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The Story of Jonah

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2014

Mera J. Flaumenhaft
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Abstract

The Book of Jonah depicts the tension between justice and mercy. Jonah's peculiar community, the “chosen” people, does not merely provide security and prosperity, but aims to shape the souls of its own members, and, eventually, of all human beings. The parable is optimistic about the possibility of justice in a world of distinct peoples. But on an individual level it is tragic, because Jonah himself fails to reach a practicable view of justice for imperfect but educable fellows and foreigners. He himself remains a distorted human being, deficient especially in his use of language, neither beast nor god, but, in the end, outside any community. As a reading on the highest holiday of the Jewish year, the story has a special place among Jonah's people. Neither homily nor sermon, it is an example of public storytelling as an instrument of education.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 76 , Issue 1 , Winter 2014 , pp. 1 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2014 

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References

1 All references to Jonah are to The Twelve Prophets, ed. Cohen, A. (London: Soncino, 1970), 137–50Google Scholar. The four chapters are so short that line references are not necessary. All other references to the Bible are to The Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha: Revised Standard Version, ed. May, Herbert G. and Metzger, Bruce M. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965)Google Scholar. The works cited in the notes all contain extensive bibliographies of interpretations by both Jewish and non-Jewish scholars.

2 Ackerman, James S., “Jonah,” in The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. Alter, Robert and Kermode, Frank (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 235–36Google Scholar. Ackerman expands on this theme of descent, death, and safe enclosures throughout the chapter and in “Satire and Symbolism in the Song of Jonah,” in Traditions in Transformation: Turning Points in Biblical Faith, ed. Halpern, Baruch and Levinson, John D. (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1981), 213–28Google Scholar.

3 Salkin, Jeffrey K, Righteous Gentiles in the Hebrew Bible: Ancient Role Models for Sacred Relationships (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2008)Google Scholar, 107.

4 For extended discussions of the idea of separation and distinction in Genesis, see Cassuto, Umberto, A Commentary on the Book of Genesis (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1964)Google Scholar; Strauss, Leo, “On the Interpretation of Genesis,” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, ed. Green, Kenneth Hart (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977), 359–76Google Scholar; and Kass, Leon R., The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (New York: Free Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

5 Some retellings unconvincingly invent a wife for him. See, for example, Goodman, Paul, “Jonah,” in Three Plays (New York: Macmillan, 1962)Google Scholar.

6 Salkin, Righteous Gentiles, 107–8.

7 Ibid., 107.

8 Landes, George M., “The Kerygma of Jonah: The Contextual Interpretation of the Jonah Psalm,” Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 21, no. 1 (1967): 10Google Scholar. Landes says there is no evidence that the Jonah text ever circulated without the psalm.

9 In his great sermon in Moby Dick (chap. 9), Father Mapple wonderfully fills out the biblical account of Jonah's first flight, boarding the ship, and guilt. Jonah's repentance is added by the preacher. And he does not comment on the latter half, Chapters Three and Four, of the original story.

10 Ackerman, “Jonah,” 242.

11 Bickerman, Elias, Four Strange Books of the Bible: Jonah, Daniel, Koheleth, Esther (New York: Schocken Books, 1967)Google Scholar, 40.

12 Fretheim, Terence E., The Message of Jonah: A Theological Commentary (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Publishing House, 1977)Google Scholar, 110.

13 Wijk-Bos, Johanna W. H. van, “No Small Thing: The ‘Overturning’ of Nineveh in the Third Chapter of Jonah,” in On the Way to Nineveh: Essays in Honor of George M. Landes, ed. Cook, Stephen L. and Winter, S. C. (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999)Google Scholar, 229.