Of all the prophetic books of the Bible, the book of Jonah is the most difficult to understand and study in depth. Despite its small volume, this work poses a huge number of problems for researchers, making it difficult not only to interpret it, but even to classify it. Thus, a number of experts in Old Testament biblical studies even deprive the book of Jonah of the status of a prophetic writing, citing various arguments in defense of their thesis. For example, O. Kaiser notes that the book of the prophet Jonah is not a prophetic text, but a story about the prophet, in connection with which he refers this work to the historical writings of the Tanakh.
Contents of the Book of Jonah
The Book of Jonah can be structurally divided into three parts. The first part begins with God's command to Jonah to go to Nineveh to report the wrath of the Almighty. The mission of Jonah is to induce the Ninevites to repentance, so that God will cancel the harsh sentence. Jonah tries to evade the divine command and flees on the ship. But the Lord overtakes the ship with a terrible storm, to which the sailors react by casting lots to find out who caused this bad weather. The lot rightly points to the divine deviator (the prophet Jonah), he, forced to confess hisfault, asks the sailors to throw him overboard. The sailors follow the advice and throw Jonah into the sea, where he is swallowed by some huge creature, in Hebrew simply called “fish”, and in the Russian translation of the Bible it is denoted by the word “whale”. According to the story, the prophet Jonah stayed inside this fish for three days and three nights. Then the fish, after Jonah's prayer, spat him out on the shore of the same Nineveh, where God originally sent him. This event is known in Christian tradition as the sign of the prophet Jonah, and is usually associated with the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The second part of the story tells how the prophet Jonah proclaimed the judgment of God on the Ninevites - another 40 days and the city will be destroyed if its inhabitants do not repent. To the surprise of Jonah himself, the inhabitants took the preaching of the visiting prophet with all seriousness. The king announced nationwide repentance and all residents, even domestic animals, had to fast, dressed in sackcloth - penitential clothes.
The third part of the book contains a description of the dispute between God and Jonah. The latter, when he saw that the Almighty, softened by the repentance of the Ninevites, canceled his sentence and pardoned the city, was upset because of his tarnished reputation. In order to reason with the prophet, God performs a miracle: in one night a whole tree grows and in the same night it dries up. The latter serves as a moral illustration for Jonah - he felt sorry for the plant, so that he even cursed his life. If a tree is sorry, then how not to have mercy on the whole city? God asks Jonah. This is where the story of the book ends.
Historicity of the Book of Jonah
It is highly doubtful that the events described in this work took place. The fairy-tale components that permeate the entire canvas of the narrative betray the fact of the literary influence of non-Jewish origin. Sea voyages, rescue by fish, etc. are all common motifs in ancient fairy tales. Even the very name of Jonah is not Jewish, but, most likely, Aegean. Nineveh, in the supposed time, was not at all what it is presented in the book - the Great City with a population of one hundred and twenty thousand people (considering that this number, according to the customs of the time, did not include women and children, the number of inhabitants for the city of this era turns out to be simply fantastic). Most likely, the plot of the book was composed of various fairy tales and folk fables for pedagogical purposes.
The moral of the book of Jonah
The very fact of God's uncharacteristic for the Jewish religion attention to the pagan city (and Nineveh had nothing to do with the cult of the Jewish God Yahweh) speaks of the circumstances in which the pagans played an important role. Perhaps this indicates the local coexistence of bearers of different traditions and the desire of the Jews to reconcile their religious world with the pagan environment. In this regard, the book of Jonah differs sharply from the Pentateuch of Moses, where pagans are subjected to a total cherem (curse) and must be destroyed, or, at best, can be tolerated. The book of Jonah, on the contrary, preaches a God who cares equally for all people, both Jews and Gentiles, so that evensends his prophet to the latter with a sermon. Note that in the Torah God sent prophets to the pagans not with a sermon of repentance, but immediately with a sword of retribution. Even in Sodom and Gomorrah, the Almighty only seeks the righteous, but does not try to convert sinners to repentance.
The moral of the book of Jonah is contained in the last verse-question of the Lord about how not to pity the great city, where one hundred and twenty thousand foolish people and many cattle.
Writing time
Based on the internal analysis of the text, from the presence of late Hebrew words and characteristic Aramaic constructions, researchers attribute this literary monument to the 4th-3rd centuries. BC e
Authorship of Jonah
Of course, the prophet Jonah himself could not have been the author of the book, the historical prototype of which lived (if he lived at all) half a millennium before the writing of this work. Most likely, it was composed by a Jew who lived in an area with a strong pagan influence - for example, a port city. This explains the moral universalism of this work. It is not possible to establish the identity of the author more precisely.
Prophet Jonah – interpretation and exegesis
Two traditions of interpretation of the Old Testament - Jewish and Christian - interpret this text in different ways. If the Jews primarily see in the book of Jonah an affirmation of the omnipotence of God Yahweh, who is above all other gods and whose jurisdiction covers all peoples, as well as all creation in general, then Christians see a different meaning. Namely, for Christiansthe episode with the swallowing of Jonah by a fish becomes central. Based on the words attributed by the Gospels to Jesus himself, the prophet Jonah in the belly of a whale represents Christ, crucified, descended into hell and rose again on the third day.
