Let neither mannor beast.

It is worth remembering what this city actually was. Nineveh ran an empire on terror as deliberate policy — deportations, flayings, cities emptied — and it was very good at it. There is a shot of a scarred man's eyes, and then a shot of a forge with swords racked floor to ceiling. This is the place that has been coming for Israel for a hundred years. Nahum 3 : 1

And also, at the same time, this: a courtyard at dusk with washing on the line and children running about in it, and a mother who hears something in the street and gathers all of them in against her at once. Both things are true of the same city. That is the difficulty the whole book is built on, and Jonah never once manages to hold both. Jonah 4 : 11

It takes a while to climb. First the streets, then the districts, then the officials, and finally a hand with a heavy ring setting down a gold cup beside a stone lion — and the face of the most powerful man in the world listening to a report he does not like at all. Nobody has arrested the foreigner. That is somehow worse. Jonah 3 : 6

Somebody has to actually say it, and that job goes to a young official who is plainly terrified. He goes flat on the marble before he speaks a word, and there is a close-up of his face with one eye squeezed shut, because historically the people who brought this king bad news did not have long careers. He says it anyway. Jonah 3 : 6

The hall he says it in is designed to end conversations — a hundred spearmen down each side and a throne at the top of a staircase. And the king listens. And then the most powerful man in the world gets up, takes off his robe, puts on sacking and sits down in ashes, which is the single least likely sentence in the Old Testament. Jonah 3 : 6

Then he makes it law, and the wording is remarkable for a man in his position: let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands — which is a king naming his own state's business as the problem. Scribes copy it out by the crateload and runners carry it into every quarter of a city three days wide. Jonah 3 : 7–8

And here is how a nation repenting of violence is shown, which is better than any speech: one soldier walks to the base of the city wall in the dark and lays his spears down against it. Then another. And then a wide shot of the wall running off into the night with braziers along it and weapons stacked the whole way. Nobody ordered a parade. They just stopped. Jonah 3 : 8

It goes all the way down to the small stuff. In a back street a grain merchant leans over his sacks with a very particular expression — the face of somebody recalculating something he has been quietly getting away with for years — and then counts out coins he does not have to count out. Repentance in this city is mostly admin, and it is mostly done by people nobody is watching. Jonah 3 : 8

And then the detail everybody assumes was invented for the cartoon, which is in fact word for word in the text: let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything… but let them be covered with sackcloth. So the sheep are put in sacking. Their shepherd leans on the pen looking out at his city, and does not crack a smile about it once. Jonah 3 : 7–8

The camels get theirs. The cattle get theirs. And then there is a close-up of a goat in a sackcloth hood with its ears out sideways and an expression of such total dejection that it should not be legal, sitting on a wall over the rooftops looking genuinely sorry for what it has done. It is the funniest frame in the book and it is also, technically, scripture. Jonah 3 : 8

Two men go down flat on the paving beside a public basin with the goat looking on over the rim. A baker the size of a door stands over his loaves with his shoulders down, unable to do the one thing he knows how to do. Nobody is performing. The whole city has simply stopped what it was doing, at the same time, on the word of a foreigner. Jonah 3 : 5

And it does not last an evening. On a rooftop above the city an old man kneels at the parapet at first light with a grandchild on either side of him, all three of them bowed. Down in the streets people stay out all night under the stars with the braziers lit, in rows, waiting — for forty days, without knowing whether any of it is working. Jonah 3 : 5

Somebody starts keeping score on the city wall — a row of tally marks going up one a day where everyone can see them, which is either faith or a countdown depending on the hour. And on the fortieth morning the streets fill before sunrise with people who did not go to bed, standing there watching the sky over their own rooftops. Jonah 3 : 4

And the sun comes up, and nothing happens. Nothing at all. God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way, and God relented. A man pulls the sacking off his head and cannot speak. The street comes apart with people holding each other. And the baker starts handing out loaves and waving the money away, which is how you can tell it was real. Jonah 3 : 10