“Cannot tell their right hand from their left”
So should I not care about the great city of Nineveh, which has more than 120,000 people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well? (Jonah 4:11 BSB)
What it sounds like today
A literal claim that they are confused about directions.
The cultural key
Read literally this is puzzling, a city of people who cannot find their left hand. It is an idiom for ignorance, specifically the moral and spiritual kind: they 'cannot tell their right hand from their left' means they cannot distinguish right from wrong, good from evil, because they have never known the true God. (Some also hear an echo of small children, the most innocent and unaccountable.) The line is the climactic punchline of the book. Jonah is furious that God spared wicked Nineveh, so God contrasts Jonah's pity for a withered plant with His own pity for a vast city of the spiritually clueless, 120,000 people fumbling in the dark, plus their animals. The point is God's compassion for the ignorant outsider: they are not hardened rebels so much as a lost, bewildered mass deserving mercy. Hearing the idiom turns a strange geography joke into the theological heart of Jonah.
Recovered meaning
'Cannot tell their right hand from their left' is an idiom for moral and spiritual ignorance, a whole city that does not know right from wrong because it has never known God. It grounds God's closing argument that such lost, pitiable people are worthy of His compassion.