Jonah-Play-b11 — Forty Days, Overturned#
An ancient Jonah Play designed for the Jonah Carnival.
This amateur play tells the ridiculous story of the selfish biblical prophet Jonah. It’s kept close to the original four short chapters and de-excerpts their carefully chosen words to provide a bit more context that may be easier to connect to. Like a little midrash from 2026, so nobody has to read the book first (though the original masterpiece is definitively worth it: Jonah 1–4). The play runs an estimated twenty minutes or more (the spoken lines alone take about thirteen), needs at least four people, two bedsheets, one mask, two dice and a pot plant. It ends with Nineveh spared or overturned, depending on what the city does and how the dice roll. This is a ready-to-play mockup model for a play you can perform as it is written and that you are most welcome to rewrite and improve in any way you see fit. It comes with its specially designed Jonah License to allow this (see bottom). Its modern sister play is Jonah-Play-b12 — Arkhipov and the Steel Fish; the two can be played as a double bill (see the end).
Who this Jonah was, and why that is funny. His book calls him “Jonah son of Amittai”. A prophet of exactly that name turns up once more in the Bible (2 Kings 14:25): Jonah son of Amittai, from Gath-Hepher in Galilee, whose word helped King Jeroboam II in winning back the old borders of Israel. So the man sent to save the capital of Israel’s most dangerous enemy was, of all prophets, the one known for his own national security messaging! No wonder he ran the other way, supported by his family and friends who recommended a long holiday somewhere far from Nineveh.
Jonah’s name cuts both ways. Yonah in Hebrew means dove. But the very same letters also spell a form of the verb “to oppress”: the prophets speak of “the oppressing sword” (Jeremiah 46:16) and “the oppressing city” (Zephaniah 3:1) with exactly this word. A dove, or a terror. Which one this Jonah turns out to be depends, like everything else in the play, on what happens next.
For those who care about the Hebrew. The name Jonah is יוֹנָה (yod, vav, nun, he), yonah, the ordinary word for “dove”. A separate root, י־נ־ה (y-n-h), means “to oppress, to treat violently” (for example Exodus 22:21, “you shall not oppress a stranger”). Its feminine active participle, “oppressing”, is spelled with exactly the same four letters and the same vowels. In Jeremiah 46:16 and 50:16 and in Zephaniah 3:1 it stands with the article, הַיּוֹנָה, hayyonah: “the oppressing sword”, “the oppressing city”. Ancient translators split over it: the Latin Vulgate reads Zephaniah 3:1 as civitas columba, “the dove city”, where most modern translations read “the oppressing city”. The word really has been read both ways.
A naming joke from later history. Latin columba means dove. Christopher Columbus’s Italian name, Colombo, means dove too; and “Columbia”, the old poetic name of the United States, comes from Columbus. So the newest superpower carries the dove in its name, as the prophet sent to the old one did. Whether it turns out a dove or a terror depends, as it did for Jonah, on what happens next.
The gist
Jonah is called to warn Nineveh, the great and cruel capital of the superpower of his day. His friends tell him to take a holiday in Tarshish instead, and he does. His own die-casting Leviathan keeps finding him: the sailors cast lots, and however often they roll, it comes back to Jonah. Overboard, swallowed, faced with a physical Leviathan (“big fish”), spat out, and called a second time, Jonah, terrified, finally walks into Nineveh and says five words: “Forty days, and Nineveh is overturned.” Nobody knows which “overturned” he means. The city’s die has been rolling towards its end every day, and the city has to decide whether to turn before the last die decides whether it will die as a city. Either way, Jonah ends up under a dying plant, and the play ends like the book on the question: why should everyone die?
Before you start#
Cast of roles. JONAH · HIS FRIENDS (two or more; they come back as the SAILORS and then as the NINEVITES: CITYSTICIANS and FARMERS; together they make the CHORUS) · THE CAPTAIN · THE FISH (any number of people under a sheet) · LEVIATHAN (optional: more people under a second sheet) · THE WATCHMAN on Nineveh’s wall · THE KING OF NINEVEH · A CHILD · a VOICE (anyone) · and ASON, a mask worn by whoever is nearest: Hebrew for disaster, and on this site also the Ambiguous Semantics Of Nothing.
Props. Two bedsheets: a grey one (the storm, then the dust) and a white one (the fish, and Leviathan). A mask for ASON: a paper bag, a hood, anything one person can put on in two seconds and another can take off. A pot plant (broccoli will do) and a sock for the worm. Paper bags for sackcloth, one per member of the audience if you can. Hula hoops for the citysticians’ hamster wheels. Pillows, if you play the fall.
The two dice. This play has two, and they must look different. Jonah’s die is small and lives in his pocket; however often it is rolled, it keeps finding him. That is what an odd vocation feels like from the inside. Nineveh’s die is big (a cardboard cube will do) and lives on the city wall with the WATCHMAN; it rolls towards the city’s end, by default. Both are honest.
For whoever organizes the performance.
Who ASON is. Ason (Hebrew אָסוֹן) is what Jacob fears will befall Benjamin on the road, the harm whose author the text declines to name. On this site the same four letters also stand for ASON, the Ambiguous Semantics Of Nothing: the trap of reading “nothing happened” as “nothing is wrong”. ASON is never a person. It is the network of causes and chances that decides what actually happens, and it can take over anyone, however well-meaning, without their noticing. More, and other ways to show it: ASON.
How to stage ASON. This is the whole trick. ASON is a mask, not a character. Anyone who puts it on becomes ASON: Jonah first, then a sailor, a busy Ninevite, perhaps the King. It must change wearers at least three times. At the end it lies on the floor with nobody in it.
The racket. Whenever anyone on stage says some version of “and nobody said anything”, someone puts on the mask of ASON and the room makes as much noise as it can. That nothing is where ASON lives.
The rules. Keep the seven rules of the form. Above all: the way out is always shown, ASON is the only enemy, nothing real is destroyed, and no sound in the room may resemble a real alert. Tell the room before you begin that tonight the city may fall, and that it falls only in the play.
The dice are honest. Never load or swap them. Each die decides only when; what happens in between is up to the people.
Scene 1 — The call#
Jonah 1:1–3.
JONAH at home with his FRIENDS. He looks at a piece of paper. He reads it. He puts it down. He picks it up. He puts it down.
He puts on the mask of ASON himself. RACKET. He takes out his little die, looks at it, does not roll it, and pockets it.
He leaves, in the opposite direction.
Beat: Jonah is the first to wear ASON, the disaster nobody authored. This is the most important staging choice in the play: the man who was sent is the first one to become the thing he was sent about.
Scene 2 — The storm and the lot#
Jonah 1:4–16.
Beat: the comic centre. Spend your best material here. The sailors, who owe Jonah nothing, behave better than the prophet does from start to finish.
A ship made of chairs. The FRIENDS are SAILORS now. JONAH goes below and falls asleep, still wearing the mask. Then the storm: people shaking the grey sheet, harder and harder.
They throw the cargo overboard (mime it: sacks, jars, a whole goat).
THE CAPTAIN goes down and shakes JONAH awake.
The lot (Jonah 1:7).
THE CAPTAIN gives each SAILOR a number, and Jonah one too. He rolls Jonah’s little die on the deck, in front of everyone. If it shows a sailor’s number:
They keep rolling until Jonah’s number comes up, counting each throw out loud.
He takes off the mask.
They row with all their might, and get nowhere. The sheet heaves higher.
They throw him overboard, very apologetically. The sheet goes still.
All on the ship bow silently to Reality. Then each vow in their own words to get as real as they can be for the rest of their lives.
One SAILOR picks up the mask that Jonah dropped, turns it over, and does not know what to do with it.
The book: the sailors fear what Jonah is running from (Jonah 1:10), try to row back to land (1:13), and pray before they throw him in (1:14). The “dove or terror” answer is this play’s, but will be obvious to any attentive Hebrew audience.
Scene 3 — The fish, and Leviathan#
Jonah 2, and an old retelling (Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer 10).
THE FISH arrives, as badly made as you can manage: several people under the white sheet. It swallows Jonah. Three days and three nights.
LEVIATHAN approaches: more people under a sheet, moving as one, with cardboard crocodile jaws. It can be played by whoever is wearing the mask of ASON.
LEVIATHAN flees, which no one expected, least of all Jonah.
Then, quietly, the one sincere moment he has had so far:
THE FISH spits him out onto dry land.
He takes out his die, rolls it without looking, and puts it away again.
Jonah finds a second piece of paper in Reality (Jonah 3:1). It happened to hide in a mask of ASON on the way.
He rolls his die again to decide which way to go and puts it away again.
Beat: in the book of Job, nobody can land Leviathan with a hook (Job 41:1). In the old retelling, a reluctant prophet in a fish’s belly faces it down. Jonah’s prayer here is a short paraphrase of Jonah 2:5–9. The minced meat alludes to Isaiah 27:1.
Scene 4 — The city#
Jonah 3. The shortest sermon ever preached, and the best answered.
Greater Nineveh. Not only the walled city, but the whole metropolitan triangle around it: Nineveh, Calah and the towns between (Genesis 10:11–12 calls them all together “the great city”), with their suburbs and farmland. Inside the walls live the rich and the powerful. Outside, on the farms, live the people who feed them. In times of trouble, everyone is supposed to find shelter inside the walls. Everyone. Except by now some are considered more equal than others.
The CHORUS are NINEVITES, busy. Half of them are CITYSTICIANS, the city’s politicians, each running in a hamster wheel to keep up with their Joneses. It’s symbolized by a hula hoop. Everyone turns it round and round in their own way. Every turn earns points, bucks and clicks in Nineveh’s attention economy.
The other half are FARMERS and other workers, crammed into the corners. On the wall sits THE WATCHMAN with Nineveh’s big die.
RACKET. The CITYSTICIAN faces the audience with the ASON mask on, and keeps spinning.
JONAH walks in: a man from a small subject nation, walking into the capital of the superpower of his age. He crosses the city once, for one whole day, from the fields on one side, through the walls, to the fields on the other, and calls out the same five words to everyone he passes. He walks slowly through the audience, repeating the line to person after person:
He sits down, at the other end of the room, satisfied, in a comfortable corner, to watch the coming disaster from a safe distance. He’s oblivious to the grass-roots movement that has been organizing itself, inspired by his words.
Greater Nineveh is “a three days’ walk” (Jonah 3:3): three days to walk round the whole triangle, farms and all. Jonah goes “a day’s walk” into it (3:4): one day to cross it. A circle three days round and one day across: the book’s geometry uses a very round pi. The Hebrew word for “overturned”, nehpakhet, really can mean both: destroyed, or turned around. The warning does not say which. The city does.
Grandma Cassandra’s troubles are not invented. Assyrian records from Jonah’s own lifetime note famine with epidemic (765–759 BCE), a total eclipse of the sun (15 June 763 BCE) and revolts in several cities. The historian D. J. Wiseman suggested that this is why Nineveh was ready to listen (“Jonah’s Nineveh”, Tyndale Bulletin 30, 1979, doi:10.53751/001c.30607). The rest of Grandma is artistic license.
The turning (Jonah 3:5–9). THE WATCHMAN stands up.
THE WATCHMAN rolls. This goes on, with the audience joining in: every “I turn” puts a Ninevite in sackcloth; every “Later” is a roll.
Maybe adjust the dice rolling scheme for the size of the audience involved and the desired outcome of what is to happen to the city in the play. This will make the intra-play dice-rolling more consistent. However, this may be too many calculations in real time based on flexible audience sizes and reactions, so the consistency may break here. It’s an amateur play after all.
When the whole cast and at least half of the room have turned, word reaches THE KING, while sitting on his throne, with the ASON mask on.
Upon hearing, he decides for a change to not kill the messenger of unwelcome news. He gets off his throne, takes off his royal robe (Jonah 3:6), and stands there in his (symbolic) underwear. (Use a white blank sheet to indicate full transparency and that he’s blanking on what to do exactly.)
He puts on sackcloth and sits in the dust.
But if we turn all that power against ourselves and the weakest among us, how will we be able to survive? If we use our smarts to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, then the poor will die, followed shortly by the rich, because as you all know, the rich all rely on others to get stuff done. Do we want to really end our great civilization like that?
There is room inside the walls for every farmer and every family, every child included. Who knows? Perhaps it is not too late.
Let the smartest people find the best solutions for balancing our great society back to deserve being called a civilization! Let them go ask the farmers, families, and children, what they really need and find smart ways to care for them. Like the farmers care to provide all of us with the excellent food they grow!
Let’s fund that research by taxing the Points! Bucks! Clicks! that have been suffocating everyone. Let’s develop better incentive-schemes. I know that you can do it. You only have to turn your mind to it!
The CITYSTICIANS let their hula hoops drop.
What follows is an even faster slow-motion explosion of gentle-kind-reasonableness. Everyone knows why it happens: because the common good needs it; and because this generation in Nineveh realized as a whole that it didn’t want to be that generation that would enter the history books as those who destroyed themselves by believing that nothing was wrong and that nothing could move, until nothing went wrong because everyone did nothing - until that ASON nothing (RACKET!!!) destroyed everyone here.
THE WATCHMAN takes the dooms-day die off the wall and locks it up in a zoo to better explain to everyone the dangers of doing nothing.
The city is spared.
—
If a six comes up three times first, the city is overturned. Pillows fall on the city from every side, thrown by the cast onto the stage, never at the audience. The grey sheet is drawn over the NINEVITES, and they lie still, as if dead.
Silence, for as long as the room can bear it. (A memorial minute or more to commemorate now what can no longer be commemorated once everyone has been obliterated by the impending doom.)
There is no second try.
Beat: in the book the turning starts with the people, from the greatest to the least, before the King hears of it (Jonah 3:5–6). That’s a grass-roots movement leading the politics, not the other way round through astroturfing. The livestock in sackcloth is in the text, and it is one of the best cosmic jokes for a time when over-reliance on meat destroys much of the planet needlessly.
The odds on Nineveh’s die are only applicable to the play for illustrative purposes. Dice are not rigged; they decide when doom happens not if; hence rolling long enough will get the city destroyed. The city needs to learn to roll life-giving dice of innovation instead of knowledge-faking dice of death.
For a real-world actuarial analysis of the dice of doom due to accidental nuclear winter, see the Matheo-b16 study; briefly, it finds that most people today are more likely to die in accidental nuclear winter than in a car crash. That is if nothing gets done about this.
The logic for acting is illustrated sufficiently well by the Nineveh story, so that it is useful, even if we nowadays have to provide our own numbers and updated analyses of how to “do right by Reality”.
Scene 5 — Under the plant#
Jonah 4. Whichever way the city went.
JONAH sits on a hill east of the city, “to see what would become of it” (Jonah 4:5).
Someone holds a pot plant over his head for shade.
Some time passes. Jonah thinks nothing (ASON Racket!) is wrong.
Then a sock puppet worm crawls up and eats the plant (Jonah 4:7).
The CHORUS blows hot east wind at him.
If the city was spared:
If the city fell:
JONAH sits alone and looks at the grey sheet. He was right. Nobody is left to tell him so. He does not look satisfied.
Either way, the last lines are the last lines of the book (Jonah 4:10–11), spoken to the audience, and not answered:
Silence. The book ends on this question. So does the play. The mask of ASON lies on the floor with nobody in it.
Epilogue. The cast stands up as themselves. One voice, plainly:
Say where to check: Science. Find a way to point out that today’s dice are more likely to kill most people in accidental nuclear winter than in a car crash.
END. Take a bow, make a racket, eat something, and discuss the Nineveh of today.
A double bill with b12. To play both plays in one evening, play this one first, and let the WATCHMAN end the epilogue with one more line: “In October 1962, the die was in a steel fish.”
After a short break we will start Jonah-Play-b12. Between them the two plays hold both dice: the one that keeps finding the reluctant messenger, and the one that is rolling the city towards its end.
The smallest version. If twenty minutes is too much, cut it to 2-5 minutes, with one verse and one die. Someone reads Jonah 3:4, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” Someone else asks: “Overthrown, or turned over?” Somebody rolls a die, and everybody watches it. That counts, and it gets a link too if you post pictures of your play.
After the performance. Tag it #JonahPlay and #AuditTheMath, and tell the Jonah Carnival where it happened and what went wrong. If you rewrote the script, send the rewrite: it may become b13.
Free to share: the Jonah License
Everything on this page is under the Jonah License (JoLi): CC0, public domain. Copy it, perform it, change it, translate it, sell tickets or not, keep none of the words or all of them. No permission is needed. Credit is welcome but not required.
The Jonah Licence’s one twist is about nothing. Doing nothing with it is not nothing. The license asks a single thing of all who use it, and cannot enforce it: “Prepare to explain on Judgement Day what you failed to do with any material you received under the Jonah License.”