Through no fault of my own, I happened to be seated next to a biblical fundamentalist.

She sat there only one night, the first night.

I think that my uncontrolled snickering at her naive comments prompted her to move closer to her mommy on subsequent evenings. Yes, her mother was in the class. There's something so fitting about that.

But, anyway, to her comments, which were so hard to take seriously. Yet Fr. Boadt admirably regained his professional composure in the wake of her first question almost instantly, as soon as he recognized what he was dealing with.

It came about as it usually does, during an overview which mentioned the prophet Nahum, Nineveh, and the Book of Jonah. I'm not sure that he baited us to see which fundamentalist among us would speak up and protest. It wasn't an attempt to sniff out Protestants, probably, because we just never assume that they can be bothered with our so-called scholarly treatments of Scripture.

I do remember one giving the sweet & retiring Fr. LaVerdiere trouble a few years back during a Revelation study ... and he hadn't gotten out of the Letters to the Churches yet! I guess the guy was looking for an allegorical or spiritual treatment of the letters and Fr. LaVerdiere was giving historical-critical, an approach which does not preclude other interpretations. I digress ... because you already know her objection to Fr. Boadt's comments on the prophet Jonah and the book which chronicles his mission to Nineveh.

He called it a short story that would have had its original readers rolling on the floor with laughter (ROTFL?) She asked about the story's historicity. He said, "Well, let's start from the text and see what can be drawn. There was a city of Nineveh. There was a prophet Jonah ... and, and, we're starting to run out of facts. Do you see?"

Later in the week, he made some other reference to historical accuracy, perhaps the number of years in captivity in Babylon, which he reckoned as 60 instead of 70. So he looked at me, looking for her and said, "Where's my girl who wants things to be historical?" and I'm like, "Hey, don't look at me!"

I found it interesting how the Babylonians destroyed Nineveh, an event which I guess is reported fairly accurately, albeit poetically, in Nahum 2:6-11. Fr. Boadt classified the text as a victory hymn, written after the fall from an eyewitness account because the details are very specific.

It reminded me of my favorite section in Revelation, chapter 18, the fall of Babylon, if the fall of a city can be considered "beautiful". Anyway, he said that the Babylonians dug a canal from the Tigris to the dry moat around Nineveh, flooding the dry moat, dissolving the mud bricks of the walled city and the city walls fell under their own weight.