Jonah

Jonah. The Book of Jonah, unlike the other eleven of the series of the minor prophets in which it occurs, is not a prophetic discourse but a narrative, and does not in any sense claim to have been written by the prophet whose name it bears. It belongs to that special kind of literary composition, common among the late Jews, usually known as haggadic; it is obviously not intended to be taken as literal history, but as a parable attached to a historic name. The name in this instance is that of Jonah, the son of Amittai, who is mentioned in 2 Kings, xiv. 25, as having been a native of Gath-hepher in Galilee, and as having prophesied the victories of Jeroboam II. No writing known to belong to him is now extant; the oracle contained in Isaiah, xv., xvi., and spoken of by that prophet as already ancient, has been conjecturally attributed to Jonah by Hitzig, but for somewhat inadequate reasons. Whether the story now associated with his name may have had some basis in any word or deed of his, or whether the choice of his name was quite arbitrarily made by the anonymous author, cannot now be determined. The key to the narrative, the details of which are familiar to every one, is to be sought in the closing chapter, where Jehovah asks the prophet whether he does well to be angry because of the sparing of Nineveh, a great city teeming with innocent life for which Jehovah has laboured, and which he has caused to grow. Nowhere in the Old Testament is that particularism, to which the Jews were ever prone, more clearly or emphatically rebuked. As for the earlier part of the story, its explanation is to be sought in the often-recurring Old Testament figures in which the great world-powers are likened to sea-monsters or dragons (see, for example, Jer. li. 44), and deliverance from any overwhelming calamity is spoken of as a bringing back from the depths of the sea (Ps. lxviii. 22 [23]). At the time when the Book of Jonah was written, the Jews, who had returned from the Babylonian exile full of bright hopes as to a near and glorious future, had become querulously aware of the failure of these. The object of the writer seems to have been to suggest to them that their existing troubles, in which they seemed as it were to be swallowed up by the world-powers which oppressed them, were due to their neglect of the missionary vocation which had been urged upon Israel by the later prophets (see especially Isa. xl.-lxvi.); once Israel in penitence and prayer shall have shown that she has again become alive to this duty, she may hope to experience the fulfilment of the prophet's words (Hos. vi. 2): 'After two days he will revive us: on the third day he will raise us up.' The prayer of Jonah, whether a composition of the author of the rest of the book or not, certainly cannot be carried back to a date nearly so early as the 8th century B.C.; it is largely a cento from older compositions, the metaphors in verses 3-6 being common in all periods of Hebrew poetry. See the commentaries on the minor prophets mentioned under HOSEA; also Krahmer (1839), Jäger (1840), and F. Bergmann (Strasb. 1885).