Jonah

Introduction and Commentary

Amy Erickson

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780802868312
• eBook ISBN: 9781467461306
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

The dominant reading of the book of Jonah—that the hapless prophet Jonah is a lesson in not trying to run away from God—oversimplifies a profoundly literary biblical text, argues Amy Erickson. Likewise, the more recent understanding of Jonah as satire is problematic in its own right, laden as it is with anti-Jewish undertones and the superimposition of a Christian worldview onto a Jewish text. How can we move away from these stale interpretations to recover the richness of meaning that belongs to this short but noteworthy book of the Bible? 

This Illuminations commentary delves into Jonah's reception history in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic contexts while also exploring its representations in visual arts, music, literature, and pop culture. After this thorough contextualization, Erickson provides a fresh translation and exegesis, paving the way for pastors and scholars to read and utilize the book of Jonah as the provocative, richly allusive, and theologically robust text that it is.

Introduction

In the modern era, the dominant interpretation of the book of Jonah has gone something like this: Jonah is an obstinate, disobedient prophet of the Lord who does not want to proclaim a message of salvation to non-Jews, especially his enemies. Over the course of the book, God pushes Jonah to see the light—namely, that God’s love and mercy extend to everyone, not only to the Jews. The “gentiles” in Nineveh are incredibly spiritually enlightened and repent of their evil ways after five words from Jonah. Or, alternatively, they repent in an over-the-top way to show up—in fantastic relief—Jonah’s obstinacy, in particular his failure to repent and submit to God. Either way, these gentiles get God (the “true” God) in a way that Jonah does not. The anger Jonah expresses in the final chapter of the book reveals that Jonah has ultimately failed to accept that God could go so far as to forgive Israel’s enemies.

In the 1980s and 1990s, many commentators, attentive to the book’s apparent comedic elements, saw the book as a satire. They argued the book lampooned the character Jonah in order to poke fun at xenophobic Israelites, who did not like the idea of sharing God’s favor with the nations (“gentiles”). The assumption behind these readings is that if the text is a satire, it must be rejecting something, showing some position to be funny, as in “funny ludicrous”: what is rejected is Jonah and all that he seems to stand for (e.g., xenophobia, election, particularity, prophecy, “old” ideas about YHWH).

The dominant interpretation, along with its satirical spin-off, has had real appeal—especially to Christians who like the idea of a universally loving God who is slow to punish and anger and are a bit uncomfortable with the theological implications of Israel’s election as well as with certain depictions of Israel’s god (as violent, angry, judging).

However, as some scholars, in particular Yvonne Sherwood, have recently pointed out, this dominant interpretation has some disturbing implications. First, casting Jonah as the sole target of the book’s critique plays into and exacerbates a deep-seated and long-felt Christian anxiety about the presence of the Jew. Indeed, as Sherwood has persuasively and disturbingly shown, a rhetoric of anti-Judaism pervades Christian critiques of the character Jonah, who is consistently indicted for being too narrow-minded, too stubborn, too disobedient—in fact, too much like a Christian anti-Judaic stereotype. The dominant reading encourages readers—Christian readers in particular—to chuckle knowingly, perhaps with some pity, at the selfish, obstinate Jonah who must learn a lesson that they (we, really) already know. In this way, Christian identity is shored up over against Jewish identity (Sherwood, 185).

Second, this reading takes the Ninevites and, without the slightest bit of irony, turns them into “the gentiles” whom God is determined to save, despite the protests of the small-minded Jew, Jonah. Inherent in this interpretation is a suspicious consistency between the Protestant worldview and God’s “message” in Jonah (it just so happens that the God of Israel espouses the most cherished of mainline Christian values). This is an interpretation that grows up from a secure readerly position, undergirded by the assumption that these readers already know what the book wants to teach—there is an answer at the back of the book that Protestants knew all along. This reinforces a Christian tendency to feel confident that it is God’s will for Christians, at least, to be saved.

Third, the prevalence of the dominant reading has the effect of marginalizing other possible interpretations. In the book’s long history of interpretation, quite different readings of the book arose and were nurtured on the margins, away from the power centers of Europe. Unlike mainstream readers, whose interpretations typically confirm and reinforce the status quo, readers from marginalized communities have tended to celebrate the ambiguous and the unsettled (which mirrors their own ambiguous and unsettled existences). Rather than use the text to reinforce the validity and rightness of the current situation, marginal readers have used the text as a forum to air their fears and raise troubling questions, which—not unlike their lives—get played out without resolution. Readers who are politically or economically marginalized cannot so easily assume that God is on their side. Such readings look at God’s salvation of Nineveh, the capital of the empire that destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel, and ask: “Is God siding with our enemies against us?” “Can we trust God to act in our interests?” “Is God a good god?” Where the dominant reading takes the difficult, raw theological questions raised by Jonah and answers them quickly, coherently, and firmly, marginal interpretations tend to take anxieties about God’s protection and the waywardness of human life and stage them so that readers can wrestle with them (Sherwood 185–88).

Finally, the dominant interpretation is simply stale and flat. It takes all of the power, pathos, and subtlety that is characteristic of great literature and processes it down to an easily digested, gluten-free kernel. It takes a theologically robust, richly allusive, and provocative biblical book and pitches it as a children’s story designed to deliver a saccharine “moral of the story” (e.g., “you can’t run away from God!” or, even sweeter, “God loves everyone!”). What I hope to offer in this commentary is a reading that is a bit meatier and more savory.

1.0 TEXTS AND VERSIONS

In the third century CE, Origen’s monumental project known as the Hexapla marks the beginning of textual criticism of the book of Jonah. The conviction that the establishment of a correct text was a necessary precursor to exegesis motivated Origen to produce the Hexapla. Such a correct text was elusive in Origen’s time because there were a number of rival Greek translations competing with the Septuagint; the variants, along with the many Greek divergences from the Hebrew text, created confusion in the church where leaders wanted to undergird and bolster their authority with the single, true text of Scripture.

To determine that true text, Origen constructed a system designed to help him adjudicate among the available variants. Although Origen’s Hexapla is not extant, it likely consisted of six columns containing (1) the Hebrew text in Hebrew square script, (2) a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew, (3) Aquila’s Greek translation, (4) Symmachus’s Greek translation, (5) the so-called Septuagint, which consisted of OG supplemented with material from Theodotion, marked with asterisks, and (6) Theodotion’s translation. Although convinced of the Septuagint’s spiritual and ecclesiastical authority, Origen was partial to the Hebrew because it represented the Old Testament in its original form (Paget 1996, 507).

The creation of Polyglots, or multilingual Bibles, marks the next significant moment in text-critical study. Eveline van Staalduine-Sulman compares the intellectual practice that fueled the creation of Polyglots to that of the study of flowers in the seventeenth century: collection, observation, and comparison. Versions were collected and presented side by side on the same page so that scholars and religious leaders could observe the differences and similarities among them and then study them in comparison to one another (230).

The Polyglots reflect the values of the scholars and printers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, who believed that “there is more to the original text than meets the eye and no translation would ever manage to comprehend the entire meaning of the original text” (Staalduine-Sulman 2017, 230). Because these Polyglot makers also believed that those who lived in closer proximity to the time and culture of the Bible had more accurate and even more intimate information about God, Polyglots accumulated more versions over time. The burgeoning grandeur of these projects has been likened to cathedral building in that the Polyglot was a material and visual expression of devotion that also brought glory to the men and the nations that produced them.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros was dismayed by the state of biblical scholarship in Spain. To ameliorate the situation, he established a university and enlisted a host of experts in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin to collaborate on the Complutensian Polyglot (Alcalá de Henares, Spain, 1514–1517). This aesthetically striking Bible presented the Hebrew, Greek (the ecclesiastical text known as the Septuagint, supplemented with the asterisked material), and Latin (Vulgate) of the book of Jonah on a single page. In the next century, the Antwerp (1569–1572) and Paris (1645) Polyglots followed, adding the text of the Targum at the bottom of each page.

The London Polyglot (1655–1657) emerged in the wake of the English Civil War. Its lead creator, Brian Walton, was convinced that an ambitious new Polyglot would be an important way to bring order and unity to the divided nation. In Walton’s Polyglot, the text of Jonah appears in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Syriac, Arabic, and Aramaic. While the sought-after order and unity in England remained elusive, the availability of Polyglots and other philological and grammatical resources produced during the same period enabled modern textual criticism on Jonah to develop through the work of scholars including Louis Cappel (1585–1658), Albert Schultens (1686–1750), Charles François Houbigant (1684–1783), and Georg Beer (1865–1946). Major text-critical and philological contributions in the twentieth century were produced by Julius Bewer (1912), Phyllis Trible (1963), and Jack Sasson (1990).

1.1 HEBREW

1.1.1 Masoretic Text

The primary Hebrew source for my translation of the biblical book of Jonah is the Masoretic Text (MT). The most readily and widely available witness to MT-Jonah is B19^A, Codex Leningrad (MT^L), which dates to ca. 1009 CE and is housed in St. Petersburg. MT^L is the basis of Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS), the fourth edition of which was edited by K. Elliger (1967–1968). While Biblia Hebraica Leningradensia (BHL), edited by Aron Dotan (2001), corrects some of the errors in BHS, it does not contain a critical apparatus. For the fifth edition of BHS, Biblia Hebraica Quinta (BHQ), Anthony Gelston prepared the fascicle for the Twelve Prophets (2010). A facsimile edition of MT^L, edited by David Noel Freedman, Astrid Beck, and James Sanders, was published in 1997.

While Codex Aleppo (MT^A) represents the most accurate source for MT, unfortunately the pages containing the book of Jonah are (presumably) among the three pages from the Twelve Prophets (Amos 8:13 to Mic 5:1, including the books of Obadiah and Jonah) that have been lost.

The Cairo Codex of the Prophets (Codex Prophetarum Cairensis) contains the complete text of the Nevi’im, including the book of Jonah. While the colophon indicates that the text was pointed in 895 CE by Moses ben Asher in Tiberias, L. Lipschütz observed that the codex is more similar to the Ben Naphtali tradition than that of Ben Asher (1962). M. H. Goshen-Gottstein explained the discrepancy by arguing that Ben Naphtali followed the Ben Asher tradition more scrupulously than Moses ben Asher’s own son (1963, 107). U. Cassutto published the book of Jonah from this manuscript in 1946 (print ed. 1953), and D. Lyons edited a facsimile critical edition of the codex’s Masora (1999).

The Petersburg Codex of the Prophets (V^P) contains the Major and Minor Prophets, including Jonah. The manuscript was discovered in a synagogue in the Crimea in 1839 and is significant because of its age (it dates to 916 CE) as well as for its preservation of the Babylonian pointing system.

Variants: Benjamin Kennicott (1776) published a collection of variants from more than six hundred manuscripts and fifty-two editions of the Hebrew text. Giovanni De Rossi supplemented and corrected Kennicott’s edition some ten years later (1788). In 1926, C. D. Ginsburg prepared a new edition of the “Later Prophets.” The text was based on Jacob ben Chayyim’s Second Rabbinic Bible (1524/25) and included variants from more than seventy manuscripts. The majority of these variants show divergence only on minor grammatical points; few produce potential differences in meaning.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

De Rossi, G., ed. 1788. Variae lectiones Veteris Testamenti ex Immensa Mss. 4 vols. Parma: Ex Regio Typographeo.

Dotan, A., ed. 2001. Biblia Hebraica Leningradensia. Peabody, MA: Hendrikson.

Freedman, D. N., et al., eds. 1998. The Leningrad Codex: A Facsimile Edition. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

Gelston, A. 2010. Biblia Hebraica Quinta: The Twelve Minor Prophets. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson.

Ginsburg, C. D., ed. 1926. The Old Testament, Diligently Revised According to the Masorah and the Early Editions with Various Readings. 4 vols. London: British Foreign Society.

Goshen-Gottstein, M. H. 1963. Pages 79–122 in “The Rise of the Tiberian Bible Text.” In Biblical and Other Studies. Edited by A. Altmann. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Kennicott, B., ed. 1776. Vetus Testamentum Hebraicum cum Variis Lectionibus. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon.

Lipschütz, L. 1964. “Kitāb Al-Khilaf: Mishael Ben Uzziel’s Treatise on the Differences between Ben Asher and Ben Naphtali.” Textus 4:1–29.

Lyons, D., ed. 1999. The Cumulative Masora: Text, Form and Transmission with a Facsimile Critical Edition of the Cumulative Masora in the Cairo Prophets Codex; Heb. title: ha-Masorah ha-metsarefet—derakheha ve-sugeha: al pi ketav-yad Kahir shel ha-Neviim. Beer-Sheva: Ben-Gurion University.

Paget, J. N. B. C. 1996....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• To the Reader
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations and Sigla
• Introduction
• Commentary