Jonah and Historicity III – The Fish, Literary Features, and the NT
In my previous two posts, I dealt with some preliminaries (Jonah and Historicity I) and the historical issues proper (Jonah and Historicity II). In this final post, I want to address some remaining questions such as the fish that swallowed Jonah, the book’s literary features and the use of Jonah in the NT.
The fish that swallowed Jonah
Perhaps this is the aspect that makes modern-day Christians most uncomfortable (incidentally, the story mentions a ‘large fish’ not a whale or any specific species). Attempts to prove how this is possible scientifically have not been successful. A modern parallel was thought to have been found when a whaler, James Bartley, fell overboard a ship and was swallowed by a sperm whale.[1] Allegedly, he was later found unconscious but alive in the whale’s stomach, but the widow of the ship’s captain affirmed that no one fell overboard when her husband was captain of that ship.[2] At the same time, there is no reason to think that God cannot do miracles whether in the sense of overruling the laws of nature that He Himself created or in some way that is scientifically explicable even if we have not worked it out. Further, historic accounts do sometimes record miraculous events (e.g. Elijah raises a dead child, calls down fire on the water-soaked sacrifice – 1 Kings 17:20-22; 18:34-38).
On the other side of the debate, this admittedly fantastical element, along with the plant that miraculously grew large enough to shade a grown man in three days, seem to point interpreters towards an understanding that the story should be read as non-historic. Allen notes that while historic accounts have miracles, too, the ones in Jonah ‘do not fall into a landmark pattern, whereby biblical miracles tend to cluster around crucial points of history, the Exodus, the ministry of prophets engaged in repelling Baalism or secular involvement in power politics and the inauguration of Christianity’.[3] The miracles in Jonah are simply vehicles to move the story along: the fish is a holding place for the prophet while his attitude is being transformed, the plant becomes an object lesson from God. The miraculous aspect in both is almost by-the-by rather than the focal point that leads to a recognition of the true God.
Stylistic-literary features
In terms of the story’s style, Jonah has a strong didactic flavour that creates somewhat stereotypical characterisations. Thus, Jonah embodies the exact opposite of what a prophet should be. For instance, he hears God’s word and runs in the opposite direction (Jonah 1:2-3), he cares more for his comfort than for the people he is sent to (Jonah 4:10-11) and he is a parody of Elijah, prophet par excellence in the Old Testament, who wanted to die because he was persecuted and exhausted after the showdown with the Baal priests (1 Kings 19:1-4). Jonah, on the other hand, wants to die because Nineveh is saved and he himself is in discomfort (Jonah 4:3, 8). By contrast, the Gentiles in the story, both sailors and Nineveh are portrayed as incredibly open and receptive to God (Jonah 3:5), with a sensitive conscience (Jonah 1:14) and an awareness of His undeserved generosity that should not be presumed upon (Jonah 3:9). They are in fact the dream of all missionaries! As it is evident from the above already, parody and humour is used to good effect to drive home the message of the book.
Further elements that some feel point towards a didactic story/parable is how everything is characterised as ‘big’ and larger than life (this feature is called hyperbole): a big storm, a big fish, a big city, and a big plant (though the latter is not called ‘big’ specifically; Jonah 1:4, 17; 3:2; 4:6). Finally, as mentioned above, the fish swallowing Jonah and the super-fast growing plant are unusual, if not fantastical.
Those who maintain the historicity of the narrative reason that parables only have one main point while Jonah contains several, such as God’s grace, His sovereignty (He appoints the storm, the fish, the plant), repentance, the openness of Gentiles to God, and so on. This argument is less strong because the one-point parable idea is by no means universally accepted in scholarship.[4] For instance, Kenneth Bailey who studied parables at length, writes,
If the great parable of the prodigal son has “only one point,” which shall we choose? Should the interpreter choose “the nature of the fatherhood of God,” “an understanding of sin,” “self-righteousness that rejects others,” “the nature of true repentance,” “joy in community” or “finding the lost”?[5]
A more convincing argument is that the writer may have written up a real event in Jonah’s life in didactic format, so the literary-stylistic features in themselves do not prove that the story is not historical.
The testimony of the NT
One final argument that is often brought by those convinced of Jonah’s historicity is Jesus’ use of Jonah in the NT (Matt 12:39-41; 16:4; Luke 11:29-32), which compares Jonah’s situation with Jesus’. It is felt that if Jesus describes His own physical resurrection than Jonah’s deliverance from the belly of the fish must be historical, too. This is a particularly compelling argument for those who are trained on interpreting Scripture with Scripture.
Allen’s explanation represents well the other side of the argument (i.e. that this is not proof of Jonah’s historicity) and it is worth quoting in full.
In this regard it is important to note a feature which will be shown in the later section on the sign of Jonah, that it is not strict exegesis that is reflected in Jesus’ use of the narrative of Jonah and the fish, but the popular Jewish understanding, which the Lord took up and employed as a vehicle for truth concerning himself. If this is so, it is quite possible to maintain that his reference merely reflects the contemporary view without necessarily endorsing it for the student of the OT. Moreover, allowance must be made for a figurative element in the teaching of Jesus, an element Western literalists have notoriously found difficulty in grasping. If a modern preacher would not be at fault if he challenged his congregation with a reference to Lady Macbeth or Oliver Twist, could not Jesus have alluded in much the same manner to a well-known story to reinforce his own distinctive message?[6]
Concluding thoughts
It should be clear from the three posts that I have written on the historicity of Jonah, that I am not convinced of every argument on one or the other side of the debate, but I tried to give a fair hearing to both. While many of the specifically historic issues (using a historic prophet, the size of Nineveh, the king of Nineveh, the plausibility of the Ninevites’ repentance, supposed later customs) may be explained either as reflecting the situation of Jonah’s time or not, the cumulative effect of the stylistic features (didactic approach, stereotypical characterisations, parody and humour, fantastical elements, hyperbole [everything ‘big’] point in my view more strongly towards a parable/didactic story. As mentioned in my initial post, however, this need not undermine the authority of God’s Word in the same way that recognising the Prodigal Son as a parable and not historic fact does not challenge Scripture’s truth either.
Finally, what is the advantage of reading Jonah as straightforwardly historical? Some feel that if the Ninevites were pardoned by God in real life, it gave them an opportunity to abuse that grace later and destroy God’s own people, which brings the dilemma of grace into sharper relief. The disadvantage is that a lot of energy needs to be exerted to explain the odd features of the story that give it a different flavour from historic accounts like Samuel, Kings, or Chronicles. Reading the story as didactic or a parable helps us appreciate the literary features and the way they powerfully convey the message of the book, which is readily understandable without reference to a detailed historic context. Such an approach also does not require a defence of elements that seem far removed from a factual-historical account.
[1] A.J. Wilson, ‘The Sign of the Prophet Jonah and its Modern Confirmations,’ Princeton Theological Review 25 (1927), 630-642.
[2] Leslie C. Allen, The Books of Joel, Obadiah, Jonah, and Micah, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976), 176, n.5.
[3] Ibid. 221.
[4] The rule that parables have only one point seems to have come from a desire to clamp down on endless and fanciful interpretations of parables, but they only work for the short sayings and not so well for the longer stories.
[5] Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels (London: SPCK, 2008), 282.
[6] Allen, Joel, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, 180. Allen notes when discussing the sign of Jonah later that in the OT story of Jonah, the fish is a vehicle for deliverance, whereas in Jewish understanding it was seen as symbolic of Jonah’s death. Ibid., 196.
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