Obadiah, Jonah and Micah

An Introduction and Commentary

Daniel C. Timmer, David G. Firth

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780830842742
• eBook ISBN: 9780830842766
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Obadiah's oracle against Edom. Jonah's mission to the city of Nineveh. Micah's message to Samaria and Jerusalem. These books are short yet surprisingly rich in theological and practical terms. In this Tyndale commentary on these minor but important prophets, Daniel Timmer considers each book's historical setting, genre, structure, and unity. He explores their key themes with an eye to their fulfilment in the New Testament and their significance for today.

The Tyndale Commentaries are designed to help the reader of the Bible understand what the text says and what it means. The Introduction to each book gives a concise but thorough treatment of its authorship, date, original setting, and purpose. Following a structural Analysis, the Commentary takes the book section by section, drawing out its main themes, and also comments on individual verses and problems of interpretation. Additional Notes provide fuller discussion of particular difficulties.

In the new Old Testament volumes, the commentary on each section of the text is structured under three headings: Context, Comment, and Meaning. The goal is to explain the true meaning of the Bible and make its message plain.

COMMENTARY

1. FIRST COMMISSION, DIVINE MERCY TO NON-ISRAELITES, JONAH’S RESPONSE (1:1 – 2:10)

A. First divine commission and Jonah’s disobedience (A) (1:1–3)

Context

The book opens by introducing its principal human character – the prophet Jonah – and one of the two primary theological issues the book will explore: God’s relationship to non-Israelites. This short section’s statement that Nineveh was an evil city would have surprised none of its Israelite hearers or readers, but the same cannot be said for the prophet’s response to yhwh’s call. The opening verses of the book thus also present, more mysteriously, a second theological issue of central importance: what explains Jonah’s decision to disobey God’s command? The unit follows the conventions of standard Biblical Hebrew narrative, including the narrator’s tendency to simply report events without explicitly commenting upon them.

Comment

1. As noted above, the book opens with a typical prophetic commission (cf. 2 Sam. 7:4; 24:11; 1 Kgs 12:22; 21:17; elsewhere in the Minor Prophets, Hos. 1:1; Joel 1:1; Mic. 1:1; Zeph. 1:1; Hag. 1:1; Zech. 1:1). In addition to identifying Jonah as a de facto prophet, this command carries divine authority and so obliges him to accept it. The identification of Jonah as the son of Amittai identifies him as the same prophet as the Jonah of 2 Kings 14:25. That connection highlights yhwh’s compassion for the northern kingdom (2 Kgs 14:26–27), and echoes his compassion for Israel in slavery in Egypt (Deut. 26:7).

Although the word of yhwh is the normal way to introduce a prophetic call, in Jonah that divine name is also integrated in the author’s careful use of different divine names in order to highlight human beings’ relational distance from, or nearness to, God. The book of Jonah uses yhwh to express close relationship to the God of Israel, thus on the part of Jonah (1:9) but also (and more genuinely) on the part of the sailors (1:14, 16). The more generic term or title God, on the other hand, is used to refer to a false deity (1:5–6) or to the God of Israel whom the Ninevites come to know in some measure (3:5, 8, 9, 10). The fact that this careful use of different divine names corresponds to developments in the story illustrates one of the many ways in which diversity can enrich, rather than detract from, the coherence of the narrative (Lichtert 2003).

2. In 1:2 yhwh orders Jonah to go to Nineveh, the large [gādôl] city, and to call out against it because of its evil (rāʿ). The author of Jonah uses the terms ‘large/great’ and ‘evil’ with precision, as our exploration of the book will show, but only here and in 4:1 (with a different form of the same root) are they used together. This, along with the fact that God himself utters this very negative evaluation of one of Assyria’s key cities, highlights its religious and moral degradation and the consequent danger of divine judgment.

This straightforward statement of the city’s uncertain future would have seemed quite improbable to some of the book’s original audience, and much more so to Assyrians (without forgetting the ominous nature of the calamities that befell parts of Assyria near the middle of the eighth century). Perhaps most importantly, since the late third millennium Nineveh was home to a temple of Ishtar, an important goddess associated especially with love, fertility, storm and war.1 That temple ‘dominated’ the hill at the city’s centre, measuring roughly 300 × 150 feet (Reade 2005: 347, 365). As the location of Ishtar’s throne, this temple was adorned by a number of stone monuments and alabaster wall panels portraying lion hunts in which Ishtar’s help aided the king in vanquishing these symbols of chaos and danger, and was complemented by an impressive ziggurat (Reade 2005: 374, 378, 384). Nineveh’s importance was further augmented by its having been a royal residence since the time of Shalmaneser I (1273–1244 bc) (Stronach and Codella 1996: 146). In the light of these and other factors, its size gradually increased over time, and by the early to mid eighth century it covered roughly 1230 acres (Grayson 1992b: 1119). Its size and religious and political importance probably account for Sennacherib’s decision to make it the empire’s capital city as of 705.

yhwh’s condemnation of Nineveh and prediction of its downfall thus stand in tension with its illustrious past and present. Any who failed to recognize yhwh’s unique deity would understandably wonder what, if anything, such a city had to fear from the deity of a distant, comparatively min uscule country like Israel. This tension is linked to another surprising dynamic in the book: God’s willingness to show mercy to the undeserving. This appears first in his willingness to spare the sailors’ lives, and then Jonah’s life, and comes fully into view with his decision to rescind Nineveh’s punishment once it repents.

3. Without explanation or evaluation, the narrator follows yhwh’s command to Jonah in 1:2 with the statement in 1:3 that he rose up to flee from the presence of yhwh by heading to Tarshish, an evidently distant location somewhere in the Mediterranean (perhaps in modern Spain) (Baker 1992). As noted earlier, Jonah is the only prophet in the Old Testament who reacts to a divine commission in this way. The reader needs to wait until chapter 4 to discover the cause, but surely knows already that something is amiss – how can the prophet hope to escape yhwh’s presence?

As a northerner, Jonah cannot intend to flee from the temple, which was located in Judah. It is more likely that he associated God’s presence (only) with the promised land. Not only did the land of Israel ‘belong’ to yhwh (Lev. 25:23), but his presence in it meant that Israel’s sin could render the land unclean and so jeopardize Israel’s presence in it (Lev. 18:24–30) (Millar 2000). While believing that yhwh’s deity was a reality only in the promised land reveals a deeply flawed and reductionist view of who yhwh is, Jonah confesses in 1:9 that yhwh made both the sea and the dry land. How might we explain these contradictory positions? Jonah’s decision to flee from God’s presence could be the bitter fruit of flawed theology if the confession of 1:9 is ‘by rote’ and mere ‘dead orthodoxy’. The reality was probably more complex, however. Considering his prayer in chapter 2, it seems that Jonah’s knowledge of yhwh is selective, since there yhwh’s power is clearly not limited to the land of Israel. Returning to chapter 1, it would seem that Jonah chooses to ignore that reality, deceiving himself in order to create a way out. When confronted with an unacceptable divine command, flight seems possible (even if a one-in-a-million chance). When that attempt fails, Jonah undertakes still more desperate measures, as we will see.

Whatever the precise contours of his mental and spiritual states, Jonah does the only thing he thinks he can. He first makes his way to Joppa, a port that lay some 70 miles to the south-west of his home town (Kaplan and Kaplan 1992). There he finds a boat heading west, pays his fare (or perhaps books the ship itself; the text says he paid its hire) and goes below board for the trip.2 The author repeats the prophet’s intention to escape yhwh’s presence, certainly a means of ridiculing Jonah’s benighted scheme. This is the first, but certainly not the last, humorous element in the book.

Meaning

On one level, the meaning of this section is self-evident: the prophet Jonah, called to deliver a message of judgment against the prominent Assyrian city of Nineveh, refuses and attempts to flee from yhwh’s presence. No mystery attends yhwh’s decision to have Jonah cry out against Nineveh considering its misdeeds, but the same cannot be said for the prophet’s rejection of his call, a response attested nowhere else in the Old Testament. Thus, on another level lurk several questions which can be answered only in the light of the rest of the book, especially the reason for Jonah’s disobedience. At this stage the reader suspects something is gravely wrong, both because Jonah disobeys a direct command from yhwh and because he seeks to flee from his presence. A final question concerns the role of Jonah in the story: what is the reader meant to learn from him? These questions, and still others, can be answered only by continuing to follow Jonah as he makes his way westwards.

B. Jonah and the non-Israelite sailors (B) (1:4–16)

Context

This unit explores both issues raised in the opening verses (God’s relationship to non-Israelites and the cause of the prophet’s mysterious disobedience), but provides clarity only on the former, leaving the latter for the end of the book. Jonah and the non-Israelite mariners are clearly meant to contrast sharply with one another in generally religious terms, but the author masterfully inverts this contrast over the course of the events he recounts so as to partially illuminate Jonah’s state of heart and to show conclusively that non-Israelites are not excluded from God’s gracious purposes. As is the case throughout the book, the author makes frequent use of humour, satire and irony in his presentations of the human characters.

As is the case with the book as a whole, this passage has been shown to have a number of structural levels or patterns, most of which identify 1:9–10 as its centre.3 In what follows, we will note the most significant structural features without choosing one structure as definitive.

Comment

4. The Hebrew syntax at the beginning of 1:4 indicates a break in the series of actions that began with Jonah ‘rising’ in 1:3. The purpose of the break is to introduce a new actor, who is none other than God. Whatever the reader might have made of Jonah’s attempted flight in 1:3, this makes clear that it was futile. The author describes God’s insurmountable interruption of Jonah’s attempt to flee his commission ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• GENERAL PREFACE
• AUTHOR’S PREFACE
• ABBREVIATIONS
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHIES
• OBADIAH
• ANALYSIS
• COMMENTARY
• JONAH
• ANALYSIS
• COMMENTARY
• 2. SECOND COMMISSION, DIVINE MERCY TO NON-ISRAELITES, JONAH’S RESPONSE (3:1 – 4:11)
• MICAH
• ANALYSIS
• TRANSLATION
• COMMENTARY
• 2. SECOND CYCLE (3:1 – 5:15)
• 3. THIRD CYCLE (6:1 – 7:20)
• Notes
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• IVP Academic Textbook Selector