Jonah's World

Social Science and the Reading of Prophetic Story

Lowell K. Handy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317491262
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The story of Jonah, often read as a simple children's story, is a multifaceted and elaborate narrative with serious intent. Treating the biblical book as a fictitious story based on real locations and recognizable persons, 'Jonah's World' examines the background to the story and draws on social science approaches to describe its imaginative world. The book explores the geography, theology, myth, human characters, natural landscape, and the ideology behind the story to uncover a vision of reality shaped by literary technique. Jonah's World will be invaluable to students and scholars seeking a new approach to the reading of this colourful text.

Chapter 1
A SCRIBE'S-EYE VIEW

A social-scientific research of any narrative should begin with questions about the production of the story in question. The central figure in the social construct of any story is the author. Various attempts to deconstruct authorship, however philosophically pleasing, fail to deal with the materialistic reality that someone composes literary texts even if the composer merely exists in a social miasma of words they did not create, social structures they do not control, and genres they can change only at the risk of being unintelligible. Someone wrote the story of Jonah and they had a social world surrounding them in which they composed a narrative that would be intelligible to others sharing that social world.

Why Assume a Scribe?

The author of the story of Jonah as known in Jewish and Christian tradition was a scribe, someone with an education, training in writing, and a sense of literary cleverness. From whence the motifs that make up the story itself might have derived is incapable of being discerned with any certainty at this remove from the time of composition. The written text exists; neither the thought process nor any oral editions of the work can be recovered save by assumptions based on the extant text.

It was a popular theory for many years that the stories in the Hebrew Bible had their origins in oral tradition.¹ The notion was quite popular for a time that Israelite “commoners” sat around campfires in the evenings and spun tales of such importance for the community that their oral presentations were passed on orally from person to person and from generation to generation until finally the narrative was committed to writing. By the time of the composition of the written text the story was supposed to have gained such status that the very words of the oral tradition needed to be recorded in their exact formation. Nineteenth-century European folk-romanticism would appear to play as much of a role in this theory of biblical narrative origins as anything else. More recent attempts to see biblical texts as post-colonial resistance literature share some presuppositions with this earlier hypothesis. Both wish to read biblical narratives “from below.” Each has a somewhat romantic notion of folk-solidarity over against empowered minorities. And each manages to make use of the narrative by reading themselves or their nostalgic notions of their ancestors into the material. The problem remains, however, that none of the biblical material is oral; it is all the production of scribal activity.

In all fairness, it should be pointed out that this theory of reliable oral story transmission has been more tenaciously held for the book of Ruth than for the book of Jonah.² Once it was generally agreed that Jonah did not write his own book and the period in which it was written most likely post-dated the prophet of 2 Kings 14:25 by at least a century, the creation of Jonah was readily ascribed to someone who initially wrote it down rather than recited it orally.³ This has been the most widely accepted notion of the origin of the book for at least the past half century. If indeed the story of Jonah is a written composition then it was composed by a scribe and if by a scribe then from a member of a specialized segment of the upper echelons of ancient Judean society. The contents of the book would appear to confirm such an origin.

It has been argued often enough that literacy was widespread among the populations of ancient Judah and Israel, which would mitigate the necessity for the author of Jonah to have been privileged in any way over the “common” populace.⁴ In such a case Jonah might have been composed by anyone; however, the problem would still remain as to how it found its way into the circles of religious scribal scholars who constructed the Book of the Twelve. It is much more likely that the general population of ancient Judah was functionally illiterate.⁵ This is not to say they could not recognize a seal impression of their own name or even write it, but there is no reason to assume that the majority of the populace could read extended narratives and even less reason to assume that they had a need to do so.⁶ The population of Judah from its formation through the Hellenistic Period was overwhelmingly agrarian;⁷ the people had a need to know seasons, weather, crop planting or harvesting times, livestock behavior, and simple mathematics, but they were not getting newspapers, agricultural department handbooks, or literary journals. In such societies literacy seldom reaches 5% of the population.⁸ Scribes were a small minority of the total population; most scribal activity was restricted to court or cultic tabulation, with some, probably, engaged in business dealings. In the larger courts of the ancient Near East scribes served as advisors to the kings, secretaries for writing messages to be sent by others, for tabulating income and expense, recording royal patronage, legal material, religious practice, and divination manuals as well as recording sacrifices presented and economic transactions. Any authors of original literary compositions were a very small minority among these scribes.⁹ Occasions could arise where original literary work would be considered part of their job (cultic hymns, special poems of praise, rewriting history narratives), but no scribe anywhere in the ancient Near East would have been assigned an entire life of composing creative fiction, so original authorship must have usually been a sideline for scribes engaged in other occupations.

In turn those scribes who wrote original narratives were writing for their peers; those who also could functionally read and write. Some form of formal education had to be available to this class of the population and it is most likely that the central Judean “school” during the monarchy had been at Jerusalem.¹⁰ Whether or not there were “schools” teaching scribal skills elsewhere in Judah during the independent monarchy is open to debate, but the evidence is not sufficient to make any hard and fast conclusions.¹¹ While many modern scholars posit formal school classes and separate educational buildings for the training of scribes in Judah, it is not clear from either archaeological or biblical texts that such organizations existed. It is equally possible that scribes were raised in some form of apprentice program, learning directly from scribes already professionally engaged. In either case, the learning period would consume at the very least a couple of years of a boy’s life.¹² During the period of Persian control it is most likely that the rather small region of Yehud concentrated its formal regional scribal training in its regional capital and that would have been Jerusalem.¹³ Therefore, it is also most likely that the author of Jonah was at the very least: (a) a scribe; (b) trained in Jerusalem; (c) employed at something other than writing short stories; and (d) wrote down the story for others who were of a similar background to himself.¹⁴

Scribes in Society

Scribes of the ancient Near East were a minority among the populace of their societies; they may well have been a minority among the elite whom they served in temple and court.¹⁵ That this group perceived themselves as a definable unit and could distinguish themselves from other divisions of the greater society in which they lived is fairly clear.¹⁶ The most pronounced such distinction from the ancient world remains the Egyptian “Satire of the Trades,” from the late second millennium BCE, in which scribal study is glorified over artisans, carpenters, courtiers, farmers and assorted other “less important” professions.¹⁷ Later, ±1000 BCE school texts from Egypt extol the scribe as the best of professions and promise “immortality” to those who compose literature; a fine book being a far better memorial than a fine tomb.¹⁸ Wisdom literature in general, including that of the Hebrew Bible, recognizes a distinction between the general public and the scribes.¹⁹ Certainly this is the case with Jesus Ben Sirach, who presented scribes as a wise group apart from and superior to other persons (Sir. 38: 24–39:11).

Beyond a fair number of generalizations about the members of the social strata occupied by the scribes, not a great deal can be determined with any certainty about division within or relations among those who could read and write. All attempts to determine the “social groups behind” any given biblical text need to remain nebulous as our data are few and more difficult to decipher accurately than is often supposed.²⁰ Moreover, it is almost a certainty that major divisions among “sectarian” groups existed not only in the period of the monarchies and in the Hellenistic Period, but in Yehud as well.²¹ Nonetheless, a few observations regarding the scribes in an ancient society can be posited with a fair degree of certainty and these may be considered seriously with regard to the author of Jonah.

To begin with, Jonah was in almost complete certitude written by a man. Not only does the story itself deal almost entirely with males, which may or may not reflect the gender of the author, especially since the protagonist is portrayed in such an unflattering light, but almost all scribes in the ancient Near East were men.²² The story of Jonah reflects male spheres of activity with its sailing ships connected to trade and its empire capital Ninevites connected to political control. This being the case, the author of the story of Jonah will be designated with male pronouns.²³

Since learning to write (as opposed to simply being able to read) takes a great deal of practice and a certain amount of directed skill, it may be assumed that the author was educated for several years in normal scribal training, but also in a wide range of what was becoming in the Persian Period the corpus of the Bible canon. The range of “biblical knowledge” attributed to the author of Jonah is vast, including at the very least: Genesis narratives and creation traditions, the history of Israel recorded in Kings, the prophets with special reflection on Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and the wisdom traditions in general.²⁴ One would not have acquired this background in a couple years of elementary scribal study which would have concentrated on basic secretarial and courtier skill requirements with writing, copying, taking dictation, economic mathematics, and proper demeanor high on the list; however, a particular worldview and a certain amount of exact knowledge would also have been part of a proper education. The author of Jonah, it would seem, would have invested considerable time in the written traditions of the Judean religious community, perhaps by having copied this material as his occupation or by having studied it as part of his preparation. In short, Jonah was not written by a boy in school, but by an adult male with considerable education.

While it would appear that the possibility of becoming a scribe might have been open to anyone, the evidence from the ancient Near East suggests that normally scribal training was almost exclusively the realm of the elite families and that probably scribal employment ran in families.²⁵ Sons of scribal fathers tended to move into the “family business.” This raises the possibility that a certain amount of scribal training may have been within the family even if formal training could be arranged with a teacher or tutor. What this would have meant in practical terms for a society is that elite social families raised sons in a comfortable life which would have become after a generation or two the only life known by the adult scribe.²⁶ Unlike the vast majority of boys raised in Judah, or later Yehud, scribal pupils would look upon the “real” world as urban, educated, male-oriented, endowed with a certain amount of social and political power, and relatively stable. Their religion was that of the Jerusalem temple cult, their professional identity would have been that of the royal court before the Persian Empire and as part and parcel of the Persian administration during the Persian Empire.²⁷ With local identity allowed, even encouraged, under Persian control,²⁸ the loyalties of the Jerusalem scribes need not have been so much “divided” as “dual” with a professional pride in being both Judean, with its long history, and in being part of the administration of the great world empire of the Persians.²⁹ Jonah reflects both a Judean theology and an imperial polity.

The basic intention of training scribes was to fit them into professions in the political and religious aspects of the imperial polity.³⁰ No doubt some scribes ended up in mercantile occupations, but the majority would have been employed by the governmental and cultic bureaucracies. Since jobs in the government were traditionally filled by the elite political families aligned with even higher political power, it is probable that Judean scribes so engaged in the Persian Period were amenable to the rule of Persians in Yehud. Scribes that found employment in the Jerusalem Temple, one apparently officially recognized by Persian decree, may have had a more mixed impression toward Persian control; Persia acknowledged their legitimacy, but did not accept their theology. In either case, the scribes would have been situated between the regional population of Yehud and the central government in Persepolis and would have clearly understood the socio-political locale that they occupied. How each individual scribe reconciled the discrepancy between political identity and ethnic/religious identity probably differed for almost every individual scribe. However, to hold the positions that employed them it would have been necessary for the individual to behave in accordance with the Persian-dominated political elite governing the region and to carry out their respective jobs with competence in so far as they owed their employment to those elite.³¹

Repeated wisdom admonitions to treat inferiors well reflect the temptation among scribes to take themselves so seriously as members of the social elite that they pass into overt snobbery. Wisdom literature throughout the ancient Near East contains social admonitions reflecting a social status of privilege with its accompanying temptation to overreach. Wealth, women, duplicity and tyranny are repeatedly warned against suggesting that persons employed in positions of some authority were then, as now, apt to abuse their position and the people around them.³² In fact, all of these temptations were quite real. A professional scribe would have had, in comparison to the majority of the population, a wealth beyond the reach of almost everyone else in the empire. A good marriage could be arranged for any young man who was going to be able to bring high prestige, a good home, and lots of possessions to the daughter of the negotiating prospective bride’s family. Of course, position and power would also provide any scribe with such inclinations the allure and opportunity to engage in extra-marital affairs through coercion, bribery, or mutual consent.³³ A little lying was no doubt as good for self-promotion in the ancient world as it is in modern business and academia;³⁴ while flattery has always been rejected by superiors in theory and sought in practice. And anyone with any sort of authority sooner or later discovers that they can wield it to their advantage to promote their own aims or to thwart others’ desires; merely having a position of any authority at all opens all manner of opportunities to manipulate those in thrall to the position held. Given the structure of a hierarchical administration it may be assumed that scribes as a group were given to these failings and that the authorities responsible for their behavior allowed a certain amount, maybe even a great amount, of misbehavior on the part of scribes (and their families) on whom the hierarchy was dependent.³⁵ This would produce a level of administration with a self-contained self-interest with a notion of its own superior worth as well as a belief that it was safe from punishment perhaps for anything short of treason or abuse of peers and superiors.

A social position which depended on favor and disfavor from superiors has conseq...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. A Scribe's-Eye View
• 2. An Imaginary Real World
• 3. The Divine Realm
• 4. The Human Dimension
• 5. An Unnatural Nature
• 6. A Moral Universe?
• 7. Reality as Fiction
• 8. The Story Once More
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Authors
• Index of Scriptural References
• Index of Subjects