluperfect

Historians are like prophets in reverse,

casting on the past a studious curse.

Of the future, prophets are historians.

The lies they often tell are mostly hoary ‘uns,

and those like me who’ve reached a hoary age,

about what they declare will often rage,

because we realize the past is not

what we’re told by historians, and what

by prophets is predicted won’t occur.

A reinterpretation: in Jonah 4:5 one word

Jonah’s disobedience can explain,

reversing history in a way that’s not absurd,

to make what had seemed unsound, sane.

Eliezer of Beaugency found

use of the pluperfect can excuse

the way that Jonah found unsound

God’s forgivingness of foes of Jews.

This policy is one that I find hard, alas,

regarding foes of Israel to follow,

such as Teheran’s proxies, like Hamas,

and runners-up in hate, Hizbollah.

The second verse of this poem applies the  poem’s first line, “Historians are like prophets in reverse,” to what I learned from  “The Book of Jonah: God and Humanity Don’t Understand Each Other,” an article in thetorah.com by Susan Niditch. In it I learned that Eliezer of Beaugency, a twelfth century Jewish bible exegete, changed the conventional  way we read the story of Jonah’s apparent rejection of God’s willingness to forgive.  His reading excuses Jonah’s objection to God’s pardon of the inhabitants of Nineveh, part of the nation of Assyria which would, tragically in a later generation, attack the  ancient Israelites as violently as  contemporary enemies of the state of Israel, Hamas and Hizbollah, have been doing in the present era.

Jonah 4:5 reads:

יונה ד:ה וַיֵּצֵא יוֹנָה מִן הָעִיר וַיֵּשֶׁב מִקֶּדֶם לָעִיר וַיַּעַשׂ לוֹ שָׁם סֻכָּה וַיֵּשֶׁב תַּחְתֶּיהָ בַּצֵּל עַד אֲשֶׁר יִרְאֶה מַה יִּהְיֶה בָּעִיר. Jonah 4:5 And Jonah went forth from the city, and he sat down east of the city, and he made for himself there a hut, and he sat under it in the shade, until he might see what would become of the city.

By reading the word וַיֵּצֵא in Jonah 4:5 as being in the pluperfect, Eliezer of Beaugency justifies Jonah’s objection to God’s forgiveness of Nineveh as occurring before God pardoned the inhabitants of Nineveh;

רבי אליעזר מבלגנצי יונה ד:א ויחר לו – כי לא ידע תשובתם כי יצא לו מן העיר כמו שאמר למטה (יונה ד:ה).

Rabbi Eliezer of Beaugency Jonah 4:1 And he was troubled: (This was so) because Jonah had not known about their repentance, for he had gone out of the city, as it is said below (in 4:5).[9]

This lack of knowledge by Jonah that God had forgiven Nineveh’s inhabitants, helps explain Jonah’s negative response to this forgiveness. According to Rabbi Eliezer of Beaugency, God only revealed to Jonah that the Ninevites had already repented when he was explaining to Jonah why He had spared the city.

Rabbi Eliezer of Beaugency suggests that  God’s words to Jonah in Jonah 4:11 “ Who do not know (to distinguish between right and left,” : i.e., between good and evil, imply that God is telling Jonah  that He would have pardoned Nineveh even if its inhabitants  had not repented, adding that on account of (their) repentance following Jonah’s words to them, God had compassion on them.

Learning this on 10/10/24, two days before Yom Kippur 5785, I realized that the book of Jonah uses the pluperfect to teach us that prophesies can be reversed in the way that historians often reverse history, making what seems evil perfect.

Ziony Zevit, author of The Anterior Construction in Classical Hebrew, informed me that he considered Eliezer of Beaugency’s interpretation of Jonah 4:5, of which he had been unaware. an example of what he treated as “preperfect” rather than pluperfect in other examples of these constructions in his book.