_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.[1458]
Yet even this might be explained by reference to the first part of the
prophetic canon—Joshua to Second Kings.[1459] 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:[1460] 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.[1461]
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 in 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.[1462]
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_[1463] 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 Niniveh 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 labour under a disadvantage. That is our sense of humour—our
modern sense of humour. 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[1464] 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 Sea.[1465] 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,[1466] nor even from
a contemporary of the prophet. On the contrary, one verse implies that
when it was written Niniveh had ceased to be a great city.[1467] Now
Niniveh fell, and was practically destroyed, in 606 B.C.[1468] In all
ancient history there was no collapse of an imperial city more sudden
or so complete.[1469] We must therefore date the Book of Jonah some
time after 606, when Niniveh’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,[1470] 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.[1471] 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.[1472] 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.[1473] This would
leave time for its reception into the Canon of the Prophets, which was
closed by 200 B.C.[1474] 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,[1475] from the materials of a myth well known to the
Hebrews. We have also the very general account of Niniveh’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 Niniveh was guilty,[1476] nor of the journey of
the prophet to Niniveh, 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.”[1477] We find, too, a number of trifling discrepancies, from
which some critics[1478] 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.[1479] 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 wilfully interpret the book as real
history.[1480]
3. THE PURPOSE OF THE BOOK.
The general purpose of this parable is very clear. It is not, as some
have maintained,[1481] 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.[1482]
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,[1483] 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.[1484] 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 armour 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 fulfil their Divine mission to the world.[1485] 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._[1486] 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, symbolise 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 prey.[1487] The full illustration of this will be given in