A Tale of Two Rages: God Confronts Cain and Jonah

Rage as an aspect of God’s personality is well attested in the Tanakh. The Hebrew phrases haron af (lit. “burning of one’s nostrils”) and va-yihar apo (lit. “His nostrils burned”) are used often to describe God’s rage at individuals or at the entire nation of Israel.^[1] On multiple occasions, God gets so angry at the backsliding Israelites that God seeks to destroy them, only to have Moses appeal to God not to engage in such destructive behavior.^[2]

Far rarer in the Tanakh is God’s appeal to humans when they are enraged. Only twice does God address human beings – Cain the murderer and Jonah the prophet – with strikingly similar yet distinctive questions about their emotions. The fact that God speaks to human beings about their anger only in these two instances requires a close analysis of these confrontations.

This comparative reading of Genesis 4 (the Cain and Abel narrative) and Jonah 4 (God’s dialogue with the prophet) demonstrates how God’s responses to Jonah echo and invert God’s responses to Cain. Below, I argue that the author of Jonah, a later book than Genesis,^[3] reworked the Cain narrative to teach critical moral and educational lessons. Such a comparison begs a critical question that I will discuss in the conclusion to this essay: as important as how God’s responses to both men’s rage are different, why are they different? 

I base this reading upon the exegesis of Professor Uriel Simon, who argues that the main theme of Jonah is the conflict between Jonah’s insistence upon strict justice and God’s insistence upon mercy.^[4] I also owe a great debt to Professor Yitzchak Berger for his close comparison of the language echoes of the narratives of Cain, among other biblical books, in the story of Jonah.^[5]

Genesis 4:4-8, 16^[6]
God paid heed to Abel and his offering, but to Cain and his offering [God] paid no heed. Cain was enraged (va-yihar le-Kayyin me’od) and his face fell. 
And God said to Cain,

“Why are you enraged (lamah harah lakh),
And why is your face fallen?
Surely, if you do good (ha-lo im teitiv)
There is uplift.
But if you do not do good (ve-im lo teitiv)
Sin couches at the door;
Its urge is toward you,
Yet you can be its master.”

Cain said to his brother Abel…and when they were in the field, Cain set upon his brother Abel and killed him…

Cain left the presence of God and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden (kidmat Eden).

Jonah 4
This [God’s forgiveness of the Ninevites] displeased Jonah greatly, and he was enraged. (va-yihar lo)

He prayed to God, saying, “O Lord! Isn’t this just what I said when I was still in my own country? That is why I fled beforehand to Tarshish. For I know that You are a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in kindness, renouncing punishment.

Please, Lord, take my life, for I would rather die than live (tov moti mei-hayyai).”

God replied, “Are you that deeply enraged (ha-heiteiv harah lakh)?”

Now Jonah had left the city and found a place east of the city (mi-kedem la-ir). He made a booth there and sat under it in the shade, until he should see what happened to the city.

God provided a ricinus plant (kikayon) which grew up over Jonah, to provide shade for his head and save him from discomfort. Jonah was very happy about the plant.

But the next day at dawn God provided a worm, which attacked the plant so that it withered.

And when the sun rose, God provided a sultry east wind (ru-ah kadim); the sun beat down on Jonah’s head, and he became faint. He begged for death, saying, “I would rather die than live (tov moti mei-hayyai).”

Then God said to Jonah, “Are you so deeply enraged (ha-heiteiv harah lakh) about the plant?”  “Yes,” he replied, “[I am] so deeply enraged that I want to die (heiteiv harah li ad mavet).”

Then God said: “You cared about the plant, which you did not work for and which you did not grow, which appeared overnight and perished overnight.

And should I not care about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not yet know their right hand from their left, and many beasts as well?”

While the rhetoric and content of Jonah echo Cain, God’s ways of dealing with each person’s rage are quite different. A comparison and contrast of these stories makes clear that the author of Jonah incorporated language and thematic elements from the Cain narrative to have the reader or listener consider Jonah’s situation in light of Cain’s story. This can be simplified with the following table.^[7]

Close Comparisons: Cain and Jonah’s Rage
Cain’s produce offering is rejected by God in favor of Abel’s animal offering. Cain is angry and depressed following the outcome of these offerings. His intense reactions (a “falling face” and rage) can be read as the result of feeling unjustly treated by God, even though the text is not explicit about this. Unlike Cain, Jonah explains why he feels so much rage.^[9] He asserts that God’s decision to not cause Nineveh to die makes him want to die. As Uriel Simon amply demonstrates, this is because Jonah rigidly refuses to accept that God can reject the moral principle of strict justice in favor of mercy and forgiveness.^[10]

Both men’s feelings about God’s injustice are responses to God’s refusal to show them favor. Cain is unfavored by God in his contest with Abel, while Jonah’s insistence upon pure retribution against Nineveh is unfavored by God. Nonetheless, both outbursts are different. Cain’s expression of rage is visceral, non-verbal, and accompanied by facial contortions such as a crying child might make: “Cain was enraged, and his face fell” (Genesis 4:5). We can only infer from God’s warning that Cain’s rage is going to lead him to succumb to the sin of murder. Though Jonah also utters a cry of great pain at not seeing the Ninevites die, he sublimates his “murderous” impulse into a theological argument. He essentially argues that God errs on the side of sloppily inconsistent mercy and forgiveness, while he errs on the side of rigorously consistent justice. Jonah then attempts to manipulate God by offering God a forced choice: “If You continue to show compassion by not killing the Ninevites, You will also have to show compassion by killing me”:

He prayed to God, saying,“O Lord! Isn’t this just what I said when I was still in my own country? That is why I fled beforehand to Tarshish. For I know that You are a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in kindness, renouncing punishment. Please, Lord, take my life, for I would rather die than live.” (Jonah 4:1-3)^[11] 

Close Comparisons:  God’s Responses And Challenges To Cain and Jonah
Jonah’s author intends for us to hear echoes of Cain’s account in Jonah’s story, while inverting those echoes. We hear words and phrases such as Kayyin/kikayon, kidmat/kedem/kadim, and especially va-yihar le-/harah lakh/harah li, and tov/teitiv/heiteiv. We encounter both men’s “rage unto death” (Abel’s, Nineveh’,s and Jonah’s) and God’s rhetorical questions. The author of Jonah then surprises us by showing us that God’s responses to both men are quite different.

Cain
Missing from their encounter is God’s explicit interest in discussing Cain’s motivations or feelings.  God’s initial question to Cain – “Why are you enraged and why is your face fallen?” – could be read as divine sympathy,^[12] yet it can just as easily be read as a lack thereof. After this question, God then gives Cain no room to explain his emotional state and refrains entirely from trying to convince Cain to view his situation differently. God’s enigmatic admonition that follows – “Surely if you do good/well there is uplift” – is generally read by the commentators as an unsympathetic exhortation that Cain should mend his ways.^[13] The focus is exclusively on the potential dangers of succumbing to sin’s power. Implicit in God’s words is that Cain’s inner turmoil does not necessarily garner divine sympathy. This is not because his rage at God’s presumed injustice is unfounded, but because it is irrelevant.  Life is unfair and arbitrary, yet Cain still should not let sin pull him down into sin’s clutches. 

Another possible reading of God’s response to Cain is that it is entirely appropriate for the non-verbal, childlike way that Cain expresses his anger.  Like the parent of an enraged toddler, God asks Cain – perhaps out of annoyance and compassion, “Why are you so angry? I know you’re feeling very badly, but you still must control your anger.”

Jonah
In contrast to Cain, who literally wears his rage on his fallen face, Jonah reasons with God as to why his anger is so intense. A dialogue between God and Jonah ensues, in which God uses a teaching tool to deepen Jonah’s empathy for the Ninevites and, as it were, for God. 

Jonah chapter 4 states explicitly that the prophet experiences the Ninevites’ forgiveness as “a great evil” (Jonah 4:1). He reiterates to God why he ran from his prophetic mission in the first place:  God is compassionate and relents from destroying sinners. This is something that Jonah cannot accept. He is committed to his rigid version of the idea of reward and punishment that doesn’t allow for forgiveness of human imperfection or the possibility of repentance. Thus, God not ending Nineveh’s life is so grievous to Jonah that he wants to have his own life ended. 

Rather than castigate or dismiss Jonah’s feelings as God had done with Cain, God partly echoes, then inverts, what God had asked Cain in his moment of rage: “Are you that (lit. is it good/well that you are) enraged? (ha-heiteiv harah lakh?)” (Jonah 4:4). Simon points out that the word heiteiv (deeply) “often indicates degree and intensity.”^[14] Heiteiv also echoes, then inverts, God’s exhortation to Cain: “If you do good, then…if you dont’ do good, then… (im teitiv, im lo teitiv).”  Recall that all of these words are variants of the Hebrew verb root, t-u-v, to do or be good. God’s moral exhortation toward Cain is preceded by rhetorical questioning that explicitly demonstrates God’s acknowledgement of Jonah’s distress. Whether Jonah should or should not meitiv, do good, his pain is heiteiv, literally “good and real.”

In contrast to Cain, God then patiently provides Jonah with an object lesson using the kikayon, or ricinus plant, the worm, and the ru’ah kadim, the easterly wind. Like Cain, who is exiled east of Eden (Genesis 4:16) and builds a city (Genesis 4:17), Jonah leaves Nineveh and sits to its east in a booth that he makes. As Jonah waits to see if God will reverse course and destroy Nineveh, God appoints (va-yeman) the fast-growing, broad-leaved ricinus or castor oil plant.  It covers the roof of the booth, providing even more necessary shade “to save Jonah from his distress”(ra’ato) (4:6). Simon asserts that the possessive pronoun, ra’ato – lit. Jonah’s evil – refers exclusively to his distress caused by the evil he experiences in Jonah 4:1, when he realizes that God will not pursue strict justice against the Ninevites.^[15] I suggest that this echo of Jonah 4:1 is more ambiguous. Perhaps the kikayon’s shade provides relief to Jonah for his moral outrage and for the oppressive strength of the sun that the roof of the booth cannot diminish. Both readings explain the source of Jonah’s relief and his joy at having the plant.

His relief is short lived, as God then appoints (va-yeman) a worm which attacks and kills the plant. God further appoints (va-yeman) the easterly wind (ru’ah kadim) which intensifies the sun’s heat and makes Jonah faint and wish once again for death. As quickly as God appoints the instruments of Jonah’s relief and desire for life, God appoints them to be taken away.^[16] These appointments  foreshadow what will eventually be God’s “point” to Jonah: justice and mercy, punishment and forgiveness, do not follow rigid formulas, because they are based upon God’s love for human beings whose behavior does not follow rigid formulas. Rigid justice is not Jonah’s to demand, no matter how rightly enraged he may be at human behavior.^[17]

Yet, why all these appointments? Why would God not simply explain these lessons to Jonah? A close reading of God’s dialogue with Jonah demonstrates that God can only get Jonah to internalize God’s lesson through a mix of patient empathy building and reasoning. The dialogue is layered as it builds in intensity, interspersing Jonah’s outcries and experiences, God’s questions, and God’s actions. Tying the dialogue together are repeated variants of the words tov, good, and ra, evil, as well as other echoes of God’s much briefer conversation with Cain, specifically with the phrase harah le-, (to be enraged):

4:1-3: Jonah asks God to take his life because of the great evil (ra’ah) of God letting Nineveh live. “Better (tov) I should die than live.”

4:4:  God asks Jonah, “Are you that enraged (haheiteiv harah lakh)?” No response from Jonah.

4:5:  Jonah exits east of the city, builds a booth in the shade, and awaits God’s final judgment.

4:6:  God appoints the ricinus plant whose (extra) shade brings Jonah great joy because it saves him from his great evil, ra’ato.

4:7:  God appoints the worm to destroy the ricinus plant.

4:8:  God appoints the easterly wind whose heat makes Jonah sick.

4:8:  Jonah wishes for death.  “Better (tov) I should die than live.”

4:9:  God asks Jonah, “Are you that enraged (ha-heiteiv harah lakh) over the ricinus plant?”

4:9:  Jonah now responds, “I am so enraged (heiteiv harah li) that I want to die.”

As I wrote above, Jonah’s rage is identical emotionally to Cain’s. Yet, unlike Cain, Jonah rationalizes his enraged desire for Nineveh’s destruction using moral principle. He claims implicitly that Nineveh must die, though he knows that God’s “weakness” for mercy and forgiveness will spare the city “unjustly.” God does not approach Jonah by telling him to control his anger which makes him vulnerable to sin, for no fury is more blinding than righteous indignation. Rather, God creates a series of experiences through which Jonah learns personally about mercy, love, and forgiveness by losing that which he loves.  God’s first query to him is about the intensity of his rage due to Nineveh still being alive, a faint echo of God’s query to Cain. Once Jonah makes clear his disdain for Nineveh to the point of wanting to die, God can set him up to love, lose, and mourn something as minor as the ricinus plant, which to him is major. Each appointment by God moves Jonah from intense joy (Jon. 4:6) to increasingly intense bitterness and loss (Jon 4:9). Both divine questions to Jonah about his rage find him in two radically different places: his unrelenting desire to see God’s beloved human beings destroyed, even to the point of his own death, and his unrelenting grief over the destruction of his beloved ricinus plant, again even to the point of his own death. God disabuses Jonah of his abstract moral principles (“people should get their just desserts”) not by telling him about love and loss, but by making him experience love and loss. 

Only now does God confront Jonah with the meaning of the lesson. As noted above, God does this by using the logic of kal va-homer, argument from a minor to a major premise:^[18]

Then God said:

God uses Jonah’s passion for a mere plant to help him understand God’s passionate love for the humans “who do not yet know their right from their left” and for the animals of Nineveh. Why does God employ a principle of logical reasoning to help Jonah make the empathic leap from his love to understanding God’s love?  Recall not only that Jonah is enraged about Nineveh, but that he expresses that rage in a seemingly reasoned, theological tone. God responds to his violent emotions of love and hate cast as reasoning, with an appeal to his empathy for God and Nineveh cast as reasoning.

God is telling Jonah: “You want to see the flesh-and-blood Nineveh die for the sake of your adherence to a “fair is fair” model of moral action. Yet, how did it feel to you to be relieved by, then bereaved of, a mere plant which you did nothing to cultivate? You loved that plant so intensely that its absence makes you want to die; thus, how much more so (kal va-homer) is My love for this entire city of people so intense that I don’t want them to die.” 

Underlying God’s lesson to Jonah is the question of tov and ra: whose approach to Nineveh is good and whose is evil? God answers this question with a unique blend of logic and love: should Jonah really expect God to destroy an entire city of people “who don’t know their right from their left?” Simon points out that, in several places in the Tanakh, not/knowing one’s right from left means not/knowing good from evil.^[20] Jonah’s rage at Nineveh expresses itself as a reasoned approach that is all about good and justice. Yet, devoid of the love and acceptance of others modeled by God, such reasoning is little more than a shallow cover for Jonah’s desire for evil. It “couches by the door” of Jonah’s soul, perhaps not so differently from that of Cain.

Conclusion: Divine Teaching Declined and Deferred
I noted in my introduction that, as important as understanding how God’s responses to both men’s rage are different, we also need to ask: why are they  different? Why might the author of Jonah have chosen to make us hear Cain’s story echoed and inverted in Jonah’s story?

In this respect, Cain and Jonah are no different: they both experience intense rage. Feeling spurned by God due to people whom God decides to favor or show compassion, they risk having their rage make them lose control of their behavior. 

The anger of a Cain-like individual is frightening and often hard to decipher, but it is honest. At different stages of life, a person needs others, or her own internalized tools of self-correction, to channel or neutralize such emotion before it becomes destructive: as it were, to master sin couching at the door. The anger of a Jonah-like individual is even more frightening because of how dishonest it can be. It is often covered in abstractions about justice and directed with righteous pretense about “fair is fair” at entire groups of whomever happens to be branded “the Ninevites.” This individual, like Jonah, is prepared to demonize and condemn a whole “city of people,” innocents among them, based upon rigid assumptions about their collective traits, history, and capacities for growth and change. He is also willing to condemn God as a model of mercy and forgiveness for the sake of preserving the theological integrity of the idea that God consistently metes out justice.^[21] Thundering like Jonah walking through the city, this person expects empathy from everyone else, has too little of  it for anyone else, and refuses to see how much of it everyone else – God especially – has granted him.^[22] 

I suggest that the author of Jonah looked carefully at Cain’s story of jealous rage turned to hatred and fratricide; he or she understood well how these dark human impulses and behaviors become intellectualized and normalized. Absent empathy for others, a love for human beings in general, and the humility to acknowledge one’s own imperfections, such normalization turns ugly quickly. Perhaps out of this sense of  urgency, Jonah’s author created this enraged, self-righteous prophet who needed, no less than Cain, to be taught a lesson about being human, and by none other than God. In the imagination of Jonah’s author, God is the ultimate Teacher of righteousness founded upon empathy, love and forgiveness. At times, God’s moral pedagogy is based upon the “Cain model” that emphasizes the simple principle of “first do no harm.”  At other times, God sees through our deft evasions – our tendencies to moralize and intellectualize our enraged hatred – using the “Jonah model.”  Through personal or collective experience, we are forced to move beyond righteous rage, to deepen our empathy and understanding for the “other.” Even if we cannot bring ourselves to see the “other” as our sister or brother, God demands of us that we at least recognize that person or those people as the “children” of God, our loving Parent who cares for us all unconditionally.

I conclude this analysis with a difficult question: God warned Cain to control his rage by mastering sin, but Cain killed his brother anyway. God appealed to Jonah to control his rage by deepening empathy, but the story ends inconclusively, with no response from Jonah. Did God fail at teaching these men – and us – about how to behave, especially under extreme emotional pressure?  I suggest that Jonah’s author subtly responds to this disturbing question in the following way: Cain is the paradigm of all human cruelty and murder. He reminds us that, for all of God’s pedagogic endeavors, we are free to do terrible harm to our brothers and sisters. We might imagine that, leaving Jonah, and us the readers, with an unanswered rhetorical question about love and compassion, God responds to my question with another question:

“I’ve done My best to show you how to love, how to master your darkest passions, and how to behave, especially in the absence of love. Will you succeed at listening to Me, or will you fail? However Jonah might have responded, your answer should fill the space following the end of our story. What will you decide?”

[1] Solomon Mandelkern, Konkordantzia la-Tanakh, ninth ed. (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Schocken Publishing, 1971) 134-136. See especially the following instances of a human asking God why God is enraged and/or beseeching God not to be enraged: Genesis 18:30, 32; Exodus 32:11; Numbers 14; Judges 6:39. An excellent example of God being enraged at an individual is Exodus 4:14.

[2] The Golden Calf incident (Exodus 32) and the incident of the spies (Numbers 14) are outstanding examples of their relationship, especially when God becomes enraged. In the Golden Calf narrative, Moses asks God why God is so angry at the people (Lamah Adonai yehereh apekha). This is a rhetorical question that seeks to, as it were, calm God down. 

[3] Uriel Simon, ed., The JPS Bible Commentary – Jonah (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society, 1999), xli-xlii; Ehud ben Zvi, “Jonah,” in Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds., The Jewish Study Bible, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 1188.

[4] Simon, Introduction, vii-xlii.

[5] Yitzchak Berger, Jonah In The Shadows of Eden (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2016), chapter 1, especially13-14. Simon and Berger remind us that biblical authors often worked intertextually by inserting words and phrases from earlier or contemporaneous biblical writings, then recasting them in new contexts. For the knowledgeable listening audiences of their day, this provided literary enjoyment and new moral and spiritual meanings.

[6] I begin the reading of the two chapters with one prefatory note about my translation. The Brown Driver Briggs biblical dictionary translates the Hebrew verb root h-r-h and its attached preposition le-  as ‘to have one’s anger kindled or to burn with anger.” Below, I use the New Jewish Publication Society translations of Genesis 4 and Jonah 4. I suggest that the NJPS translations of this phrase (“distressed” or “grieved”) underemphasize the turbulence of Cain’s and Jonah’s emotional states in these stories: they are far more than distressed or grieved by what has happened to them; they are enraged. To emphasize the intensity of both men’s emotions, I translate all variants of harah as “to be enraged,” which differs from the original Jewish Publication Society rendering.

[7] The table is based in part on Berger, 13-14.

[8] Berger, 13.

[9] Jonah 4:1-2.

[10] Simon, vii-xiii and 34, where Simon writes, “Ideologically, Jonah rebels again [in Jonah 4] because of his insistence that divine justice reign supreme and unchallenged.”

[11] Simon further suggests that Jonah’s “death wish” is the result of his rigid insistence upon rendering justice against the Ninevites, which means having them all die. I suggest that Jonah is expressing a tragically ironic double death wish: God’s unfulfilled destruction of Nineveh is due to God’s merciful forgiveness and desire for life, leading Jonah to turn the desire for their deaths into a request to God to end his life, the most merciful thing that God could do for him from his perspective. See Simon, 34.

[12] See the comment of Rabbi Ovadiah Sforno on Genesis 4:6.

[13] Significantly, Nachmanides interprets God’s warning about conquering sin as God’s promise to Cain that, if he would improve himself, he would be able to assert superiority over Abel. He reads Genesis 4:7 thusly: “Abel’s desire is toward you, yet you can be Abel’s master.”

[14] Simon, 38.

[15] Simon, 43.

[16] This repeated use of the word “appointed”  (va-yeman) occurs at the beginning of chapter 2 as well (Jonah 2:1). There, God appoints the great fish to swallow Jonah after the God-fearing sailors reluctantly throw him overboard to quiet the storm sent by God. 

[17] Simon draws similar conclusions in his comparison of Jonah 3 with the (earlier) Book of Jeremiah chapters 18 and 36. See Simon, xxxvii-xxxviii.

[18] Though kal va-homer is generally used to derive conclusions about Jewish law logically, the Rabbis identify ten places in the Tanakh where it is employed in different narratives. Strangely, God’s response in Jonah 4:10-11 is not listed as one of them. See Genesis Rabbah 92:7 and Simon, 45-46.

[19] The chart and interpolation are based upon Simon, 45.

[20] Simon, 46-47. He argues as well that the Ninevites who don’t know their right from their left are a reference to the Ninevite children, who would be entirely innocent of the sins of their parents. This strengthens God’s point to Jonah that, even if the adults should still, by right, be punished for past evils, their children should certainly not be. 

[21] See James Ackerman, “Jonah,” in Robert Alter and Frank Kermode, eds., The Literary Guide To The Bible (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 240.

[22] One ironic element of the book is that Jonah is the only biblical prophet able to bring about instant repentance of an entire city of incorrigible evildoers. This is a prophet’s main mark of success, yet Jonah considers this a failure, due to his own moral blindness. Another element of irony is that despite God saving Jonah from harm after he – like Nineveh – rebels against God, he can only learn to empathize more deeply with human imperfection and divine love through a weed that gives him temporary comfort. For more about irony in Jonah, see Ackerman, 234-243.