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COMMENTARY ON JONAH, CHAPTER ONE The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai, Rise up, go to the great city of Nineveh, and preach in it, because a clamor has ascended to me from their wickedness (vv.1–2). ITH AN understanding of the ministry and mission of Jonah’s prophecy, you would be quite right to make the opportune remark in terms of the praise uttered by blessed Paul, “Is he the God of Jews only, and not of gentiles also? In fact, he is the God of gentiles also, since God is one, and he will justify the circumcised on the grounds of faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith.” And having learned this through experience, the divinely inspired Peter himself also proclaims it to us in the words, “I truly understand that God shows no partiality; rather, in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.”1 After all, it is he who created earth and heaven and everything in them, and made the human being in the beginning in his image and likeness to be devoted to virtue, to live a commendable life of holiness and blessedness, and to enjoy a rich share of his gifts. They were then led astray into sin, tricked by the devil’s wiles; consequently, they were accursed and also subject to corruption . Christ was therefore preordained and foreknown before the foundation of the world to set everything right; the God and Father was pleased to “gather up (566) all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.”2 Some achievements of this kind were kept for the Only-begotten , who became like us and shed his light on the world in the flesh. But God also wished to confirm in practice the fact that even before the moment of his coming he showed a necessary 151 1. Rom 3.29–30; Acts 10.34–35. 2. Gn 1.26; Eph 1.10. 152 CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA care for those who had been deceived, and bestowed his regard on those who had lapsed through ignorance. Consequently, he bade the blessed prophet to go to Nineveh. Now, Nineveh was a Persian city, situated in the east, celebrated and, as the prophet Jeremiah says, “a land of statues.” A great number of cities bordering on the Jews, in fact, were given over to worship of the idols; “Tyre and Sidon, and the whole of Galilee of foreigners,”3 remember, worshiped the works of their hands, and in their midst were temples, altars, and shrines of innumerable demons. So why, tell me, does he bypass the neighbors’ cities and send the prophet to Nineveh, situated at a great distance, in which especially , as I remarked, there was an uncivilized multitude of people given over insatiably to sun and stars and fire? In fact, it was also a prey to unbounded religious quackery hostile to God; it is said of it in Jeremiah, “a beautiful and charming whore, mistress of potions.”4 In my view, then, the God who knows everything had the beneficial intention of demonstrating even to the ancients that people who were quite alienated and caught in the toils of deception would also be attracted in due course to the knowledge of the truth, even if quite desperate, stubborn, and completely in the grip of obduracy. The word of God, you see, is quite capable even of succeeding in (567) forming attitudes and persuading people to learn the things that make a person wise. Listen to his saying to Jeremiah at one time, “Lo, I am now making my words in your mouth a fire, and this people wood, and it will consume them,” and at another likewise, “Are not my words like a fiery flame, says the Lord, and like an axe that cuts rock?”5 It was therefore not without purpose that the divinely inspired Jonah was sent to the Ninevites; rather, it was for him to be a kind of harbinger of God’s inherent clemency, which is bestowed even on people led astray by ignorance. At the same time, however, 3. Jer 50.38; Jl 3.4. If it is true that only at a late stage of the Assyrian empire was Nineveh its capital, after Ashur and Calah, falling in 612 B.C.E. to a coalition of Medes and Babylonians, Cyril is astray in thinking of Nineveh as a Persian city at the...

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