Jared Byas

Love Tenaciously

Is Jonah Historical? The Overview (Part 1 of 5)

I have finally caved. In the following posts I am showing my cards for why I don’t think we have to read Jonah as a historical account and that doing so might actually be going against the author’s intention.

And in case you’re wondering, no, not one of my reasons includes a lack of faith or anti-supernatural bias. In fact, that accusation is how this conversation started (see here and here). So, to those of you who don’t care (which if experience tells me anything, is about 90% of you), I am sorry. I will try to post a few other things this week as well so that you don’t completely check out.

I avoid putting on my nerdy biblical studies hat when possible, but this week will be an exception. I will try to keep it simple but thorough. And given people’s atrocious attention span online, I will split it up into five, yes 5, parts (some of you have just decided it’s not worth it) that will be posted throughout the week.

This first post will simply give you my 3 broad reasons and each subsequent post will look at these reasons with more detail. The last will then deal with the two biggest objections: the historical Jonah mentioned in Kings and Jesus’ mention of the “sign of Jonah” in the New Testament.

The Way It’s Written (Textual Style): the first reason I don’t think Jonah is meant to be historical is the highly stylized way it is written. There are various rhetorical devices that are used to make nice, neat, points. None of these exclude historical writing, of course, but when you put them all together the book begins to look a lot less like non-fiction and a lot more like stylized fiction with a specific purpose.

The Way It Borrows (Intertextual Cues): Another reason I am suspicious of reading Jonah historically is because it borrows from and mirrors other books of the Bible in several interesting ways. Again, this doesn’t exclude historicity since most of the biblical writings are shaped according to certain purposes and often borrow from one another. But, along with the other evidence, this does play a role for why I do not read Jonah historically.

The Point It Wants to Make (Textual Shape): In all other prophetic books, the prophet is speaking the Word of the Lord in a time of crisis, either political or theological (mostly both). But this is a book about a prophet not speaking the Word of the Lord at first and then being upset by the outcomes of that word later. In Jonah, the prophet looks like a foil for the author to make a bigger point. Jonah looks symbolic, or technically speaking, like a metonymy. And as such, the point of the book looks theological, not historical.

Of course, I could be wrong on all three accounts. But aside from the evidence of whether or not it is historical, in these posts I also want to challenge the deeper question: why are we so insistent that it is? What assumptions are we bringing to the Bible that keeps us from even entertaining the question? What keeps us from the “perhaps”?

In the next post, we will delve into the way it’s written (textual style).

Jonah 7

Although there are dozens of other great literary features in the book of Jonah (like chapter 4’s affinity with the book of Exodus) I will end this series with a discussion of how the Ninevites are portrayed in the book. The book makes it sound as though the Ninevites are no better than cattle.

Now, oftentimes, the Old Testament will call people animals. For instance, Amos rails against some foreign wives and says, “Hear this word, you cows of Bashan who are on the mountain of Samaria, who oppress the poor, who crush the needy!” But there in Jonah the comparison between the foreigners and cattle is a little more subtle.

This idea is seen in Jonah 3:7-8 and 4:11. In 3:7-8 the author lumps man and beast together in the proclamation of the king of Nineveh who says:

“Do not let man, beast, herd, or flock taste anything. Do no let them eat or drink water. But both man and beast must be covered with sackcloth and let them call on God earnestly that each may turn from his wicked way and the violence which is in their hands.” So both man and animal (what a strange idea) must be covered with sackcloth (a traditional Hebrew rite for mourning) and let them (another strange idea) call on God.

Then in 4:11 he also lumps them together although the connection is not as explicit:
“Should I not have compassion on Nineveh, the great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know the difference between their right and left hand, as well as many animals?”

Jonah 6

Old Testament thoughts is a weekly post where we’ll be looking at some interesting aspects of some Scripture from the Hebrew Bible (what Christians call the Old Testament). Right now, we are looking at the literary aspects of the book of Jonah.

Chapter 3 begins the way you would have expected the entire story would have (see the first post below). YHWH tells Jonah to “arise” and he does “arise” to go to Ninevah, instead of “arising” to “go down” to run away from YHWH.

Then he goes to Nineveh and says this, “Yet forty days and Nineveh will be haphak.”

I will, for the sake of space and focus, not deal with how unlikely it would have been for the Ninevites to understand Hebrew, the language the Scriptures are written in. That is, what did Jonah really say? And did he say it in Hebrew? Or is what we have a translation? Ah…for another day…

But I do want to simply point out the ambiguity of the term haphak. If God (via Jonah) wanted to proclaim that in 40 days Nineveh would be destroyed there are several other words that would be unambigious. Instead, he uses the ambigious haphak, which could mean either “turned” or “overthrown.” We obviously know which of those Jonah meant, he wanted Nineveh to be “overthrown.”

Instead, verse 5 shows us that the Ninevites “turned” or “were changed,” that is, they repented. Is that what God meant when he said, “40 days and Nineveh will be haphak“?

The interesting thing is that Nineveh wasn’t destroyed. If you remember, in Deuteronomy, the mark of a true prophet is that his/her prophecy comes true. But Nineveh wasn’t destroyed. So if Jonah took haphak to mean “destroy” then he is a false prophet. But as it is, and against Jonah’s own wishes, Nineveh “turns,” so maybe he wasn’t a false prophet after all…

N.B.: Even the people of Nineveh thought (whatever language Jonah used) that God was planning on destroying them – see 3:9.

Jonah 5

Old Testament thoughts is a weekly post where we’ll be looking at some interesting aspects of some Scripture from the Hebrew Bible (what Christians call the Old Testament). Right now, we are looking at the literary aspects of the book of Jonah.

The Psalms in ancient Israel are everywhere. They seem to be what the Israelites continue to go back to in order to explain where they are in life. David prays for deliverance in 2 Samuel 22 quoting extensively from Psalm 18, Jesus uses Psalm 22 to describe his current pain and abandonment.

In Jonah 2, the Psalms are used the same way Beatles songs are used in the movie Across the Universe. There is a pastiche of quotes from the psalms all stitched together to make a coherent prayer for Jonah in the belly of the fish. Here is a list* of verbatim uses of the Psalms in Jonah 2:
Jonah 2:3a=Psalm 18:7; 30:3; 118:5; 120:1
Jonah 2:3b=Psalm 130:2
Jonah 2:4b=Psalm 42:8b
Jonah 2:5a=Psalm 31:23a
Jonah 2:6a=Psalm 18:5; 69:2
Jonah 2:8a=Psalm 142:4; 143:4
Jonah 2:8b=Psalm 5:8b; 18:7
Jonah 2:9a=Psalm 31:7a
Jonah 2:10a=Psalm 42:5b; 50:14; 66:13
Jonah 2:10b=Psalm 3:9
The rhetorical effect of this is in providing a structure that lends itself to introspection, as many of the Psalms are, but also of identifying with Israel as a whole. Why else might the writer of Jonah use all these Psalms in the prayer of Jonah?
*List taken from A Poetics of Jonah: Art in the Service of Ideology by Kenneth M. Craig

Jonah 4

Old Testament thoughts is a weekly post where we’ll be looking at some interesting aspects of some Scripture from the Hebrew Bible (what Christians call the Old Testament). Right now, we are looking at the literary aspects of the book of Jonah.

A shorter post this time we’ll continue the theme from last time – who really is a God-fearer in the story of Jonah? The writer makes another contrast between Jonah and the “pagan” boat crew. Here it is:

When the folks from Ninevah sin, Jonah has no interest in mercy or in trying to save them from their impending doom.

When Jonah sins, the “pagan” boat crew do everything they can, even against their best interest, to save Jonah.

Even after Jonah told them that the only way to calm the storm was to throw him into the sea they still “rowed desperately to return to land but they could not.”

This may give some evidence as to when and why Jonah was written, although such a question is a little off topic from the purpose of these posts. However, many think that Jonah was written around the time of the exile of 586 BCE, either just prior (pre-exilic), during (exilic) or just after (post-exilic) This is important because later in the life of Israel, around the time of the exile, they became unhealthily ethno-centric. This rhetorical effect (or maybe even the whole book) may be one example of the writer of Jonah trying to correct how ingrown Israel had become. God cares about and yearns to have compassion on all the nations, not just Israel. Israel had forgotten that. So here, to make the “pagan” boat crew more God-like than the prophet of God, Jonah, is a slap in the face to the Israelites…but a much needed slap.