Session Notes
Opening Question
Jeremiah and Jonah both carry prophetic messages, but they are very different prophets speaking to very different audiences — one to Israel, people of the original covenant, and one to Nineveh, a massive and brutal foreign empire. Does the prophet matter? Does the message matter? Does the audience matter? What do these two stories, taken together, teach us about the nature of prophecy?
Having spent our last session with the foundational narratives of Genesis and Exodus — a God still very much operating through punishment, spectacle, and the machinery of covenants — we arrived at Jeremiah and Jonah looking for what the tradition might be learning about itself. The central irony the group landed on almost immediately is stark: Jeremiah, the willing prophet, delivers God’s word to his own “covenanted” people with exhausting and challenged persistence and is comprehensively ignored and disdained. Jonah, the deeply reluctant prophet, flees, gets swallowed by a big fish, sulks his way to Nineveh, and delivers what may be the most minimal and least tantalizing, least convincing prophecy in scripture (“forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown”)… and is immediately, universally heeded. The people who should have been most prepared to receive the word were the most resistant, and a foreign city with no prior relationship to this God turned on a dime. We dove into what that asymmetry might be revealing to us.
Part of what made Jeremiah such a slog to read, as one participant put it, is that its very repetitiveness is itself the argument. The same threats are reissued, reframed, and repeated across dozens of chapters — which might be read, if charitably, as a literary technique to dramatize just how many chances the people of Judah were given and how consistently they refused them. But the group also pressed on the reliability of the narrator here: much of what we know about the “stiff-neckedness” of the Israelites comes from God himself, speaking through Jeremiah, which is a peculiar kind of evidence. One thread that sharpened this was the episode where the people, after being explicitly instructed not to return to Egypt, immediately go back to Egypt and start worshipping Asherah (youliterallyhadonejob). Their justification is not one of cynicism, but that of lived experience: “when we followed God, things were terrible; when we worshipped Asherah, we had food”. We saw their resistance as a pragmatic short-termism of a very human kind, a preference for immediate, legible rewards over a promise whose benefits are never a present thing, always two or three generations out. We empathized that the “do the opposite” logic that God’s long game requires is a hard sell when you’re hungry now.
The question of God’s moral development, which we’d touched on at the end of Genesis, opened up significantly here. We identified something that felt like genuine character development in the Nineveh episode: God changing his mind not for the sake of his own people, not in response to a one-on-one negotiation like Abraham’s, but in response to the moral transformation of 120,000 strangers (these strangers, b y the way, were barbaric, terrifying enemies). We agreed this is the first time the text offers something that actually feels like real compassion for non-Jewish people. The salvation of Nineveh was not conditional, contractual mercy, but a willingness to relent toward people with no prior claim on God or his covenant. We contrasted this with the Sodom and Gomorrah: there, the question was whether any good people could be found; here, a whole city repents collectively and God responds by saving them. We started to think of this as a kind of theological hinge, with Jeremiah containing an early usage of the word “compassionate” applied to God (“I am compassionate, I do not bear a grudge for all time” [lol prove it]), and the Nineveh episode showing that quality extended beyond the covenant community for the first time. The companion idea that emerged (drawn from Jeremiah’s promise of a new covenant written on the heart rather than on tablets) is that this God is slowly working out a different mechanism for transmission. Fear and rule-following clearly haven’t worked. Something more interior is being proposed. This continued our thread from the Genesis and Exodus reading that God seems to be developing emotionally alongside his evolving acquaintance with humanity.
It led to one of the most generative threads of the evening: the question of what it means for the covenant to be “written on the heart,” and how that connects to the mechanics of prophecy itself. The group began triangulating between Jeremiah and Jonah not as a contrast between success and failure but as two different relationships to inner knowing. Jeremiah suffers acutely but never seriously considers turning away. Something in him simply cannot deny what he knows to be true. Jonah on the other hand runs away, but even in flight he doesn’t renounce the presence of God within him: when he tells the sailors to throw him overboard, he identifies himself as a Hebrew who has displeased his God, implicitly affirming the truth he’s fleeing. The group found it striking that Jonah’s weakness is fear, not disbelief. We wondered whether the people of Nineveh succeed precisely because they, too, have something like an undefended heart, no prior relationship that would make them contractually defensive about what they owe or are owed. We also noticed the Tao Te Ching and the earlier readings hovering in the background here: the Tao prescribes positively, pointing toward a way of being; the Old Testament legislates negatively, cataloguing prohibitions. One participant observed that the Bible grants humans dominion over nature and then immediately concludes they’re innately bad (ooops!) and that the rules follow as a consequence of that grant, almost as a necessary corrective. The contrast with the Tao’s trust in natural orientation felt important to us, especially given Jeremiah’s suggestion that the covenant’s next home is the interior (written on the heart).
The conversation turned in its final stretch toward the personal and the philosophical question of how prophecy actually works (or fails to) in our own experience. We moved through the prisoner’s dilemma as a frame for thinking about why Jeremiah’s message couldn’t land: a community already in a stable equilibrium (worshipping Asherah, getting fed) has no internal incentive to defect first toward a long-term cooperative outcome. Yessy brought it home by identifying trust as the essential condition of prophecy: trust in God, trust in one’s own inner sense of direction, trust that the path that feels right will bear out. The problem is that trust is the very thing that gets systematically eroded: by immediate evidence, by false prophets, by the grinding accumulation of unfulfilled promises. The group ended without resolving whether prophecy is primarily about the prophet, the message, or the audience, but with a growing sense that the answer is probably some form of readiness in the receiver… a heart, as Jeremiah would have it, that hasn’t been pre-sealed.
