JONAH - Expositor’s Commentary
"And this is the tragedy of the Book of Jonah, that a Book which is made the means of one of the most sublime revelations of truth in the Old Testament should be known to most only for its connection with a whale."
THE BOOK OF JONAH.
THE Book of Jonah is cast throughout in the form of narrative—the only one of our Twelve which is so. This fact, combined with the extraordinary events which the narrative relates, starts questions not raised by any of the rest. Besides treating, therefore, of the book’s origin, unity, division, and other commonplaces of introduction, we must further seek in this chapter reasons for the appearance of such a narrative among a collection of prophetic discourses. We have to ask whether the narrative be intended as one of fact; and if not, why the author was directed to the choice of such a form to enforce the truth committed to him.
The appearance of a narrative among the Twelve Prophets is not, in itself, so exceptional as it seems to be. Parts of the Books of Amos and Hosea treat of the personal experience of their authors. The same is true of the Books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, in which the prophet’s call and his attitude to it are regarded as elements of his message to men. No: the peculiarity of the Book of Jonah is not the presence of narrative, but the apparent absence of all prophetic discourse.
Yet even this, might be explained by reference to the first part of the prophetic canon—Joshua to Second Kings. These Former Prophets, as they are called, are wholly narrative—narrative in the prophetic spirit and written to enforce a moral. Many of them begin as the Book of Jonah does: they contain stories, for instance, of Elijah and Elisha, who flourished immediately before Jonah and like him were sent with commissions to foreign lands. It might therefore be argued that the Book of Jonah, though narrative, is as much a prophetic book as they are, and that the only reason why it has found a place, not with these histories, but among the Later Prophets, is the exceedingly late date of its composition.
This is a plausible, but not the real, answer to our question. Suppose we were to find the latter by discovering that the Book of Jonah, though narrative form, is not real history at all, nor pretends to be, but, from beginning to end, is as much a prophetic sermon as any of the other Twelve Books, yet cast in the form of parable or allegory? This would certainly explain the adoption of the book among the Twelve; nor would its allegorical character appear without precedent to those (and they are among the most conservative of critics) who maintain (as the present writer does not) the allegorical character of the story of Hosea’s wife.
It is, however, when we pass from the form to the substance of the book that we perceive the full justification of its reception among the prophets. The truth which we find in the Book of Jonah is as full and fresh a revelation of God’s will as prophecy anywhere achieves. That God has "granted to the Gentiles also repentance unto life" {#Ac 9:8} is nowhere else in the Old Testament so vividly illustrated. It lifts the teaching of the Book of Jonah to equal rank with the second part of Isaiah, and nearest of all our Twelve to the New Testament. The very form in which this truth is insinuated into the prophet’s reluctant mind, by contrasting God’s pity for the dim population of Nineveh with Jonah’s own pity for his perished gourd, suggests the methods of our Lord’s teaching, and invests the book with the morning air of that high day which shines upon the most evangelic of His parables.
One other remark is necessary. In our effort to appreciate this lofty gospel we labor under a disadvantage. That is our sense of humor—our modern sense of humor. Some of the figures in which our author conveys his truth cannot but appear to us grotesque. How many have missed the sublime spirit of the book in amusement or offence at its curious details! Even in circles in which the acceptance of its literal interpretation has been demanded as a condition of belief in its inspiration, the story has too often served as a subject for humorous remarks. This is almost inevitable if we take it as history. But we shall find that one advantage of the theory, which treats the book as parable, is that the features, which appear so grotesque to many, are traced to the popular poetry of the writer’s own time and shown to be natural. When we prove this, we shall be able to treat the scenery of the book as we do that of some early Christian fresco, in which, however rude it be or untrue to nature, we discover an earnestness and a success in expressing the moral essence of a situation that are not always present in works of art more skilful or more correct.
1. THE DATE OF THE BOOK.
Jonah ben-Amittai, from Gath-hepher in Galilee, came forward in the beginning of the reign of Jeroboam II to announce that the king would regain the lost territories of Israel from the Pass of Hamath to the Dead. {#2Ki 14:15} He flourished, therefore, about 780, and had this book been by himself we should have had to place it first of all the Twelve, and nearly a generation before that of Amos. But the book neither claims to be by Jonah, nor gives any proof of coming from an eye-witness of the adventures which it describes, nor even from a contemporary of the prophet. On the contrary, one verse implies that when it was written Nineveh had ceased to be a great city. Now Nineveh fell, and was practically destroyed, in 606 B.C. In all ancient history there was no collapse of an imperial city more sudden or so complete. We must therefore date the Book of Jonah some time after 606, when Nineveh’s greatness had become what it was to the Greek writers, a matter of tradition.
A late date is also proved by the language of the book. This not only contains Aramaic elements which have been cited to support the argument for a northern origin in the time of Jonah himself, but a number of words and grammatical constructions which we find in the Old Testament, some of them in the later and some only in the very latest writings. Scarcely less decisive are a number of apparent quotations and echoes of passages in the Old Testament, mostly later than the date of the historical Jonah, and some of them even later than the Exile. If it could be proved that the Book of Jonah quotes from Joel, that would indeed set it down to a very late date—probably about 300 B.C., the period of the composition of Ezra-Nehemiah, with the language of which its own shows most affinity. This would leave time for its reception into the Canon of the Prophets, which was closed by 200 B.C. Had the book been later it would undoubtedly have fallen, like Daniel, within the Hagiographa.
2. THE CHARACTER OF THE BOOK.
Nor does this book, written so many centuries after Jonah had passed away, claim to be real history. On the contrary, it offers to us all the marks of the parable or allegory. We have, first of all, the residence of Jonah for the conventional period of three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, a story not only very extraordinary in itself and sufficient to provoke the suspicion of allegory (we need not stop to argue this), but apparently woven, as we shall see, from the materials of a myth well known to the Hebrews. We have also the very general account of Nineveh’s conversion, in which there is not even the attempt to describe any precise event. The absence of precise data is indeed conspicuous throughout the book. "The author neglects a multitude of things which he would have been obliged to mention had history been his principal aim. He says nothing of the sins of which Nineveh was guilty, nor of the journey of the prophet to Nineveh, nor does he mention the place where he was cast out upon the land, nor the name of the Assyrian king. In any case, if the narrative were intended to be historical, it would be incomplete by the frequent fact, that circumstances which are necessary for the connection of events are mentioned later than they happened, and only where attention has to be directed to them as having already happened." We find, too, a number of trifling discrepancies, from which some critics have attempted to prove the presence of more than one story in the composition of the book, but which are simply due to the license a writer allows himself when he is telling a tale and not writing a history. Above all, there is the abrupt close to the story at the very moment at which its moral is obvious. All these things are symptoms of the parable—so obvious and so natural, that we really sin against the intention of the author, and the purpose of the Spirit which inspired him, when we willfully interpret the book as real history.
3. THE PURPOSE OF THE BOOK.
The general purpose of this parable is very clear. It is not, as some have maintained it to explain why the judgments of God and the predictions of his prophets were not always fulfilled though this also becomes clear by the way. The purpose of the parable, and it is patent from first to last, is to illustrate the mission of prophecy to the Gentiles, God’s care for them, and their susceptibility to His word. More correctly, it is to enforce all this truth upon a prejudiced and thrice-reluctant mind.
Whose was this reluctant mind? In Israel after the Exile there were many different feelings with regard to the future and the great obstacle which heathendom interposed between Israel and the future. There was the feeling of outraged justice, with the intense conviction that Jehovah’s kingdom could not be established save by the overthrow of the cruel kingdoms of this world. We have seen that conviction expressed in the Book of Obadiah. But the nation, which read and cherished the visions of the Great Seer of the Exile, {#Isa 40. ff.} could not help producing among her sons men with hopes about the heathen of a very different kind—men who felt that Israel’s mission to the world was not one of war, but of service in those high truths of God and of His Grace which had been committed to herself. Between the two parties it is certain there was much polemic, and we find this still bitter in the time of our Lord. And some critics think that while Esther, Obadiah, and other writings of the centuries after the Return represent the one side of this polemic, which demanded the overthrow of the heathen, the Book of Jonah represents the other side, and in the vexed and reluctant prophet pictures such Jews as were willing to proclaim the destruction of the enemies of Israel, and yet like Jonah were not without the lurking fear that God would disappoint their predictions and in His patience leave the heathen room for repentance. Their dogmatism could not resist the impression of how long God had actually spared the oppressors of His people, and the author of the Book of Jonah cunningly sought these joints in their armor to insinuate the points of his doctrine of God’s real will for nations beyond the covenant. This is ingenious and plausible. But in spite of the cleverness with which it has been argued that the details of the story of Jonah are adapted to the temper of the Jewish party who desired only vengeance on the heathen, it is not at all necessary to suppose that the book was the produce of mere polemic. The book is too simple and too grand for that. And therefore those appear more right who conceive that the writer had in view, not a Jewish party, but Israel as a whole in their national reluctance to fulfill their Divine mission to the world. Of them God had already said: "Who is blind but My servant, or deaf as My messenger whom I have sent? Who gave Jacob for a spoil and Israel to the robbers? Did not Jehovah, He against whom we have sinned?—for they would not walk in His ways, neither were they obedient to His law." {#Isa 42:19-24} Of such a people Jonah is the type. Like them he flees from the duty God has laid upon him. Like them he is, beyond his own land, cast for a set period into a living death, and like them rescued again only to exhibit once more upon his return an ill-will to believe that God had any fate for the heathen except destruction. According to this theory, then, Jonah’s disappearance in the sea and the great fish, and his subsequent ejection upon dry land, symbolize the Exile of Israel and their restoration to Palestine.
In proof of this view it has been pointed out that, while the prophets frequently represent the heathen tyrants of Israel as the sea or the sea monster, one of them has actually described the nation’s exile as its swallowing by a monster, whom God forces at last to disgorge his living. {#Jer 51:34,44 f.} The full illustration of this will be given in chap 36, on "The Great Fish and What it Means." Here it is only necessary to mention that the metaphor was borrowed, not, as has been alleged by many, from some Greek, or other foreign, myth, which, like that of Perseus and Andromeda, had its scene in the neighborhood of Joppa, but from a Semitic mythology which was well known to the Hebrews, and the materials of which were employed very frequently by other prophets and poets of the Old Testament.
Why, of all prophets, Jonah should have been selected as the type of Israel, is a question hard but perhaps not impossible to answer. In history Jonah appears only as concerned with Israel’s re-conquest of her lands from the heathen. Did the author of the book say: I will take such a man, one to whom tradition attributes no outlook beyond Israel’s own territories, for none could be so typical of Israel, narrow, selfish, and with no love for the world beyond herself? Or did the author know some story about a journey of Jonah to Nineveh, or at least some discourse by Jonah against the great city? Elijah went to Sarepta, Elisha took God’s word to Damascus: may there not have been, though we are ignorant of it, some connection between Nineveh and the labors of Elisha’s successor? Thirty years after Jonah appeared, Amos proclaimed the judgment of Jehovah upon foreign nations, with the destruction of their capitals; about the year 755 he clearly enforced, as equal with Israel’s own, the moral responsibility of the heathen to the God of righteousness. May not Jonah, almost the contemporary of Amos, have denounced Nineveh in the same way? Would not some tradition of his serve as the nucleus of history round which our author built his allegory? It is possible that Jonah proclaimed doom upon Nineveh; yet those who are familiar with the prophesying of Amos, Hosea, and, in his younger days, Isaiah, will deem it hardly probable. For why do all these prophets exhibit such reserve in even naming Assyria, if Israel had already through Jonah entered into such articulate relations with Nineveh? We must, therefore, admit our ignorance of the reasons which led our author to choose Jonah as a type of Israel. We can only conjecture that it may have been because Jonah was a prophet, whom history identified only with Israel’s narrower interests. If, during subsequent centuries, a tradition had risen of Jonah’s journey to Nineveh or of his discourse against her, such a tradition has probability against it.