JONAH

JONAH , or, in Hebrew, Yonah, was an Israelite prophet in the Bible who, as told in the book preserved in his name, was divinely commissioned to announce a prophecy of imminent doom to the Assyrian people of Nineveh (Jon. 1:1–2). Fleeing his task, Jonah hopped aboard a commercial vessel bound for Tarshish, in the west (Jon. 1:3). Subsequently, a violent storm broke out that was recognized through divination by lots to be due to a sin of Jonah's. The storm was quelled when Jonah was cast into the sea (Jon. 1:4–10). However, the Lord arranged for a great fish to swallow the prophet, who presumably repented his folly in attempting to flee divine destiny (Jon. 2:8). In any event, he was regurgitated upon the dry land and traveled to Nineveh, where he first announced doom to the city and its inhabitants and then witnessed the pagans' repentances and God's forgiveness (Jon. 3). Grieved at this expression of divine mercy, Jonah wished to die, but, in the parable of chapter 4, was given instruction and reproof by God in the form of a recinus plant that sprouted to shade him in the heat of the day but then as quickly withered. Jonah regretted its loss, although he had done nothing to care for it. How much more (he is asked rhetorically) should God have compassion for people like the Ninevites and their cattle—his creatures?

Both language and theology, as well as the inaccurate depiction of Nineveh, suggest that the Book of Jonah is a relatively late postexilic composition, from about the fourth century bce (it is first cited in Tobit ). The book is artistically organized and integrated: Chapters 1 and 3 deal with penitent pagans and their salvation from the wrath of Israel's God; chapters 2 and 4 deal with the Israelite prophet and his theological lessons in and by miraculous circumstances. But the concern of the text has, since antiquity, perplexed its readers.

In ancient Jewish Midrashic and aggadic literature, commentators have drawn out various lessons from the story of Jonah. In the failure of Jonah's flight they saw proof that a prophet could not escape his destiny. In his refusal to prophesy they detected a noble desire not to insult Israel, who—unlike the pagans—did not repent. In God's final response to the Ninevites, the rabbis underscored the power of repentance to affect the divine will. (Since antiquity the Book of Jonah has been the prophetic lection for the afternoon service of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement; see B.T., Meg. 31a.) Finally, in Jonah's refusal to utter a prophetic oracle of doom in the name of a merciful God, many interpreters have seen his fear of being killed as a false prophet. The church fathers, in contrast to the rabbis, argued that Jonah wanted by his prophecy to the Ninevites to teach a lesson to the stubborn Jews, and thus found in Jonah precedent and support for missions to the Gentiles.

Divine mercy, false prophecy, and repentance combined are the core of the prophetic meditation reflected in this book: Initially concerned that divine mercy would limit the dignity of prophecy and so make the divine oracular word conditional upon human behavior, Jonah rejected his office only to realize finally that repentance has no independent, magical effect, because divine mercy is an attribute of an utterly transcendent and free God. The asymmetry between the parable at the story's end, the prophet's situation, and the lesson derived from it, has often been regarded as support for this theological point. God will have mercy in the end upon whomsoever he chooses.

At another level, the ingestion and regurgitation of Jonah by a fish is a motif that dramatizes the inner transformation and spiritual rebirth of the prophet. Typologically, moreover, the three days spent by Jonah in the belly of the fish were seen in early Christian tradition as prefiguring the three days spent by Jesus "in the heart of the earth" (Mt. 12:40). The fish and salvation motifs are found frequently in the Roman catacombs and on the sarcophagi and were used extensively in Byzantine manuscripts and in medieval miracle plays. In Jewish Neoplatonic texts, the themes of the story of Jonah were understood allegorically in terms of the fate of the human soul in the world.

Bibliography

Bickerman, Elias J. Four Strange Books of the Bible: Jonah, Daniel, Koheleth, Esther. New York, 1967.

Cohn, Gabriël H. Das Buch Jona. Assen, 1969.

Ginzberg, Louis. The Legends of the Jews (1909–1938). 7 vols. Translated by Henrietta Szold et al. Reprint, Philadelphia, 1937–1966. See the index, s.v. Jonah.

Goitein, S. D. "Some Observations on Jonah." Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 17 (1937): 63–77.

Scholem, Gershom, ed. Zohar, the Book of Splendor (1949), vol. 6. Reprint, New York, 1963.

Urbach, E. E. "The Repentance of the People of Nineveh and the Discussions between Jews and Christians" (in Hebrew). Tarbiz 20 (1949): 118–122.

New Sources

Gaines, Janet Howe. Forgiveness in a Wounded World: Jonah's Dilemma. Studies in Biblical Literature, no. 5. Atlanta, 2003.

Person, Raymond F. In Conversation with Jonah: Conversation Analysis, Literary Criticism, and the Book of Jonah. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series, no. 220. Sheffield, 1996.

Sherwood, Yvonne. Biblical Text and Its Afterlives: The Survival of Jonah in Western Culture. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2000.

Michael Fishbane (1987)

Revised Bibliography