The Message of Jonah

Presence in the Storm

Rosemary Nixon

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780830883820
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblischer Kommentar

The book of Jonah is mostly remembered for its oddity—a runaway prophet swallowed by a whale!But there must be more to the book than that. And indeed there is. For one thing, it is a book artfully constructed, with one chapter devoted to a psalm. It is a book that will reward careful reading and meditation.But more than that, in the drama of Jonah we find charted the course not just of this angular prophet but of Israel's attitude toward its most despised neighbor in the Mediterranean world. Jonah refuses to answer God's call to go and proclaim judgement because he knows God is just the kind of God who respond in mercy and grace should the Assyrians repent. Jonah will have no part of it—until he is compelled. And even then he pities himself.The irony of this prophet's story is amusing—but it reaches out and touches us where we are today. Rosemary Nixon's exposition explores the book in its own right and helps us make the connections with our view of God and his world today.

1. The literary genre of Jonah

The traditional Christian doctrine has always been that Jesus Christ is the Word of God.1 Holy Scripture bears witness to Christ as the Word of God. The Scriptures, inspired by the Spirit of God, testify to God’s revelation to humanity, a revelation which finds its highest pinnacle in the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Word of God incarnate. Sacred Scripture is a literary anthology. The pages of the Old Testament in particular offer a wide range of literary styles and forms. As we read its pages we recognize different kinds of writing. Each book of the Bible gives clues which shape our expectations. For example, following the Hebrew text, the Psalms and much of the prophetic literature is set out in modern translations of the Bible in poetic form. By contrast, earlier English translations set out each of these texts as if they were prose. Whether reading poetry or prose, readers adopt an approach to the literature which shapes their expectations of it.

Scripture also uses different literary forms or genres to convey the word of God. No one form is adequate to the task; many forms are needed to witness to the glorious riches of gospel truth. The genres we encounter as we range over Hebrew Scripture include letters (Jer. 29), royal edicts (Ezra 1), songs (Is. 5), sermons (Deut.), court records (2 Sam. 20:23–26), liturgical rubrics (Lev. 6), parables (2 Sam. 12), allusions to Ancient Near Eastern myths (Is. 51:9), genealogies (1 Chr. 1–9), codes of moral teaching (Exod. 20), accounts of battles (2 Kgs. 23), love songs (Song) and much more. We also find examples of historical data, as in Isaiah 1:1, and specific theological interpretation, as in 2 Kings 14:26–28. All the books of Scripture have their own integrity and authenticity. Their theological and spiritual truth is recognized in the way that they correspond to the whole range of human experience. When inspired by the Holy Spirit of God, prayerful reflection on human experience in the presence of God may give birth to what is called ‘revealed truth’.

Readers also bring to the text certain expectations of the kind of truth they may encounter. For example, Christians are frequently drawn to the kind of truth expressed in the Psalms. They anticipate the poetry of the Psalms having the capacity to plumb the spiritual depths of human experience. On the other hand, we generally expect the prose of 1 Chronicles to give us clips of information which were considered important within the overall theological conventions of that book. Similarly, we anticipate a different aspect of truth in Genesis 1 from that which we encounter in Ezra 1. Again we find in the Gospel of Mark a different way of communicating the truth about Jesus Christ from that found in the epistle to the Hebrews. All these texts glow endlessly with different facets of incomparable divine truth. All are bearers of God’s truth and their genre is necessarily gloriously diverse.

This is not to cast doubt on the fundamental nature of revealed truth in Scripture. Nor is it to deny the indispensable work of God’s Holy Spirit in enlivening the truth of God’s word in different ways at different times. Rather, it is to recognize that the Word of God in Jesus Christ cannot be contained in any one kind of literary form. The gospel of God breaks through our literary conventions. They are no more than earthen vessels. As we have seen, holy Scripture makes use of many different styles of human literature: poetry, narrative, letter, genealogy, court records, liturgy. Just as there is no one single form of literature to express the rich diversity of human culture, so no one single literary form is adequate to give full expression to God’s word. Together these different literary forms testify to the precious spiritual Bread and Water of Life. Even as the heaven of heavens cannot contain him, neither can our different modes of human literature and expression.

Clues concerning the genre of Jonah

What type of literature are we reading when we turn to Jonah? What kinds of truth may we expect to encounter as we read the book? To respond to these questions we must consider the genre of Jonah. A superficial glance at the text shows that chapter 2 is clearly in poetic form. Immediately that simple observation suggests how we might read it. By contrast chapters 1, 3 and 4 are set out in prose. Do we therefore expect them to retell an historical event, or is the story they tell an extended parable? What kinds of truth may we encounter as we follow Jonah on his amazing journey? Are we reading an historical account of the prophet’s life written from a theological perspective? Or are we reading theological truth distilled from historical reality but expressed for us here in parable form?

Scholars have argued for various possibilities such as that Jonah is a humorous treatise against Jewish exclusivism in the post-exilic era, or that the text reflects a general loss of confidence in the prophets in Israel following the restoration from exile in Babylon. What clues are available to help us understand what we are reading in these four short chapters?

History is the beginning but not the end

While the very existence of the Bible is clear testimony to significant historical realities and facts, it is plain to see that the Bible itself is much more than an ancient historical narrative spanning a period of over two thousand years. Events of history recounted in the Bible are, like all human history, mediated through the perspective of interpreters. Even inspired theological interpreters sometimes give the same historical events different significance. The significance they attribute to an event will depend on their perspective and their underlying purpose in recounting the history. For example, when telling the history of Israel and Judah the writers of 1 and 2 Kings offer a different perspective from that found in 1 and 2 Chronicles. Sometimes the storyline itself has curious differences; a notable example of this is found in their respective accounts of King Manasseh.2

It cannot be doubted that the text of the Bible is shaped by events in human history. However, the meaning of those events, for example the exodus, is disclosed by the word of God to his people, Israel. These theological disclosures lead to a writing of history in a way which transcends the actual events. Thus we see in the Scriptures theological truth being expressed in images and motifs which give flesh to abstractions and propositions. A biblical scholar has correctly said that the Bible speaks

. . . largely in images. . . The stories, the parables, the sermons of the prophets, the reflections of the wise men, the pictures of the age to come, the interpetations of past events all tend to be expressed in images which arise out of experience. They do not often arise out of abstract technical language.3

For example, the transformative story of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea is infused throughout the literature of the Old Testament. It was the key event by which the Lord God brought his people, Israel, into existence. It portrayed her as the Lord’s ‘firstborn’, as a ‘priceless jewel’ in his crown, as the wife of the Lord. All manner of images were deployed as a way of expressing the Lord’s unique covenant relationship with Israel. An event, grounded in an actual human experience, became the window through which God’s chosen people came to understand and interpret their entire history. The exodus transcended history; it became a fundamental article of faith, a reality by which the history of God’s people came to be judged. It was the key to understanding the identity and calling of Israel. It came to be expressed by means of powerful and vibrant images which resonate with the human condition. Images such as slaves being freed to worship and serve the King of kings, slaves being the chosen people, a kingdom of priests, the ones to inherit the Promised Land, abound in this story. Such images resonate deeply with the human calling to identify the purpose and meaning of life lived in relationship to a creating and redeeming Lord.

Translating all this in terms of how we might read the book of Jonah, we need, first, to notice that the two books, Exodus and Jonah, are different. The first sets out the theological and historical framework in which God’s people come to exist, while the second paints a picture of how God’s people sometimes behave towards God and others. Concerning Jonah, we could say that the four chapters describe an historical event. Thus everything described, his attitude towards God, the sailors, the great fish, Nineveh’s repentance, the worm and the castor oil plant, are all factually necessary to the divine revelation. This approach is well attested from antiquity and is still followed by some commentators.4 Alternatively, we could say that in this short book the meaning of the prophet’s personal experience is being interpreted to us theologically by means of a parable.5 As an equally well-attested means of divine revelation, the parable makes use of powerful and humorous imagery in disclosing a rather unpalatable truth about God’s people. The historical reality of Jonah’s attitudes towards the Lord and Nineveh are not in doubt; the divine disclosure of God’s mercy towards Nineveh is not in doubt. It is the way these truths come to be expressed which gives them a wider and more enduring application. The concern is no longer with the historical Jonah, with what he said and did and when, but with the universal motifs of human disobedience in the face of God’s call.

In particular, the book of Jonah draws out themes of the sovereign grace of the Lord God in the face of human evil. These theological truths are the glory of the book. They are not grounded in a wishful imagination, nor do they inhabit the minds of the deluded; they are grounded in the ongoing and experienced ways of the Lord God with his people through the millennia. In a sense, the book of Jonah is a little like a testimony. The nature of the profound truth conveyed concerns the relationship between the Lord God of Israel and Jonah son of Amittai. The story is told not simply as a historical memoir of a disobedient man, but as a significant way of challenging those who claim to know and love the Lord to consider all his ways. Whether we take the book as ‘history with a moral’ or as ‘parable grounded in experience’, there is no doubt about its overriding message.

In the three Gospel accounts of his allusions to Jonah, Jesus draws attention to himself as being a ‘sign’ to this ‘evil generation’ just as Jonah was a sign to Nineveh.6 He also says, ‘As Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so will the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.’7 Here Jesus makes use of popular Jewish thinking in which the disobedient Jonah of the biblical text had come to be linked with a miracle of resurrection.8 Referring to both Jonah and himself suffering death, Jesus implies that it is the Son of man who will actually and literally be raised from the dead. He argues that Someone greater than Jonah is standing in the midst, yet those seeing and hearing him are blind to what they see and deaf to what they hear. Here it must be acknowledged that, for some readers, the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection implies the historicity of Jonah. For others, Jesus is making a statement about himself, the One who is greater than Jonah. Drawing on language and imagery which was familiar to his audience, he was drawing attention to himself and away from the disobedient prophet. In the event, the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection does not depend on the historicity of Jonah’s incarceration in and eventual expulsion from the belly of the great fish. It depends on the uniqueness of the Lord Jesus Christ, the extent of New Testament testimony, the consequent transformation of hundreds of thousands of human lives and the ongoing witness of the Christian church throughout the world.

That Jonah was called by God is beyond doubt, but the book in which the call of Jonah is worked out is a prophetic oracle in parable form. It is an historical fact that God’s people were called to serve him and were often guilty of disobedience to his call. This stance does not underestimate the evidently historical dimensions of Scripture. Rather, it reflects a judgment being made on the literary genre of Jonah having a greater affinity with the art of parable than with historical writing.

Set in parable style, Jonah’s stance in regard to his call is sketched against the background of the giantesque. With the exception of his call, everything to Jonah was larger than life. His task was bigger than that of other prophets; this dove-like man was called to go alone to preach God’s judgment to the aggressive, powerful, distant and huge city of Nineveh. His brief, eight-word sermon provokes a thoroughgoing repentance of this city from top to bottom. The fish which swallows Jonah is of monstrous size. Over against all these giants looming on Jonah’s little horizon is the lavish, immeasurable and unfathomable grace and mercy of the Lord God. But this he cannot see; Jonah is too caught up with great things.

Whether we regard the story of Jonah as history or as something else, it cannot be doubted that we have in these forty-eight verses an incomparable story. While of itself it may fascinate and intrigue, it is the magnificent articulation and portrayal of the character of God, so consonant with the teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ, which grips and absorbs us. To express these truths in the form of a parable is no diminishment of its meaning, any more than the truth offered by Jesus in his story of the prodigal son or Dives and Lazarus is lessened by their literary genre.

In searching the text for clues to the genre of Jonah we might consider evidence from the following sources.

The canon of Scripture

Ecclesiasticus 49:10 refers to ‘the twelve prophets’.9 From this we can deduce that by the early first century BC Jonah was reckoned among this prophetic collection. However, this is only marginally helpful in our search for clues concerning the genre of Jonah. Even a casual reading of just two of ‘the twelve’ prophetic texts, such as Jonah and Nahum, shows striking differences between them. In one, the reader is driven by the pace of a narrative story, and in the other pounded by a series of awful oracles of judgment against Nineveh. If we were to read all ‘the twelve’ we would discover that, in terms of literary style, Jonah is the odd one out. There is no implication here that Jonah was not a prophet; by its very inclusion the text was clearly regarded as prophetic. The case here is simply that the prophetic text of Jonah is most unusual when compared with the other eleven texts in which it is set.

Prophecy

This leads us to ask how prophecy was understood. Both Jonah and, for example, Nahum were included in the prophetic collection, so we are forced to see that two very different kinds of texts were reckoned as prophecy. We discover that this is in keeping with a very broad view of prophecy in the Hebrew Scripture generally. For example, the books we know as 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings were known from ancient times as the ‘former prophets’. In other words, they were conceived primarily as prophetic texts and not historical ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Short Title Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• General preface
• Author’s preface
• Chief Abbreviations
• Bibliography
• Introduction
• 1. The literary genre of Jonah
• 2. A prophet protests (1:1–3)
• 3. Storm at sea (1:4–8)
• 4. The prophet speaks (1:9–16)
• 5. Alive or dead? (1:17–2:10)
• 6. Jonah calls upon the Lord (2:1–10)
• 7. A persistent God (3:1–10)
• 8. A prophet’s anger and the Lord’s pity (4:1–11)
• 9. The repentance of Nineveh and the people of God
• Appendix: A possible chronology of Jonah’s life and times
• Notes
• BST Old Testament series
• BST New Testament series
• BST Bible Theme series
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright