Jonah (Updated April, 2000)

What is the book of Jonah all about? Does the interpretation of a story tell us more about the interpreter than the story?

Activity: Read Jonah 1:1-3 and Jonah4:1-3. Look at how a variety of children's books fill the gaps. What is God's intent? Why does Jonah flee? Have students fill in the gap and justify their gap filling with reference to the text. Explore the presuppositions that inform how one fills the gaps.

Peter Spier, The book of Jonah (Doubleday, 1985). What do the picture's suggest?
 
Warwick Hutton, Jonah and the Great Fish (Atheneum, 1984).
 
God" Arise and go to the city of Nineveh. The people there are wicked. You must preach and persuade them to give up their evil ways."
Jonah was frightened by the Lord's command. So he fled from the presence of the Lord, down to the port of Joppa.
 
 
Allison Reed, The Story of Jonah (North South Books, 1987).
 
Once, Long ago, a young man called Jonah was sitting in his garden when God spoke to him.
"Jonah," he said, "you must go to Nineveh, the great city on the banks of the river Tigris. The people there are living bad lives. They are cheats and liars and worse. I need someone to tell them that they must change their ways."
When Jonah heard this he was very unhappy. "The people of Nineveh won't want to hear that God is angry with them, he thought. "They will probably turn on me for saying so and beat me. Maybe they will even kill me."
So Jonah decided to go in the opposite direction. He hoped he could trick God and continue to live a comfortable life.
Reed does some other interesting gap filling. Jonah is sleeping during the storm while everyone is working frantically to save the ship.
 
"When the captain saw Jonah was sleeping, he shook him roughly awake. 'Why are you not praying like everyone else?' he asked. 'None of their gods seem able to calm this story Perhaps yours may do better.'
Jonah wanted to pray but he was ashamed to ask God for help. After all, he had disobeyed God and was trying to run away from him.
Everyone looked at Jonah suspiciously as he stood there in silence."
 
"I knew this would happen," God, he grumbled. "I knew you were kindhearted and would spare them. That's why I tried to go to Tarshish instead of coming here. I told the people of Nineveh that you would destroy their city in forty days and now you're not going to do it. I've made such a fool of myself that I wish I were dead."

Alan Cooper, "In Praise of Divine Caprice," Philip R. Davies and David J. A. Clines ed. Among the Prophets (Sheffield: JSOT, 1993) 145-163, suggests that, "The Book of Jonah gives common sense a battering." Listing the ways in which the book does this is a good place to begin a discussion of the book:

 
What then fulfills expectations? The answer can be found in Jonah's reasons for disobeying God in the first place. Many leap to the conclusion that Jonah acts out of his petty Israelite nationalism and does not wish to deliver God's message to Nineveh, but the text itself is clear that this is not the case. [This rush to judgment may be spurred on by our own latent petty antisemitism.] Jonah's message to Nineveh is not a call to repentence; it is an announcement of destruction. God does not send a conditional message such as "if you do not repent, I will destroy this city." Nevertheless, when Nineveh does repent, God has mercy and does not act on his threat. This is exactly what Jonah anticipates (2:9; 4:2). God does just as Jonah expects.
 
Why is Jonah ticked off about this? Once again we should avoid jumping to the charge that Jonah is vindictive and wants to see Nineveh destroyed. Jonah's response to God's mercy is to wish for death (4:3). A likely reason for his depression is that he is now a false prophet. Of course, God does not treat Jonah like a false prophet and shows him mercy.
 
The significant message of the book of Jonah, then, is not God's universalism but rather that God's actions are not determined by his own pronouncements, prophecies, or law. God is God not an ideology. As Cooper suggests, Israel would not want a god who is too reliable, otherwise they would be bound to be inflicted with punishment rather than being granted pardon. At the same time, Israel cannot presume upon the Lord. God is free to save whomever he pleases in whatever way he chooses. He can care even about cows.
 
Other recent articles:
 
Thomas M. Bolin, "'Should I Not Also Pity Nineveh?' Divine Freedom in the Book of Jonah," JSOT 67 (1995) 109-120.
 
 
Terry Eagleton: "The book ends with a small Dadaist drama in which God conjures up a plant, worm and wind in rapid succession ... This bizarre sadistic taunting is presumable meant among other things to show Jonah that God isn't such a nice chap as he seemed; if he can indulge in this sort of nasty insensitive trifling then he might just have blasted Nineveh after all. There's a darkly malevolent humor about this divine tomfoolery, which suggests in quick symbolic notation that God can either save Jonah or scupper him as the fancy takes him ... What seems particularly callous about God is that his flashy, second-rate conjuring act is a kind of grisly parody of Jonah's black despair; God's gratuitous cavortings, pulling worms and winds from his sleeve like so many rabbits, writes cruelly large Jonah's own nauseated sense of the gratuitousness of all meaning under God's libertarian regime. It's in that sheer unfounded gratuitousness of meaning, that abyss of all signification, that God brutally, therapeutically, rubs Jonah's nose. God's mercy is indeed a kind of absurdity, but there's no need for Jonah to make a song and dance of it
... Jonah just has to find some way of living with the fact that he can never know whether he is doing anything or not, which was perhaps the point of the whole futile narrative after all." "J.L. Austin and the Book of Jonah" in The Book and the Text (Oxford, 1990) pp. 231-236.