The Book of Jonah by Robert Alter

We know nothing about the author of the Book of Jonah or his geographic location, and only a rough approximation can be made of the time of the books composition:. The main evidence for dating is linguistic: there are quite a few turns of phrase that indicate this is Late Biblical  prose, a kind of Hebrew not written until after the return from the Babylonian exile in the fifth century B.C. E.  The book’s universalist theology probably also argues for a relatively late date because one does not  find this sort of rigorously world embracing monotheism until  Second Isaiah, the anonymous sixth-century prophet of the Babylonian exile.

The name Jonah son of Amittai is drawn from a passing reference in 2 Kings 14:25 to a prophet so designated who delivered God’s word during the reign of Jeroboam II and about whom nothing more than that is said. Since the story, which itself has no clear historical moorings, apart from a vague invocation of Assyria, was almost surely composed centuries later. . . the writer  might simply have chosen this particular name as a convenient hook upon  which to hang a fable about prophesy precisely because nothing more is known about the prophet in question.


While Hebrew narratives composed in the First Temple period utilized heterogeneous materials, they exhibit a great deal of uniformity in regard to narrative conventions and the general purpose for which the narrative is framed. By contrast, what characterizes the narratives of the Late Biblical period is a vigorous experimentation with genre and an impulse to move beyond the governing procedures of earlier biblical narrative. Perhaps the most distinctive hallmark of Jonah’s relatively are composition is that it tells a story altogether unlike those of earlier biblical literature. The recalcitrance of the prophet is a recurring feature of the classic call of the prophets, as with Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Moses himself, but nowhere else to we have a person summoned to prophesy who actually tries to flee to the other end of the known world. Similarly, though one prophet, Amos, is sent from his home in Judah to prophesy in the northern –and not very friendly  - kingdom of Israel, the two realms are still, after all, within the family, while only Jonah is a man called to deliver prophesy to the general populace of an altogether foreign, and hostile nation.

The Book of Jonah picks up certain hints or precedents from earlier biblical narratives but pushes them to an extreme where they play a role in what amounts to a different genre. The narratives originating in the First Temple period, despite exhibiting some miraculous events and some spectacular episodes of divine intervention, are by and large ‘history-like’. Jonah, on the other hand, is a manifestly fabulous tale. Though earlier Hebrew narrative offers one anomalous instance of a talking animal, Balaam’s she-ass, that is the exception that proves the rule, an invention introduced to sharpen  the attire on the pagan soothsayer who is blind to what his visionary beast can plainly see. Jonah’s fish does not speak, but it follows God’s instructions dutifully, first swallowing Jonah and then, when it gets the word, vomiting him up on dry land. Its capacity, moreover, to keep Jonah three days in the dark prison of its innards is an even more fantastic contrivance than according Balaam’s ass the momentary gift of speech. This peculiar performance of the fish, serving as God’s obedient instrument, is in keeping with the cattle and sheep in Nineveh, bizarrely require to do sackcloth and fast together with the human beings, and, in the deliberately ambiguous wording of the Hebrew, seen as if consciously covering themselves in sackcloth as if crying out to God along with the human denizens of Nineveh.

All this has led scholars to scramble for labels to describe Jonah. It has been called everything from a Menippean satire to an allegory, but none of these identifications of Jonah is entirely convincing. I would see Jonah as its own kind of ad hoc innovative narrative. It aims to recast traditional Israelite notions of prophesy in a radically universalist framework. The prophets of Israel all work in an emphatically national context. Their messages are addressed to the people of Israel, often with explicitly political contents, and the messages are manifestly directed to the fate of the nation - its imminent destruction by foreign powers if it fails to mend its evil ways -  the fulfillment of its hopes for national restoration after the disaster has occurred. The medium of the prophets is generally poetry, where all the powerful expressive resources of the Hebrew language could be summoned to convey the prophetic vision to the people.

Jonah is accorded no verbal prophetic vision to the people, only that single brief prediction of catastrophe which, if one is supposed to think of such considerations, he would have spoken not in Hebrew but in Akkadian. Jonah engages with no Israelites in the story. First he has an exchange with the polytheistic mariners, then he addresses the Ninevites, and his closest connection is with two presumably insensate living things, a very larger fish and a leafy plant. The God with whom he has such difficulties because his Israelite nationalist mind-set is not chiefly the God of Israel but the God of the whole world, all creatures great and small. He is not a God you can pin down to national settings. Although He initially addresses Jonah some where within the land of Israel – perhaps even Jerusalem, where the Temple, evoked in chapter 2 stands- his fullest dialogue with Jonah is on the promontory overlooking Nineveh. While he does rebuke Jonah as the God of earlier narratives rebukes wayward people, the rebuke itself is oddly formulated, in keeping with the wonderful strangeness of this book.

God exercises magisterial control over storm winds, fish, livestock, and plants, as well as over human beings of all tribes and nations, and He asks the recalcitrant prophet why he should ‘have pity’ for an ephemeral plant but not for a vast city of clueless human beings and their beasts. [Jonah is vexed that the Ninevites listened to his prophesy, recanted their evil ways and were thus saved].

 It is beautifully appropriate that the story ends with the beasts, and with a question. It is in no way clear how Jonah will respond to this question. Will God’s challenge lead him to a transformative insight about God’s dominion over all things and all peoples, or will it prove to be a challenge that is quite beyond the myopia of his ingrained prejudices? The trembling balance of this concluding ambiguity perfectly focuses the achievement of the Book of Jonah both as an enchanting story and as a shaking up of an entire theological world.

.  .  . .And the sailors were afraid, and each man cried out to his god, and they cast gear that was in the ship into the sea to lighten the load. And Jonah came down into the far corners of the craft and had laid down and fallen deep asleep. And the captain approached him and said, ‘What are you doing asleep? Call out to your God. Perhaps the god will give some thought to us, that we may not perish.’ And they said to each other, ‘Let us cast lots that we may know on whose account this evil is upon us.’ And they cast lots, and the lot fell to Jonah. And they said to him, ‘Tell us, pray, you on whose account this evil is upon us, what is your work and from where do you come” What is your land and from what people are you?’ And he said to them, ‘I am Hebrew and the Lord God of heavens do I fear, Who made the sea and the dry land.’ And the men feared greatly, and they said to him, ‘What is this you have done?’ For the men knew that he was fleeing from before the Lord, for he told them. And they said to him, ‘What shall we do that the sea calm for us?’ For the sea was storming more and more. And he said to them, ‘Lift me up and cast me into the sea that the sea calm for you, for I know that on my account this great storm is upon you,.’ And the men rowed to get back to dry land and were not able, for the sea was storming  upon them more and more. And they called out to the Lord and said, ‘Please, O Lord, pray let us not perish on account of the life of this man, and do not exact from us the blood of the innocent, for You, O Lord, as You desire You do.” And they lifted up Jonah and cast him into the sea, and the sea ceased from its fury. And the men feared the Lord Greatly and offered sacrifices to the Lord and made vows.

And the Lord set out a great fish to swallow Jonah and he was three days and three nights in the innards of the fish. And Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the innards of the fish,. And he said:

I called out from my straights

   to the Lord, and He answered me.
From the belly of Sheol* I cried out –

   You heard my voice.
You flung me into the deep, in the heart of the sea,

   And the current came round me,

All your breakers and waves

   Streamed over me.

And I thought:

   I am banished from before  Your eyes.
Yet again will I look

   On Your holy temple.
Water lapped about me to the neck,

   The deep came around me,

      weed was bound around my head.
To the roots of the mountains I went down –

   The underworld’s bolts against me forever.
But You brought up my life from the Pit,
   O Lord my God.

As my life-breath grew faint within me

   The Lord did I recall,

And my prayer came unto You,

   To Your holy Temple.
Those who look to vaporous lies

   Will turn away from their mercy

And I with a voice of thanksgiving

   Let me sacrifice to You.

What I vowed let me pay.

   Rescue is the Lords.

And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto the dry land.

* the underworld, imagined as a great pit, represented as a kind of hungry monster swallowing those marked for destruction.