NOTES

1. ESCAPE TO EDEN

1. Proposed explanations of the book’s purpose appear in summary form in a number of treatments. See, e.g., Catherine L. Muldoon, In Defense of Divine Justice: An Intertextual Approach to the Book of Jonah (CBQMS 47; Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 2010), 6–30; T. A. Perry, The Honeymoon Is Over: Jonah’s Argument with God (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2006), xxv–xxxii; Uriel Simon, Jonah: The Traditional Hebrew Text with the New JPS Translation (JPS Bible Commentary; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1999), vi–xiii; and esp. Thomas M. Bolin, Freedom beyond Forgiveness: The Book of Jonah Re-Examined (JSOTSup 236; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), 57–63.

Broadly speaking, scholars have identified themes pertaining to divine mercy or sovereignty, repentance, universalism, and the role and limitations of prophets and prophecy. I argue that the book of Jonah underscores the efficacy of repentance – itself a product of divine mercy – while critiquing certain improperly balanced reactions to sin and the divine response that it provokes. A central theme pertaining to universalism or prophecy, by contrast, would not easily accord with the book’s pervasive Eden-related motifs. Nonetheless, I do not exclude universalism as a possible secondary message.

My approach does not ascribe to the story any fundamental Israel-related theme, nor do I associate the book with any political or ideological concern presumed to typify the centuries-long postexilic Jewish experience. Regarding this methodological step, see the important remarks by Benjamin D. Sommer, “Dating Pentateuchal Texts and the Perils of Pseudo-Historicism,” in The Pentateuch: International Perspectives on Current Research (ed. T. B. Dozeman, K. Schmid, and B. J. Schwartz; FAT 78; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 85–108 (esp. 106–108). Rather, my non-Israel–centered reading suggests that the story of Jonah, much like wisdom texts, addresses questions that transcend sociohistorical boundaries. On the question of a relationship between Jonah and wisdom literature, see, inter alia, Bolin, Freedom beyond Forgiveness, 184–185, and the earlier material cited there.

Consistent with this conception of the book, scholars note that Edenic aspirations appear in postexilic texts in a variety of forms, “nationalistic/covenantal” and otherwise, and that Edenic depictions of a divine sanctuary – the likes of which we repeatedly encounter in Jonah – may evoke a heavenly abode without reference to any earthly temple. (See recently Peter T. Lanfer, Remembering Eden: The Reception History of Genesis 3:22–24 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012], 30, 131–132; and more generally the expansive study by T. Stordalen, Echoes of Eden: Genesis 2–3 and Symbolism of the Eden Garden in Biblical Hebrew Literature [BBET 25; Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 2000]). Observe, therefore, that beyond offering no overt indication of any nationalistic or political objective, the book of Jonah – unlike numerous other texts that allude to Eden – avoids mention of Jerusalem, Mount Zion, and, for that matter, any specific holy mountain, even as it refers to God’s “holy sanctuary” and invokes motifs that signify a divine abode. Rather, the Edenic sanctuaries in Jonah represent an idyllic, sacred domain that transcends any narrowly delimited space.

Finally, in line with sentiments expressed by Jack M. Sasson (Jonah: A New Translation with Introduction, Commentary, and Interpretation [AB 24B; New York: Doubleday, 1990], 326), I make no effort to attach any nuanced label to the genre of the work, although I maintain little objection to the rather general category “didactic story.” See esp. James Limburg, Jonah: A Commentary (OTL; Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1993), 22–28; Steven L. Mc Kenzie, “The Genre of Jonah,” in Seeing Signals, Reading Signs: The Art of Exegesis (ed. M. A. O’Brien and H. N. Wallace; JSOTSup 415; London: T & T Clark, 2004), 159–171 (160–162). Note, however, the concerns raised by Kenneth M. Craig Jr. regarding “didactic story” as a technical classification (A Poetics of Jonah: Art in the Service of Ideology [Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1993], 159–165).

2. I am inclined to date the book of Jonah near the end of the fifth century BCE or later, because I offer strong evidence that it alludes to the Eden motif in the book of Joel and I am sympathetic to the assignment of Joel to the latter half of the fifth century. See esp. John Strazicich, Joel’s Use of Scripture and the Scripture’s Use of Joel: Appropriation and Resignification in Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity (BINS 82; Leiden: Brill, 2007), 53–55.

3. I concur here with the position of Ehud Ben Zvi – endorsed by many others at least by implication – that the book of Jonah was intended for a sophisticated audience and that an appreciation of its depth requires careful study and repeated engagement of the text (Signs of Jonah: Reading and Rereading in Ancient Yehud [JSOTSup 367; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2003], 9–11, 14–33).

To cite just one illustration, Jonah’s indignation at the beginning of chapter 4 seems, at least initially, to result from God’s reversal of his decree against Nineveh. Shortly thereafter, however, we find the prophet sitting anxiously near the city, apparently unaware of any decision about its fate. This widely noted incongruity invites a sober reassessment of Jonah’s anger, and not one that gives way to a quick resumption of the story under a new set of clear-cut assumptions. Instead, this apparent discrepancy throws the chronology of events and their causal relationships into serious confusion, thereby demanding reengagement with the passage and sustained, careful reflection on the merits of different possible explanations.

For a broader articulation of this methodological premise and its relevance to inner-biblical allusion, see Cynthia Edenburg, “Intertextuality, Literary Competence, and the Question of Readership: Some Preliminary Observations,” JSOT 35 (2010): 131–148. According to Edenburg, when a text features complex allusions that yield subtle meaning, this suggests that it was intended for a reading audience that “had the means to peruse and reread texts” in order to make the necessary associations (145–147).

4. Many of our book’s resonances with prior biblical material were first noted in André Feuillet, “Les sources du livre de Jonas,” RB 54 (1947): 161–186. Considerable advances, both in identifying allusions and in evaluating their significance, appear in the final two chapters of Jonathan Magonet, Form and Meaning: Studies in Literary Techniques in the Book of Jonah (BBET 2; Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1976). More recent contributions include, inter alia, Simon, Jonah, xxxvi–xxxix; Hyun C. P. Kim, “Jonah Read Intertextually,” JBL 126 (2007): 497–528; and Muldoon, Divine Justice. Most of these treatments support the view that inner-biblical allusions, even when distributed erratically through a text, function to generate meaning. Studies that operate on this assumption, moreover, have produced suggestive analyses of numerous biblical compositions, especially works of the postexilic period. I provide some substantial bibliography pertaining to allusions in Ruth and Esther in my essays, “Ruth and the David–Bathsheba Story: Allusions and Contrasts,” JSOT 33 (2009): 433–452; “Ruth and Inner-Biblical Allusion: The Case of 1 Samuel 25,” JBL 128 (2009): 253–272; and “Esther and Benjaminite Royalty: A Study in Inner-Biblical Allusion,” JBL 129 (2010): 625–644.

To an extent, this methodological conclusion emerges from the craftsmanship exhibited by such compositions more generally: when a text seems carefully designed to maximize meaning – through its lexical and structural features, plot and character development, deployment of motifs, and more – it stands to reason that similarities to earlier texts likewise carry significance. Crucially, moreover, where multiple apparent allusions combine to yield a single striking interpretation, it becomes especially difficult to deny their presence and meaningfulness. Thus certain lexical analogies in Jonah, which other scholars have dismissed as mere products of stock terminology, play a significant role in my analysis. For example, Bolin affirms that similarities between the sea-storm narrative in Jonah and analogous accounts elsewhere in Scripture result from nothing more than “a time-honored literary convention that demands certain features and vocabulary” (Freedom beyond Forgiveness, 95). Based on a more comprehensive set of evidence, however, I argue that the relevant parallels make an important contribution to the development of our book’s Eden theme.

Finally, let me stress that, where apparently meaningful inner-biblical correlations are convincingly present, they amount to hard data that may not be ignored either by those who seek to identify an author’s intended theological message or by anyone embracing a hermeneutical model that calls for serious engagement of all varieties of signification. Put differently, only a hermeneutic that places limits on the types of evidence it will entertain could reasonably allow for ignoring intertextual signifiers, and importantly, even non-intentionalist treatments do not generally operate with such stark constraints. It emerges, accordingly, that in the interpretation of Jonah, the incorporation of intertextual evidence may scarcely be regarded as a mere hermeneutical option.

5. In short order, we will encounter examples of phonetic parallels between texts. The first one of these examples, involving the phrase yarkĕtê hassĕpînâ (“the nethermost part of the vessel”; Jonah 1:5), finds support in multiple earlier studies. Phonetic wordplay, moreover, is widely seen to characterize the text of Jonah itself, inner-biblical parallels aside. See esp. Baruch Halpern and Richard E. Friedman, “Composition and Paronomasia in the Book of Jonah,” HAR 4 (1980): 79–92.

6. The most important discussion of the book’s multivalence appears in the first two chapters of Ben Zvi, Signs of Jonah. More recently, see esp. chapter 8 of Perry, The Honeymoon Is Over, and the more general discussion in Diana V. Edelman, “Jonah among the Twelve in the MT: The Triumph of Torah over Prophecy,” in The Production of Prophecy: Constructing Prophets and Prophecy in Yehud (ed. D. V. Edelman and E. Ben Zvi; BibleWorld; London: Equinox, 2009), 150–167. Perry makes considerable strides toward a comprehensive multivalent conception of the story, and in the present study I argue that the text indeed yields sustained multiple readings that flow smoothly from start to finish.

Significantly, my interpretation invokes multivalence of various kinds: semantic, syntactic, and thematic. Furthermore, whereas the text’s deeper meanings typically add to its superficial sense without generating any sort of clash, these deeper meanings do stand in creative tension with one another – ultimately, to be sure, in the service of a single theological message. It thus bears emphasis that all these types of multivalence find considerable precedent in biblical interpretation. A notably detailed treatment, including the citation and evaluation of secondary works of both biblical and more general scholarship, appears in Jonathan Grossman, “Ambiguity in the Biblical Narrative and Its Contribution to the Literary Formation” (Hebrew; Ph.D. diss., Bar Ilan University, 2006). See especially chapter 8 of Grossman’s study concerning the dialectical relationship that may obtain between different intended meanings of a biblical story, and note also his discussions of the multiplicity of meaning triggered by philological obscurity (chapter 5) and by inner-biblical allusion (chapter 6). All this material provides a foundation for the methods that I use. (Note also the English-language study by Allen M. Darnov, “Equivocal Narrative in the Hebrew Bible” [Ph.D. diss., Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 2007], and the literature cited therein.) As for the dialectical variety of multivalence, see also the instructive essay by Benjamin D. Sommer, “Is It Good for the Jews? Ambiguity and the Rhe toric of Turning in Isaiah,” in Birkat Shalom: Studies in the Bible, Ancient Near Eastern Literature, and Postbiblical Judaism Presented to Shalom M. Paul on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday (ed. C. Cohen et al.; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2008), 321–345; and cf. idem, “Reflecting on Moses: The Redaction of Numbers 11,” JBL 118 (1999): 601–624 (622–624).

Finally, let me emphasize, echoing both Grossman and Sommer, that I speak of multivalence as a product not of reader subjectivity but of literary craftsmanship, whereby the text’s multiple meanings generate a unified if multifaceted theological message. By no means do I regard the book of Jonah to be theologically indeterminate. In this connection, see also – albeit with impor tant variation – the classic if controversial argument in chapter 6 of Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (ISBL; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).

7. Many of my claims draw on an accumulation of suggestive evidence. Such claims pertain to the presence of widespread multivalence; the prevalence of allusions, the complexity of their deployment, their meaningfulness, and the validity of numerous specific correlations; the presence and significance of keywords, different types of wordplay, and other literary features; and my actual interpretation of the story. I ask, therefore, that the reader allow the argument to build on all these fronts. In this connection, note esp. the remarks by Richard B. Hays concerning the force of cumulative, exegetically satisfying arguments in favor of allusion (Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989], 31–32). Let me emphasize, moreover, that if the author of Jonah intended for the book to be studied carefully and repeatedly, and doing so reveals a strikingly meaningful convergence of allusions, we hardly need to justify that conclusion by speculating about the mental process by which a reader makes instinctive textual associations.

In addition, let me caution against skepticism born of excessively restrictive methodological criteria. For example, the evidence suggests that a character may have more than one biblical counterpart and that textual correlations may draw on references that are distributed erratically (if judiciously) through a narrative. Cf., e.g., Mark E. Biddle, “Ancestral Motifs in 1 Samuel 25: Intertextuality and Characterization,” JBL 121 (2002): 617–638; and contrast the restrictions proposed by Paul R. Noble, “Esau, Tamar, and Joseph: Criteria for Identifying Inner-Biblical Allusions,” VT 52 (2002): 219–252.

Furthermore, when a passage – especially one already shown to be highly allusive – features a concentration of terms/motifs that appear likewise in an earlier composition, the presence of those elements may serve as a marker of allusion even if the later text does not deploy the terms/motifs “ungrammatically”; that is, in a way that generates some kind of incongruity. Indeed, in her pivotal study of literary allusion, Ziva Ben-Porat provides a central example where the reader, even after arriving at a “satisfactory local interpretation,” would properly detect an allusion to another work purely on the strength of an analogous lexical sequence (“The Poetics of Literary Allusion,” PTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature 1 [1976]: 105–128 [119]). The term ungrammaticality, by contrast, was coined by Michael Riffaterre to refer, in a more general way, to incongruities in a text that prompt the reader to seek implied significance (Semiotics of Poetry [Advances in Semiotics; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978], 2). Even though Riffaterre later applies the term when discussing “intertextuality” (see, e.g., his essay “Syllepsis,” Critical Inquiry 6 [1980]: 625–638 [625–628]), nowhere does he deny the common-sense observation that, even in the absence of an ungrammaticality, a set of terms in one text may call to mind a similar set in an earlier text. He affirms, rather, that without an ungrammaticality the reader will not seek out other texts to help determine meaning. If, accordingly, we apply Riffaterre’s analysis to allusion, we must do so in a different way: once an earlier text is evoked with or without the help of an ungrammaticality – and innocuous explanations such as “stock terminology” and “common influence” are not applicable – the resulting textual correlation, much like an extraneous word or phrase in a single text, amounts to an ungrammaticality that calls for interpretation. In other words, although establishing an allusion does not require an appeal to ungrammaticality, the allusion itself constitutes a sign that, bearing no intrinsic meaning, generates implied significance. Regarding the proposed role of ungrammaticality in the identification of inner-biblical allusions, see recently Joseph R. Kelly, “Intertextuality and Allusion in the Study of the Hebrew Bible” (Ph.D. diss., Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2014), 135–141; Edenburg, “Intertextuality,” 144–145; idem, “How (Not) to Murder a King: Variations on a Theme in 1 Sam 24; 26,” SJOT 12 (1998): 64–85 (68–69, 72–73). Most often, lists of criteria for identifying inner-biblical allusions justly omit this requirement; see, e.g., chapter 5 of Kelly, “Intertextuality”; Hays, Echoes of Scripture, 29–32; and Jeffery M. Leonard, “Identifying Inner-Biblical Allusions: Psalm 78 as a Test Case,” JBL 127 (2008): 241–265 (246). All of my important claims, in any event, meet any reasonable threshold in this regard, much as they do for more widely accepted criteria involving the distinctiveness, quantity, and thematic suggestiveness of proposed parallels.

Finally, on the matter of terminology, some scholars employ the expressions intertextuality and allusion almost interchangeably. For others, however, intertextuality refers not simply to an author’s production of meaning through purposeful allusion to other texts but, to paraphrase one ambitious definition, to the impact of all encounters, textual and otherwise, on an individual’s construal of signifiers. Such deployments of the term, which generally seek to conform to its initial usage by the literary theorist Julia Kristeva, are less pertinent to the methods of the present study. To avoid confusion, therefore, I typically speak of inner-biblical allusion, resorting to the adjective “intertextual” only where a suitable alternative is lacking. (The adjective “inner-biblical,” which does not by itself indicate a textual relationship, is sometimes insufficient.) For a basic articulation of the relevant distinction, see Benjamin D. Sommer, “Exegesis, Allusion and Intertextuality in the Hebrew Bible: A Response to Lyle Eslinger,” VT 56 (1996): 479–489 (486–489), and note the earlier studies cited there. More recent discussions include, inter alia, Kelly, “Intertextuality”; John Barton, “Déjà Lu: Intertextuality, Method or Theory?,” in Reading Job Intertextually (ed. K. Dell and W. Kynes; LHBOTS 574; New York: T & T Clark, 2013), 1–16; David M. Carr, “The Many Uses of Intertextuality in Biblical Studies,” in Congress Volume Helsinki 2010 (ed. M. Nissinen; Leiden: Brill, 2012), 519–549; Geoffrey D. Miller, “Intertextuality in Old Testament Research,” CBR 9 (2011): 283–309; and Stefan Alkier, “Intertextuality and the Semiotics of Biblical Texts,” in Reading the Bible Intertextually (ed. R. B. Hayes, S. Alkier, and L. A. Huizenga; Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009), 3–22. Note also that I use the expressions allusion, correlation, relationship, and set of parallels when referring to the totality of a connection between texts, and the terms parallel and correspondence when referring to a single common expression or motif. I may speak of a link, connection, association, analogy, equivalence, resemblance, similarity, resonance, or reference in either of these two senses.

8. James S. Ackerman, “Satire and Symbolism in the Song of Jonah,” in Traditions in Transformation: Turning Points in Biblical Faith (ed. B. Halpern and J. D. Levenson; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1981), 213–246; and less expansively idem, “Jonah,” in The Literary Guide to the Bible (ed. R. Alter and F. Kermode; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 234–243. These studies provide an essential basis for my argument, even though I do not regard the story to be fundamentally satirical as does Ackerman. As for the significance of Jonah’s sanctuaries, Ackerman provides just a brief conjecture: the prophet, he suggests, wishes to isolate himself in a protective, temple-like enclosure in an expression of the “Temple Presence theology” of the Zadokite priesthood – an objective that God shuns in favor of a more universalist stance (“Satire and Symbolism,” 246; “Jonah,” 242). Note, however, that Tarshish, Jonah’s preferred destination, is hardly an enclosure like the ship, the fish, and the plant. Ackerman thus proposes, based on highly doubtful evidence, that Tarshish stands outside the bound aries of God’s sovereignty and thereby offers a haven – albeit of a variety that, he concedes, stands in stark opposition to the kind of refuge provided by those other, divinely protected domains (“Satire and Symbolism,” 233; “Jonah,” 235).

Building in part on Ackerman’s studies, Joel E. Anderson argues that the “re-creation” of Jonah in the womb of the fish spawns an analogy to the establishment of the postexilic temple (“Jonah’s Peculiar Re-Creation,” BTB 41 [2011]: 179–188). After all, prophets of this period occasionally describe that temple as a new creation and in other instances envision it as embracing all humanity, including non-Israelites. Accordingly, whereas Jonah resists his mission to save the Gentiles of Nineveh and longs for a temple that serves Israelites alone, the Lord insists that, in the newly fashioned reality represented by the reconstructed temple, sanctuary under the shelter of the divine shall be attainable to every one.

Problematically, however, the proposed link between the postexilic temple, the re-creation motif, and the embrace of non-Israelites draws on just a small handful of select, diverse biblical passages, and the synthesis of these ideas in Jonah emerges from the text far from easily. This difficulty becomes particularly apparent when one asks what precisely the Eden-like temple signifies in Jonah’s prayer. On the one hand, Anderson affirms, the “use of creation/temple imagery” serves “to anticipate the inclusion of Gentiles,” because God’s “true [cosmic] Temple, of which the Jerusalem temple is merely a symbol, encompasses all of the created order, and thus extends to all people, Jew and Gentile alike.” On the other hand, the objective of our prophet, who utters the prayer, is allegedly to exclude non-Israelites from the sacred existence toward which he sees himself heading. It hardly seems likely that Jonah’s words signal both his own limited view of the role of the temple and the book’s more inclusive conception of it.

Finally, a rabbinic source (Midr. Psalms 26:7) affirms that Jonah underwent a process of purification in the sea and in the belly of the fish and that he subsequently entered the Garden of Eden alive (The Midrash on Psalms, vol. 1 [trans. William G. Braude; Yale Judaica Series; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959], 363). This affirmation appears in the context of a comparison between Jonah and Elijah, and it stands to reason that Elijah’s ascent to the heavens (2 Kgs 2:11) influenced the analogous claim about our prophet. Regarding this rabbinic perspective, see Yehuda Liebes, “Jonah as the Messiah Ben Joseph” (Hebrew), Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 3 (1983/4): 269–311 (269–270) and Pnina Galpaz-Feller, Jonah – Journey to Freedom: A New Reading of the Book of Jonah (Hebrew; Jerusalem: Carmel, 2009), 128–129. It is worth asking if the midrash perceived certain traits shared by Jonah and Elijah, particularly their zeal for unadulterated truth and justice, to have prompted their direct passage to a spiritual realm. This would resonate with my contention that, according to one meaning of the story, Jonah is drawn toward a pristinely sacred existence precisely because of his zealotry. In that connection, see Liebes, “Messiah Ben Joseph,” 304–311; and cf. Arthur J. Seltzer, “Jonah in the Belly of the Great Fish: The Birth of Messiah Ben Joseph,” JNSL 25 (1999): 187–203.

9. Cf. Gen 2:11–12, a passage that, to be sure, does not include Tarshish-stones among the riches that it associates with Eden. For a recent discussion, see Lanfer, Remembering Eden, 142–146.

10. Ackerman, “Satire and Symbolism,” 232–233, 242; “Jonah,” 235. Contrast Lowell K. Handy, who affirms that Tarshish must have been a specific location known to our book’s audience (Jonah’s World: Social Science and the Reading of Prophetic Story [BibleWorld; London: Equinox, 2008], 28). In connection with this idealized image of Tarshish, Ackerman adopts the phrase “distant paradise” from C. H. Gordon, “Tarshish,” IDB 4:518–519. Cf. Terence E. Fretheim, The Message of Jonah: A Theological Commentary (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1977), 40; and R. Reed Lessing, Jonah (Concordia Commentary; St. Louis: Concordia, 2007), 73. For a summary of speculations regarding the actual location of Tarshish see, inter alia, Sasson, Jonah, 78–79.

11. Ackerman, “Satire and Symbolism,” 229–230; “Jonah,” 235. The link to Zaphon is proposed likewise by Halpern and Friedman (“Composition and Paronomasia,” 84 n. 11), endorsed by Willie S. van Heerden (“Humour and the Interpretation of the Book of Jonah,” OTE 5 [1992]: 389–401 [395]), and cited as a serious option by Duane L. Christensen (“The Song of Jonah: A Metrical Analysis,” JBL 104 [1985]: 217–231 [226]), Philip J. Nel (“The Symbolism and Function of Epic Space in Jonah,” JNSL 25 [1999]: 215–224 [218]), and Yvonne Sherwood (A Biblical Text and Its Afterlives: The Survival of Jonah in Western Culture [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000], 248 n. 152).

Fundamentally, the word yarkâ appears to mean “side” or “extreme part”; see the relevant entries in BDB and HALOT. Even if yarkĕtê ṣāpôn initially referred to the “sides/slopes” of Zaphon, its opposition to yarkĕtê bôr (“the nethermost reaches of the Pit”; Isa 14:13–15) suggests that it probably evolved to mean the “uppermost reaches” or “heights” of Zaphon. I thank Prof. Moshe J. Bernstein for prompting me to clarify this point.

12. See extensively Richard J. Clifford, The Cosmic Mountain in Canaan and the Old Testament (HSM 4; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), esp. 131–160.

13. Here and elsewhere, my renderings of the biblical text bear the influence of the NJPS translation.

14. Ackerman, “Satire and Symbolism,” 242.

15. These formulations, cited by Anderson (“Jonah’s Peculiar Re-Creation,” 183), appear, respectively, in Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1–15 (WBC 1; Waco, TX: Word Books, 1987), 399; and Othmar Keel, The Symbolism of the Biblical World: Ancient Near Eastern Iconography and the Book of Psalms (trans. T. J. Hallett; New York: Seabury, 1978), 118. Cf. also Anderson’s citations of Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 369–370, 386. Among many other expressions of this idea, see recently Stordalen, Echoes of Eden, chapters 13 and 15; Lanfer, Remembering Eden, chapter 5.

16. These parallels, noted long ago by Feuillet (“Sources,” 176–181), have drawn only limited attention. An En glish summary of Feuillet’s essay appears in Benoit Trépanier, “The Story of Jonas,” CBQ 13 (1951): 8–16.

17. I am referring specifically to ḥōbēl in the sense of a “ship pilot.”

18. Bolin, in his important if skeptical treatment of the Ezekiel correlation, does not cite this particular parallel (Freedom beyond Forgiveness, 91–95). Gerhard C. Aalders, who resists the analogies presented by Feuillet because of their perceived threat to the historicity of Jonah, dismisses the present parallel without meaningful argument (The Problem of the Book of Jonah [Tyndale Old Testament Lecture; London: Tyndale Press, 1948], 22–23). Magonet (Form and Meaning, 139–140 n. 66) discounts this parallel because the coastal rulers in Ezekiel act out of grief whereas the king of Nineveh seeks to display contrition. We will see, however, that contrasts of this sort contribute meaningfully to a number of our book’s inner-biblical allusions, in line with Magonet’s own approach elsewhere in his study (e.g., 102–103).

The proposed correlation to Ezekiel fares equally poorly in German-language treatments. Wilhelm Rudolph tersely dismisses the connection because of a perceived thematic incompatibility (Joel–Amos–Obadja–Jona [KAT 13.2; Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1971], 328), and Hans W. Wolff sees the parallels as coincidental, arguing that, had our passage been dependent on the Ezekiel text, Jonah would have used the port city of Tyre rather than that of Joppa – especially because of Tyre’s relative proximity to the prophet’s hometown of Gath-Hepher (Studien zum Jonabuch: Mit einem Anhang von Jörg Jeremias: Das Jonabuch in der Forschung seit Hans Walter Wolff [Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2003], 27). Like others, however, Rudolph and Wolff do not account for the striking convergence of the sea-storm parallels and the notably similar conduct displayed by the coastal rulers and the king of Nineveh. (Regarding the significance of Joppa and its relationship to the Ezekiel text, see the following discussion.) Gottfried Vanoni, for his part, cites the parallels to Ezekiel but confesses his inability to find meaning in them (Das Buch Jona: Literar- und formkritische Untersuchung [ATSAT 7; St. Ottilien: EOS, 1978], 147).

19. In Ezek 27 and Isa 23, treasure-filled ships of Tarshish supply or signify Tyre, a city that juts out into the sea.

20. Beyond the assumption that Joppa ought to bear literary significance, it is intrinsically unlikely that Jonah would head there for no important reason, because other port cities would probably have offered better options for the Gath-Hepherian prophet. Cf. Wolff, Studien, 27; Meik Gerhards, Studien zum Jonabuch (Biblisch-Theologische Studien 78; Neukirchen– Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2006), 67.

Sasson (Jonah, 80) embraces an older proposal that, by hurrying to a city that stood outside Israelite control, Jonah thought that he could escape the presence of God. See also Sasson (Jonah, 83–84) for citations and discussion regarding the śākār provided by Jonah, which, on the assumption that it refers to the cost of the whole voyage, is said to underscore the prophet’s haste to run away. As a general matter, I regard the book’s distinctive terminology and motifs to be of more concrete significance, often hinting at added layers of meaning through allusion to other biblical texts. Thus, Joppa marks something more specific than a port city outside Israel, and its use goes beyond highlighting Jonah’s already stated motive to escape from the Lord.

It bears mention that the motifs in this verse are widely observed to contribute to a chiastic pattern, but I do not appeal to structural considerations as a sole justification for any striking feature of the text. Regarding the book’s literary structures, see the helpful synopsis in Simon, Jonah, xxiv–xxx. The patterns observed by scholars typically accord with the arguments in this study without difficulty.

21. Indeed, even the many occurrences of yph in the Song of Songs are more scattered.

22. Regarding the implications of the phrase “its fare,” see the discussion in Sasson (Jonah, 83–84).

23. The matter finds limited acknowledgment in some treatments, such as Ackerman, “Satire and Symbolism,” 222–223. Ships of Tarshish appear in 1 Kgs 10:22 (cf. 2 Chr 9:21); 1 Kgs 22:49 (cf. 2 Chr 20:36–37); Isa 2:16; 23:1, 10, 14; 60:9; Ps 48:8; and, of course, Ezek 27. (The Psalms text alludes to the resplendence of these ships by means of their implied comparison to the surpassing “beauty” of Zion.) Cf. also Jer 10:9. In Ezekiel, Psalms, Jonah, and 2 Chr 20:37, these ships are said to “break apart.” Cf. Sherwood (Biblical Text and Afterlives, 250 n. 155), who notes the surprisingly scarce mention of these biblical passages in scholarship on Jonah.

24. As argued recently by Aaron Koller, the biblical root in question denotes arrival or entry, not setting out or journeying (“ and : “Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives on the Semantics of in Ancient Hebrew” [Hebrew], Leshonenu 75 [2013]: 149–164). See also the somewhat different formulation of the problem in Sasson (Jonah, 82–83) and his proposed solution. In 2 Chr 9:21 and 1 Kgs 22:49 (cf. 2 Chr 20:36), it is the verb hlk that fittingly indicates the departure of Tarshish-bound ships.

Note further that, according to our verse, Jonah descended into the ship “to go with them” to Tarshish, yet the text contains no explicit plural antecedent for the pronoun. The phrase “with them,” moreover, seems extraneous, and the entire last line of the verse, which reiterates that Jonah fled in the direction of Tarshish, seems to accomplish no more than to help generate a widely perceived chiastic structure. Dare I suggest, accordingly, that, on another level of meaning, this latter part of the verse stresses that the prophet, seeking to escape his divinely ordained mission in favor of a Tarshish-like, paradisiacal existence, sought to arrive (lābō’) at his Edenic destination “with them” – that is to say, with the ship and its treasures?

25. Correspondence between śîn and sāmek is well attested in the biblical period; see, e.g., Paul Joüon and T. Muraoka, A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew (StudBib 14; 2 vols.; Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1996), 28–29. Note also the term ’eškārēk (“your tribute”; Ezek 27:15) used to denote valuables provided to Tyre by foreign merchants, which bears at least some limited resemblance to the word śĕkārāh (“its fare”) in the Jonah text.

Of possible significance is Ezekiel’s acknowledgment, in the chapter following his proclamations against Tyre, that, in spite of his predictions, the invading Babylonian army did not destroy the city and thus left without pillaging any śākār (“wages”) for its troops (Ezek 29:18). Perhaps, then, by filling a Tyre-like vessel with its śākār, Jonah seeks a resplendent domain epitomized by that enduringly affluent coastal kingdom.

26. The author’s quest to generate the additional sense of shedding honor also accounts for the absence of a direct object after lĕhāqēl, which would have limited the phrase’s range of meaning. A recent discussion of this omission of a direct object appears in Carl J. Bosma, “Jonah 1:9 – An Example of Elenctic Testimony,” CTJ 48 (2013): 65–90 (76–77). See also Phyllis M. Trible, “Studies in the Book of Jonah” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1963), 210–211 n. 1; Bolin, Freedom beyond Forgiveness, 79–80.

27. The second one of these phrases raises serious problems of interpretation (see esp. Hans Wildberger, Isaiah 13–27 [CC; Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1977], 408–409), but the remaining examples provide sufficient basis for my broader point.

28. A summary of alternatives appears in Wildberger, Isaiah 13–27, 406.

29. Feuillet (“Sources,” 176–177) makes the connection, although Magonet (Form and Meaning, 80–82) is skeptical. The common terms do seem to suggest at least a shared template, and the acknowledgment of God that follows the salvation in the psalm accords with a key theme in our text. Cf. recently Tova Forti, “Of Ships and Seas, and Fish and Beasts: Viewing the Concept of Universal Providence in the Book of Jonah through the Prism of Psalms,” JSOT 35 (2011): 359–374 (368). Significantly, it emerges from my analysis of Jonah that a root as distinctive as štq almost invariably generates a meaningful allusion to another text, unless it bears some alternative special significance. Thus I am inclined to think that our text alludes to the psalm, thereby calling attention to the sailors’ emerging recognition of the Lord.

30. Cf., with variation, Sasson, Jonah, 115.

31. Isaiah speaks of the Tyrians attempting to preserve their resplendent existence, whereas Jonah sought to attain such an existence on the Zaphon-like vessel. If, however, our prophet actually seeks to preserve the Edenic environment embodied by the Tyre-like Nineveh, as I believe the story suggests according to one layer of meaning, then the parallel emerges even stronger.

32. This suggestion, of course, embraces an understanding of Jonah’s fear of the Lord that, as in the case of the word ‘ibrî, goes beyond the surface meaning of the expression. Later, we return to the multivalent force of the text’s reference to Jonah’s “fear,” whose sense should properly take into account other parallels still to be considered.

33. See, e.g., the approaches presented in Sasson, Jonah, 121.

34. This explanation, furthermore, accounts for Jonah’s reference to himself as a Hebrew rather than an Israelite. For another approach and some citations of earlier scholarship, see Meir Sternberg, Hebrews between Cultures: Group Portraits and National Literature (ISBL; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 206–208, 216.

35. John C. Holbert, “ ‘Deliverance Belongs to [Y-ahweh]!’ Satire in the Book of Jonah,” JSOT 21 (1981): 59–81 (68); cf. Lessing, Jonah, 110; Gerhards, Studien, 141. Except for this observation, Holbert does not address our story’s connection to Eden. (Here and elsewhere, I modify transliterations of the Tetragrammaton because of personal religious constraints.)

36. The arrogance of Tyre, in fact, has justly been identified as the governing motif of all of Ezekiel’s prophecies on that kingdom; see Ian D. Wilson, “Tyre, a Ship: The Metaphorical World of Ezekiel 27 in Ancient Judah,” ZAW 125 (2013): 249–262 (254–255).

37. See Halpern and Friedman, “Composition and Paronomasia,” 81–82, and the recent extensive study by Jan-Dirk Döhling, “Das Wüten der Welt: Zur literarischen und narrativen Funktion der Schöpfungsdynamik in Jona 1 und 2,” BN 157 (2013): 3–32 (cf. idem, “Jona und des Meeres Wellen: Zum problemgeschichtlichen Horizont und zum traditionsgeschichtlichen Hintergrund,” BN 158 [2013]: 17–37).

38. Concerning renderings akin to “city of God-like magnitude,” see Sasson, Jonah, 228. Sasson’s own inclination (228–230) is that the expression, in one way or another, links Nineveh to the divine in a nonmetaphorical sense. According to my suggestion, the phrase, in line with this chapter’s emphasis on the humbling of Nineveh’s “great” people, means to attribute godlike pretensions to the city. Indeed, Magonet (Form and Meaning, 32) observes that the text’s descriptions of Nineveh’s greatness constitute one of the story’s “growing phrases” (cf. Jonah 1:2; 3:2; 4:11). In my opinion, this “greatness” bespeaks the wicked city’s arrogance already at the beginning of the book, and the present, more expansive expression intensifies the story’s disapproving characterization of Nineveh’s self-perception.

In fact, scholars note the apparently unnecessary inclusion here of hāyĕtâ (“was”), a word that could easily have been elided (cf. Sasson, Jonah, 228, and the literature cited there). Perhaps, then, our phrase, in line with at least two other occurrences of hyh in Jonah (4:5, 10), bears the secondary meaning, “and Nineveh had become a city of divinely great pretensions” – a step beyond the merely “great” self-image implied in the book’s opening scene. I propose another secondary meaning of the phrase in a later note.

39. See the extensive discussion and citations in Sasson, Jonah, 234–237.

40. The root yph also appears in Ps 48:3, where the text describes the beauty of Mount Zion and compares it to the yarkĕtê ṣāpôn. In the psalm, the magnificence of Zion proves overwhelming to foreign kings, and the city’s superiority finds expression when God breaks apart ships of Tarshish by means of an east wind (48:5–8).

41. Muldoon, Divine Justice, 134–137. Regarding the identity of the plant, a peripheral matter for our purposes, the most elaborate discussion appears in Bernard P. Robinson, “Jonah’s Qiqayon Plant,” ZAW 97 (1985): 390–403.

42. Peter Weimar senses the relationship between these texts in a limited way (Eine Geschichte voller Überraschungen: Annäherungen an die Jonaerzählung [SBS 217; Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 2009], 140).

43. Eric W. Hesse and Isaac M. Kikawada likewise propose a connection between the plant and the Garden of Eden (“Jonah and Genesis 11–1,” AJBI 10 [1984]: 3–19 [5]). Cf. also the eighteenth-century commentary by Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon of Vilna (Moshe Schapiro, The Book of Yonah: “Journey of the Soul”: An Allegorical Commentary Adapted from the Vilna Gaon’s Aderes Eliyahu [Artscroll Judaica Classics; Brooklyn, NY: Mesorah, 1997], 93–94, and less clearly in the English adaptation on pp. 75–76).

44. Accounts of correspondences between Jonah and the Cain story appear in Vanoni, Buch Jona, 143, and in the later, more elaborate discussions by Gerhards (Studien, 138–140) and Weimar (Geschichte, 174–178). In English-language scholarship, the correlation was first noted by Hesse and Kikawada (“Jonah and Genesis 11–1,” 5), who argue that our story progresses in inverse parallel to Genesis 1–11. The purpose of the book, they contend, is thus to affirm that the Lord’s mercy extends to all people “as long as they conform to the spirit of the Mosaic covenant, even accidentally.” For “in what better way could the author have reestablished the ground for the covenant than to have paralleled the book of Jonah with the first eleven chapters of Genesis in reverse order, taking us back to the God of creation?” This reading, however, has gained little traction in subsequent treatments, despite wide recognition of a more confined correlation between Jonah and the flood story.

Based in part on the study by Hesse and Kikawada, Lessing develops a similar thesis concentrating mostly on connections to the story of Noah (Jonah, 38–48). For other recent discussions of the link between our story and Noah’s flood, see Noah Greenfield, “Jonah’s Ark and Noah’s Fish: Reading the Book of Jonah after the Flood,” AJBI 33 (2007): 37–72; Timothy R. Koch, “The Book of Jonah and a Reframing of Israelite Theology: A Reader-Response Approach” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 2003), 285–291; Kim, “Jonah Read Intertextually,” 499–504; Anderson, “Jonah’s Peculiar Re-Creation,” 184–185; and cf. the discussion by Albert H. Kamp, which addresses both creation and flood imagery (Inner Worlds: A Cognitive Linguistic Approach to the Book of Jonah [trans. D. Orton; BINS 68; Leiden: Brill, 2004], 205–217).

45. Cf. already Rudolph, Joel– Amos– Obadja– Jona, 328; Rabbi Elijah of Vilna (Schapiro, Allegorical Commentary, 73).

46. Regarding this last parallel, cf. Perry, The Honeymoon Is Over, 88.

47. Scholars often assume that Cain starts out near the eastern boundary of Eden where his parents allegedly made their home and that he then moves to a location farther east where he lives an unsettled life outside the range of God’s protection (cf. Gen 4:14: “and I will be hidden from your face”). See, inter alia, Wenham, Genesis 1–15, 110; Kenneth A. Mathews, Genesis 1–11:26 (NAC 1A; Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1996), 278. The text, however, neither specifies where Adam and Eve settled nor any particular place from which Cain was banished. Rather – at least according to the author of Jonah – after Cain learns that God will not enable the land to produce for him, he moves toward Eden, longing to enter that blissful divine realm. Accordingly, both the Cain story and the analogous sin narrative about Adam and Eve fittingly culminate in the protagonists’ exclusion from Eden itself. For lists of parallels between the two stories, see esp. Alan J. Hauser, “Linguistic and Thematic Links between Genesis 4:1–16 and Genesis 2–3,” JETS 23 (1980): 294–305; Wenham, Genesis 1–15, 99–100.

48. Halpern and Friedman, “Composition and Paronomasia,” 85–86. For additional sources and for a discussion of alternatives regarding who or what is doing the vomiting, see Brent A. Strawn, “On Vomiting: Leviticus, Jonah, Ea(a)rth,” CBQ 74 (2012): 445–464 (455–459).

49. I am aware that the phrase in question may be compared to a similar one (albeit one that, significantly, lacks the preposition “from”) in 1 Kgs 19 pertaining to Elijah – an analogy that underscores Jonah’s reluctance to carry out his task as a prophet. It becomes abundantly clear, however, that our story employs expressions that allude to multiple texts, and I am convinced that the present phrase is one of them. Cf. Vanoni, Buch Jona, 129 and n. 24; Gerhards, Studien, 141–142. For Gerhards, as well as for Weimar (Geschichte, 174–178), the phrase “away from the Lord” is central to the Jonah– Cain analogy, but the pivotal Garden of Eden connection plays only a peripheral role in their analyses.

50. See esp. Magonet, Form and Meaning, 73–74.

51. Our text invokes the face of God as a symbol of both judgment and protection, and I suspect that it attributes both meanings to the passage in Genesis also. (The expression “away from the Lord” may literally be rendered “from the face of the Lord.”) The motif signals divine judgment when the evil of Nineveh rises up “to the face [of the Lord],” the defiant Jonah runs from “the face of the Lord,” and Cain leaves “the face of the Lord” after God issues a sentence on him. (Cf. Gen 18:22, 25; Deut 19:17; 1 Kgs 3:16; Mathews, Genesis 1–11:26, 226–227, 278.) As for divine protection, Jonah later reflects on having been “banished” from the Lord’s gaze (Jonah 2:5), whereas Cain worries about being hidden from the Lord’s protective “face” (Gen 4:14).

Victor P. Hamilton contrasts Jonah, who left God’s presence “voluntarily and in his own self-interests,” with Cain, whose departure marks his “life of alienation from God” (The Book of Genesis: Chapters 1–17 [NICOT; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1990], 235). This explanation, however, mandates a focus on the judging/commanding divine presence in the case of Jonah and on the protective divine presence in the case of Cain. My analysis, by contrast, suggests that both Jonah and Cain head away from God’s judgment while yearning for a blissful existence under his protection.

A substantive analogy between Jonah’s departure “from the face of the Lord” and that of Cain is likewise drawn by the twelfth-century theologian Judah Halevi, who identifies the relevant sacred location as the land of Israel, which he regards to be “[just] a step below the Garden of Eden” (Yehudah Halevi, The Kuzari: In Defense of the Despised Faith [trans. N. D. Korobkin; Jerusalem: Feldheim, 2013], 157–158).

52. Cf. Ackerman, “Jonah,” 41; Anderson, “Jonah’s Peculiar Re-Creation,” 186–187. The connection was already drawn by the eleventh- to twelfth-century Spanish polymath Abraham bar Ḥiyya Savasorda, who adds the crucial observation that the trees of Eden, much like the qîqāyôn, rose up quickly and without any human effort (Abraham bar Chiyyah, “Hegyon Hanefesh Ha’atzuvah [Meditation of the Sad Soul],” in The Journey of the Soul: Traditional Sources on Teshuvah [ed. and trans. L. S. Kravitz and K. M. Olitzky; Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1995], 131–174 [170]).

53. Ackerman, “Satire and Symbolism,” 242; “Jonah,” 241. Images that show a serpent specifically are reproduced in Keel, Symbolism, 51–52.

54. Galpaz-Feller, Journey to Freedom, 103; Gershon Hepner, Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel (Studies in Biblical Literature 78; New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 694–695. In many rabbinic Bibles, there appears a parenthetical insertion in Rashi at Jonah 2:1 which, in the name of a lost, centuries-old commentary called Sod Mesharim, draws this lexical connection between wayĕman and the manna. Some discussion of these insertions in Rashi and their obscure origins appears in Chaim Lieberman, The Tent of Rachel (Hebrew; New York: Empire Press, 1980), 310–329.

55. Additionally – if rather less definitively – the arguably extraneous word lammāḥŏrāt (“the next day”) in Jonah 4:7, which marks the worm incident, resonates with a similar term in Joshua 5:12 where the text recounts the permanent withholding of the manna on the day that followed the paschal offering (mimmāḥŏrāt).

56. I am indebted to Rabbi David Silber who, in a personal communication, identified the basic significance of the manna connection.

57. See esp. Alastair Hunter, “Jonah from the Whale: Exodus Motifs in Jonah 2,” in The Elusive Prophet: The Prophet as a Historical Person, Literary Character and Anonymous Artist (ed. J. C. de Moor; OTS 45; Leiden: Brill, 2001), 142–158 (147–150). The verb “swallow” (bl‘) in v. 1 may resonate with the affirmation that the land “swallowed” (bl‘) the Egyptians (Exod 15:12), but Hunter proposes an alternative connection to Ps 69:16: “Let the deep (mĕṣûlâ) not swallow (bl‘) me.”

58. Regarding all these connections, cf. Magonet, Form and Meaning, 70.

59. Ibid., 74–75.

60. The keyword is noted by, inter alia, Magonet, Form and Meaning, 16; Halpern and Friedman, “Composition and Paronomasia,” 81.

61. At the very end of this study, I explain why these references to the ṭal appear where they do and how precisely they relate to the idea introduced here. Bolin (Freedom beyond Forgiveness, 174) proposes a different connection between Jonah and Num 11 that involves Moses’s frustration and wish for death, but it does not appear relevant to my present claim.

62. See, inter alia, Ackerman, “Satire and Symbolism,” 235–236; Anderson, “Jonah’s Peculiar Re-Creation,” 182–183; Yael Shemesh, “ ‘And Many Beasts’ (Jonah 4:11): The Function and Status of Animals in the Book of Jonah,” JHS 10.6 (2010): 9 (online: http://www.jhsonline.org/Articles/article_134.pdf).

63. See, e.g., Marvin A. Sweeney, The Twelve Prophets (Berit Olam; 2 vols.; Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000), 317. This is also the apparent intention of Ackerman (“Satire and Symbolism,” 235), contra the paraphrase by Sasson (Jonah, 155).

64. See recently Shemesh, “Status and Function of Animals,” 12, and the earlier treatments cited there.

65. Indeed, Sasson (Jonah, 176) observes that elsewhere in Scripture the imperfect polel form of sbb denotes protection (e.g., Deut 3:10). Ps 55:11, however, contains an apparent counterexample. The sixteenth-century commentator Rabbi Moses Alshekh provides his own favorable reading of v. 4b–c, noting the resonance with the rivers of Eden in Genesis (The Book of Jonah: The Voyage of the Visionary: The Commentary of Rabbi Moshe Alshich on the Book of Jonah [trans. R. Shahar; Alshich Tanach Series 3; Jerusalem: Feldheim, 1992], 59). Cf. Seltzer, “Messiah Ben Joseph,” 197.

66. Regarding the term’s consistently unfavorable connotation and its striking appearance in the present context, see recently Strawn, “On Vomiting,” 445–447, 453–454. Phyllis L. Trible suggests that the verb “underscores the repugnance that Jonah’s words have elicited” (Rhetorical Criticism: Context, Method, and the Book of Jonah [GBS, OTG; Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1994], 172).

67. Halpern and Friedman, “Composition and Paronomasia,” 85.

2. WRATHFUL MORALIST

1. Scholars, to be sure, have generally shied away from interpreting this occurrence of kî in the sense of “that.” See, e.g., Simon, Jonah, 4. Exceptions include André Lacocque and Pierre-Emmanuel Lacocque (Jonah: A Psycho-Religious Approach to the Prophet [SPOT; Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990], 1), and the medieval commentators Abraham Ibn Ezra and Eliezer of Beaugency (Mikrao’t Gedolot ‘Haketer’: A Revised and Augmented Scientific Edition of ‘Mikra’ot Gedolot’ Based on the Aleppo Codex and Early Medieval MSS [Hebrew; ed. M. Cohen; 17 vols.; Ramat Gan, Israel: Bar Ilan University Press, 1992–2013], The Twelve Minor Prophets: 156–157). For discussion of the issue and another alternative, see Sasson, Jonah, 75. Based on a more general philological treatment by A. Schoors (“The Particle ,” in Remembering All the Way: Collection of Old Testament Studies [ed. B. Albrektson; OTS 21; Leiden: Brill, 1981], 240–276 [256–259]), Sasson affirms that kî cannot mean “that” and thereby introduce the substance of what Jonah is expected to convey. Schoors’s intent, however, is merely that kî cannot serve to introduce the actual words of the speaker. For an example of a verb denoting speech that is followed by kî in the sense of “that,” see Gen 3:11: “Who told you that (kî) you are naked?”

As for ‘ālêhā, which most straightforwardly means “on it,” Sasson (Jonah, 72–75) cites the widespread view that ‘al may also mean “to,” especially in Late Biblical Hebrew, before offering his own argument that the present expression indicates a (repentance-inducing) proclamation of doom. My own analysis acknowledges both the suggestiveness of Sasson’s rendering and the fundamental ambiguity of the language.

2. Regarding the absence of an explicit direct object see, inter alia, Simon (Jonah, 4), who affirms that the expression, understood to mean “cry out against it,” requires no “complement.”

Several scholars maintain that, at this stage, the reader may perceive Jonah’s mission to entail a proclamation of doom. See Sternberg, Poetics, 318–320; Hauser, “In Pursuit of the Dove,” 21–22; and Lessing, Jonah, 362–363. See also Ben Zvi’s discussion (Signs of Jonah, 34–39), which provides an especially important foundation for my own analysis.

3. See, e.g., Feuillet, “Sources,” 179–186, esp. 181–182; Simon, Jonah, xxxvii–xxxviii. Note also the sources collected by Bolin (Freedom beyond Forgiveness, 141–142 n. 75).

4. We should properly acknowledge the related motifs in Jer 18:7–10, whose “verbal and thematic links [to Jonah] have been noticed for centuries” (Bolin, Freedom beyond Forgiveness, 141).

5. Cf. Craig, Poetics, 71.

6. Sasson (Jonah, 323 n. 3), Ben Zvi (Signs of Jonah, 42), and Benjamin Gesundheit (“Studies in the Book of Jonah” [Hebrew], in U-ve-Yom Tzom Kippur yehatemun: Studies on Yom ha-Kippurim [ed. Amnon Bazak; Alon Shevut, Israel: Tevunot, 2004/5], 151–197 [160]) acknowledge the phrase in Jeremiah, albeit without explicitly referencing Jonah’s wrath in 4:1. Even if, as most scholars maintain, the phrase ḥărôn hayyônâ should properly read ḥereb hayyônâ (“the sword of the oppressor”), an independent reference to the oppressor’s ḥărôn (“rage”) appears immediately thereafter in the verse in Jeremiah. For references and discussion see Jack R. Lundbom, Jeremiah: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB 21B; New York: Doubleday, 2004), 280.

7. Elijah’s zeal is signified, inter alia, by the storm (sĕ‘ārâ) that carries him up to the heavens in a fiery chariot (2 Kgs 2:1, 11). It is quite possible, accordingly, that when selecting the phrase sa‘ar-gādôl, our author had that text in mind in addition to the one in Jeremiah.

8. Most of these correspondences are listed by, inter alia, Feuillet (“Sources,” 168–169), Magonet (Form and Meaning, 68–69), Vanoni (Buch Jona, 145–146), Hagia Witzenrath (Das Buch Jona: Eine literature-wissenchaftliche Untersuchung [ATSAT 6; St. Ottilien: EOS, 1978], 78–82), Lessing (Jonah, 48–52), Weimar (Geschichte, 170–74), and Muldoon (Divine Justice, 97–98). A convenient table displaying these and still other suggested parallels appears in Vanoni, “Elija, Jona und das Dodekapropheton: Grade der Intertextualität,” in Wort [J-HWHs], das geschah . . .” (Hos 1,1): Studien zum Zwölfprophetenbuch (Herders Biblische Studien 35; Freiburg: Herder, 2002), 113–121 (118–119). A further analogy is proposed between Elijah’s forty-day walk to Mount Horeb (1 Kgs 19:8) and Jonah’s warning that Nineveh will be destroyed in forty days (see, e.g., Muldoon, Divine Justice, 98 n. 150), but these hardly seem to correspond thematically. Rather, the far more important parallel to this motif in Jonah is apparently the forty days of rain in the story of Noah.

There does, however, remain one instructive parallel that merits some supplementary discussion (cf. Sweeney, Twelve Prophets, 326; Weimar, Geschichte, 171). When our text recounts the king’s display of submission, it states that “he removed his mantle from upon him” (wayya‘ăbēr ’addartô mē‘ālâw; Jonah 3:6). This terminology recalls the aftermath of Elijah’s escape, when the prophet, on the Lord’s instructions, designates Elisha his successor by approaching him and throwing his mantle toward him (wayya‘ăbōr ’ēliyyāhû ’ēlâw wayyašlēk ’addartô ’ēlâw; 1 Kgs 19:19). In a different context, moreover, Elijah uses this mantle to part the waters of the Jordan (2 Kgs 2:8). It seems, therefore, that Elijah’s mantle symbolizes the exceptional power that he must ultimately transfer to Elisha, and that the mantle of the Ninevite king, correspondingly, signifies the supreme power that he is prepared to renounce as a show of deference to God. Elijah, furthermore, before shying away from his mission still another time, uses his mantle to hide his face from the Lord (1 Kgs 19:13). Thus, whereas Elijah covers himself with his mantle in the process of resisting his divine mandate, the king of Nineveh sheds his own mantle in order to show acceptance of God’s authority.

Consider, then, that the Ninevites’ submission to the Lord, much like that of the Gentile sailors, underscores the contrasting behavior of Jonah, who persists in contesting God’s merciful ways (cf. Magonet, Form and Meaning, 19; Craig, Poetics, 61–62.). Let me suggest, therefore, that when the king sheds his Elijah-recalling mantle, he stands in pointed opposition to Jonah, the zealous Elijah-figure in our own story. For when our Elijah-like prophet refuses to carry out his task, he resembles the Ninevite leader in his prior, mantle-clad state, when the sinfulness and arrogance of his kingdom aroused God’s wrath. In the end, then, the entire connection between these two stories underscores the moralistic zeal of Jonah, which prompts him to rebuff the divine command.

Indeed, that our prophet needs to be humbled like the Ninevites, not merely taught a lesson in theology, likewise emerges from the book’s deployment of the key root gdl, denoting “greatness.” Every occurrence of gdl in the story highlights, directly or otherwise, the Lord’s suppression of either the self-importance of the Ninevites or the brazenness of Jonah. Twice the text refers to “great” people in Nineveh who, facing destruction, capitulate to God (Jonah 3:5, 7). Four times it calls Nineveh “great,” emphasizing either the city’s need to be humbled or the salvaging of its grandeur in the wake of its submission (1:2; 3:2–3; 4:11). A “great wind” and a “great storm,” with pointed irony, underscore God’s pushback against Jonah’s zealotry (1:4, 12). The sailors, both before and after throwing their passenger overboard, show “great” fear of the Lord (1:10, 16) – in sharp contrast to the fleeing Jonah whose recalcitrance belies his claim to be God-fearing. The ejection of Jonah from a “great fish” (2:1, 11) thwarts his presumption of having attained Eden. After the Lord rescinds his decree against Nineveh, the “greatly bad” feeling that overtakes the still oppositional prophet (4:1) provokes a divine challenge. And when the tenacious Jonah then rejoices “greatly” over an unmerited paradisiacal plant that he did nothing to make “great” (4:6, 10), God promptly causes it to dry up.

9. There is hardly sufficient basis to conclude that Jonah and the equally zealous Elijah stand in opposition to one another. For discussion and citations, see recently Muldoon, Divine Justice, 98–101.

10. Recent discussions appear in Koch, “Book of Jonah,” 285–291; Kim, “Jonah Read Intertextually,” 499–504; Lessing, Jonah, 38–48; and Anderson, “Jonah’s Peculiar Re-Creation,” 184–185.

11. To be sure, the root qll in Jonah, which appears in the hiphil infinitive form lĕhāqēl, bears a more important correspondence to lĕhāqēl in Isa 23.

12. Cf., with variation, Fretheim, Message of Jonah, 107–108.

13. Cf., e.g., Anderson, “Jonah’s Peculiar Re-Creation,” 185; contra Simon, Jonah, 29.

14. Hauser (“In Pursuit of the Dove,” 32) embraces both this interpretation and, simultaneously, the inference that the Ninevites became inspired after just one day of admonishment. The cumulative evidence leads me to conclude that the text, at least primarily, seeks to underscore Jonah’s reluctance.

15. The verb also appears a second time in this sense, albeit with all three root letters present (wayyiyyāḥel; Gen 8:12).

16. As noted by Sasson (Jonah, 231), numerous modern commentators, beginning with Julius A. Bewer (A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Jonah [ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1912], 52), sense that Jonah delayed making his pronouncement, but they do not derive this from the word wayyāḥel. By contrast, Meir Zlotowitz cites multiple rabbinic commentators who do translate wayyāḥel this way, and he acknowledges the similar usage of yḥl in the Noah story, albeit without suggesting any literary relationship (The Twelve Prophets: Yonah/Jonah: A New Translation with a Commentary Anthologized from Midrashic and Rabbinic Sources [Artscroll Tanach Series; Brooklyn, NY: Mesorah, 1978], 121).

17. Cf. Itzhak Amar, “Similar [Motifs] in the Story of Jonah and the Story of Noah” (Hebrew), Megadim 45 (2006/7): 73–86 (79); Koch, “Book of Jonah,” 289; Ben Zvi, Signs of Jonah, 122; Lessing, Jonah, 46; and Thomas M. Bolin, “Jonah 4,11 and the Problem of Exegetical Anachronism,” SJOT 24 (2010): 99–109 (105–106). All these scholars note the analogy albeit without drawing this particular contrast.

18. To my discussion, cf. esp. R. J. Lubeck, “A Look at Jonah 3:2–4,” Trinity Journal 9 (1988): 37–46.

19. The root dbr occurs again in connection with the king of Nineveh (Jonah 3:6), thereby underscoring, in conjunction with the analogous recurrence of qr’ and qwm (3:5–6), a contrast between the Ninevites’ submission and Jonah’s recalcitrance. Cf. Magonet, Form and Meaning, 21; Craig, Poetics, 62; and Limburg, Jonah, 81.

20. Cf. Simon, Jonah, 26. The phrase in Exodus employs ’ănî for the first-person singular. Regarding our text’s use of the alternative ’ānōkî, see the following discussion. The only other similar phrase appears in Daniel 10:11, a text that is generally believed to postdate Jonah.

21. The term likewise appears in the abrupt clause ‘ibrî ’ānōkî (“I am a Hebrew”; 1:9). Sasson, accordingly (Jonah, 117), cites a suggestion that the alternative ’ănî tends to be employed “as a lighter choice [specifically] when appended to verbs.”

22. Cf. the important discussion of this issue in Ben Zvi, Signs of Jonah, 34–39.

23. Accordingly, “forty” appears to be the correct reading, not “three” as in the LXX. For an elaborate discussion, see R. W. L. Moberly, “Preaching for a Response? Jonah’s Message to the Ninevites Reconsidered,” VT 53 (2003): 156–168.

24. Cf. Magonet, Form and Meaning, 65; Greenfield, “Jonah’s Ark,” 41.

25. Cf. Koch, “Book of Jonah,” 287; Greenfield, “Jonah’s Ark,” 44.

26. The beginning of this translation follows the basic approach of Sasson (Jonah, 5, 252–253), who argues that the edict should properly start right after wayyō’mer (which I have rendered “saying”). In several ways, however, the formulation in the text thereby remains less than ideal. First, as Sasson notes, this sense of wayyaz‘ēq typically involves the summoning of troops or people. Second, when wayyaz‘ēq indicates a pronouncement, it is always followed by a direct object. Third, this would constitute an uncommon instance where the (untranslated) infinitive lē’mōr, which appears before the clause “let them not taste anything,” does not operate in conjunction with a finite verb that signals the approaching onset of speech. Finally, according to this rendering, instead of opening with “in Nineveh” the edict might better have said, in the appropriate place, “the people and the animals of Nineveh (’ăšer bĕnînĕwê).” Other translations, furthermore, which begin the edict right after “in Nineveh,” yield most of the same difficulties.

I propose, therefore, that an additional meaning is implied: “And he prompted crying out [among the citizens] in Nineveh, saying on the authority of the king and his nobles, ‘The people and the animals. . . .’ ” This rendering of wayyaz‘ēq accounts for both the absence of a direct object and the presence of the phrase “in Nineveh” near the beginning, and it also links lē’mōr to the earlier word wayyō’mer. To be sure, according to this translation, wayyō’mer would best have appeared after “in Nineveh” rather than before it.

27. Cf. Trible, Rhetorical Criticism, 217–218; Bolin, “Exegetical Anachronism,” 100–101.

28. The word ribbô occurs several times in Late Biblical Hebrew, but our author typically prefers a more classical Hebrew style. Among many discussions of language in Jonah, see Simon, Jonah, xxxix–xli, and Muldoon, Divine Justice, 48–63. I return to this matter near the end of the study.

29. See, e.g., Sasson (Jonah, 255–256), who makes a preliminary effort at investing this wordplay with meaning.

30. As noted by Sasson (Jonah, 256) and others, ’al-yir‘û might also play on the root r‘‘, so that the clause would bear the added meaning “let them not act wickedly.” However, this strikes me as a peripheral reason for the word choice.

31. See, e.g., Moshe Greenberg, Ezekiel 21–37: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB 22A; New York: Doubleday, 1997), 723.

32. The verse reads, “For the Lord has comforted Zion; he has comforted all her ruins; he has made her wilderness like Eden and her desert like the Garden of the Lord; exultation and joy (śimḥâ) shall be found in her, gratitude and the voice of melody.” Cf. the appearance of śmḥ in Joel (2:21, 23) concerning the restoration of the Eden-like city of Jerusalem (2:3). A helpful list of appearances of the root in the Twelve Minor Prophets appears in Craig, Poetics, 141.

33. Sasson, Jonah, 255.

34. See, e.g., the discussion in Simon, Jonah, xxxvii.

35. The lexical analogy to ’al-yir‘û in the Exodus passage was brought to my attention by Menachem Leff and is acknowledged in Gesundheit, “Studies,” 181.

36. For extensive summary and discussion, see recently Seth D. Postell, Adam as Israel: Genesis 1–3 as the Introduction to the Torah and Tanakh (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2012), 32–41, 124–129.

37. Sweeney, too, proposes that the three days in our passage conform to the three days that precede entry into the divine presence in Exodus (Twelve Prophets, 317). Note also that a similar three-day period precedes the arrival at Mount Moriah in the account of the binding of Isaac (Gen 22:4). Regarding that story’s connections to the revelation at Sinai, see Jonathan Grossman, “ ‘He Saw the Place from Afar’ – The Binding of Isaac as Background for the Covenant of the Basins and Other Stories” (Hebrew), Megadim 25 (1995/6): 79–90 (79–86); and the elaborate table provided by Neria Klein, “The shofar of Isaac at Mount Sinai” (Hebrew); online: http://www.etzion.org.il/dk/5770/1224maamar3.html.

38. I have fallen short in my substantial efforts to recover the source of this proposal, which came to my attention some time ago. It is possible that the extraneous word hāyĕtâ in Jonah 3:3 also works together with the three-day motif, so that on a deeper level that verse means to say, “Nineveh was/had come to be a great distance [from returning] to God, a walk of three days.”

39. Regarding the three days and nights mentioned in our text, I am inclined to accept a widely cited proposal by George M. Landes that, based on comparative evidence, this motif signifies the travel distance between the “upper” and “nether realms” (“The ‘Three Days and Three Nights’ Motif in Jonah 2:1,” JBL 86 [1967]: 446–450 [448–450]). According to the present analysis, this span of time would thus mark the transformation of the fish from “the belly of Sheol” into an Edenic enclosure.

40. Extensive discussion and citations of earlier scholarship appear in Siegfried Bergler, Joel als Schriftinterpret (BEATAJ 16; Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1988), 213–245; Kim, “Jonah Read Intertextually,” 512–516; Strazicich, Joel’s Use of Scripture, 146–156; and most recently the expansive treatment by Joseph R. Kelly, “Joel, Jonah, and the [Y-HWH] Creed: Determining the Trajectory of the Literary Influence,” JBL 132 (2013): 805–826.

41. Cf., inter alia, Gesundheit, “Studies,” 161, 187.

42. Note that this verse, within the space of four words, refers twice to the prospect of God “turning” (swb). This redundancy evidently results from the author’s wish to allude both to the parallel expression in Joel and to the phrase “turn back (swb) from your fury” in the story of the golden calf.

43. For citations of scholarship see Strazicich, Joel’s Use of Scripture, 146; Kelly, “Literary Influence,” 806–810 nn. 4–12. The most important argument in favor of the priority of the Jonah text is that, whereas our author was clearly working off the relevant passage in Exodus, the same cannot be said of the author of Joel. Thus, it is proposed, our text contains an adaptation of the divine-attribute formula found in Exodus, and the new phrasing of the formula – along with other motifs – influenced the passage in Joel. See Magonet, Form and Meaning, 79; Strazicich, Joel’s Use of Scripture, 151; and the admirably cautious endorsement of this position in Kelly, “Literary Influence,” 819–820, 825.

To be sure, as noted by Thomas B. Dozeman, the phrase “Why should they say among the peoples” in Joel 2:17 resonates with the formulation “Why should they say in Egypt” in Exod 32:12 (“Inner-Biblical Interpretation of [Y-ahweh]’s Graciousness and Compassionate Character,” JBL 108 [1989]: 207–223 [222]). Nevertheless, that line in Joel bears a far closer parallel to a nearly identical phrase in Ps 79:10 (cf. 115:2), and so it cannot be said definitively that it also draws on the formulation in Exodus. See also Kelly (“Literary Influence,” 818) regarding a possible connection between Joel 4:21 and Exod 34:7, and the earlier discussions cited there.

The evidence that I introduce here strongly supports the more common view, which affirms the priority of Joel.

44. These overt references to Eden appear in Gen 2–4, 13; Isa 51; Ezek 28, 31, 36; and the present passage in Joel.

45. Cf. BDB: 724 (I 2b), 725 (II 1b).

46. See, e.g., the discussion by Sasson (Jonah, 278–279), who also observes, as have many others, that qdm appears three times in this chapter (vv. 2, 5, 8). All occurrences of this key root generate allusions to Eden.

47. This bears an analogy, of course, to the land’s withholding of its vigor in the story of Cain (Gen 4:12).

48. A recent discussion of the phrase appears in Yoo-ki Kim, “The Function of in Jonah 4 and Its Translations,” Bib 90 (2009): 389–393. See esp. p. 390 regarding the present alternative and its philological difficulty, which makes it implausible as a primary meaning. A version of the proposal first appears in Ibn Ezra in the name of the tenth-century Karaite exegete Yefet ben Eli (Steven Bob, Go to Nineveh: Medieval Jewish Commentaries on Jonah Translated and Explained [Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2013], 38). It is likewise mentioned by the eleventh- to twelfth-century commentator David Kimḥi and later embraced by the fifteenth- to sixteenth-century figure Don Isaac Abarbanel (Bob, Commentaries, 61, 104). For hêṭēb as a noun, cf. Isa 1:17. I thank Prof. Richard C. Steiner for this reference.

49. By contrast, the prophet Nahum depicts Nineveh itself as a once indomitable den of preying lions that will nonetheless fall (Nah 2:12–14). I discuss connections between Jonah and Nahum in the next chapter.

50. See, e.g., Sasson, Jonah, 292.

51. Regarding the yrd motif, cf., inter alia, Halpern and Friedman (“Composition and Paronomasia,” 84–85), who also appear to hint at this last suggestion.

52. Halpern and Friedman (“Composition and Paronomasia,” 85) note the wordplay but affirm that it bears no apparent thematic significance.

53. This wordplay may also extend to Jonah’s construction of a (sukkâ), a defiant act that stands in contrast to the repentant conduct of the Ninevites. See Alan Cooper, “In Praise of Divine Caprice: The Significance of the Book of Jonah,” in Among the Prophets: Language, Image, and Structure in the Prophetic Writings (ed. P. R. Davies and D. J. A. Clines; JSOTSup 144; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1993), 144–163 (154–155).

On a related note, observe that, initially, the people of Nineveh merely call a fast and “don” () sackcloth, which may bespeak mourning rather than a plea for deliverance (cf. the perception articulated by the courtiers of David in 2 Sam 12:21). The Ninevite king, by contrast, in the context of a series of reversals, “covers himself with sackcloth” (). Then, he provides a set of instructions that call for repentance and prayer, on the chance that a transformation of the conduct of the population might prompt a corresponding nullification of the divine decree. Indeed, as I have suggested, the verb wayyaz‘ēq might well indicate that it is the king who prompts the Ninevites to cry out to God, their own initial reaction having reflected sorrow rather prayer. Fittingly, therefore, the king insists that, much like him, the people not merely “don” sackcloth but exhibit a reversal by “covering” themselves in sackcloth (). In a notably fundamental way, the Ninevite leader thus expands on the deferential reaction of the citizenry – in pointed contrast to the Judean king in Jer 36 who, we recall, undercuts his subjects’ submission to God. The subtly different reactions of the Ninevites and their king, moreover, give expression to the ambiguity of Jonah’s pronouncement, which suggests inevitable doom, on the one hand, and the opportunity for a transformation, on the other.

54. The presence of wordplay in these verses is noted in a general way by, inter alia, Simon, Jonah, xxxii.

55. Because of the significance of the phrase rûaḥ qādîm, our author had little choice but to separate the words rûaḥ and ḥărîšît. Note also that the wāw that breaks up the rêš–ḥêt combination in the word rûaḥ is nonconsonantal.

56. The wordplay in noted by, inter alia, Halpern and Friedman (“Composition and Paronomasia,” 86). Arguably, the unexpected preposition l- (-) that follows lĕhaṣṣîl contributes to the play on ṣll. Indeed, the two words that denote “to save him,” if read as one (lĕhaṣṣillô), would yield the meaning “to shade him.”

57. The hot wind that afflicts Jonah, to be sure, reinforces the impact of the worm attack, which might suggest that straight letter-repetitions would have been preferable in that case too. Crucially, however, the worm and the scorching weather, joined together by the repetition of the word wattak (“and it attacked”), are both commissioned by God. They embody, accordingly – as in the case of the manna – a single, premeditated one-two punch that thwarts any prospect of lasting unmerited divine favor. By contrast, God initially commissions the plant to endorse, however fleetingly, a human initiative whose fate was as yet undetermined.

As for the word wattak, note that the Lord protects Cain – who wished to preserve his life – from those who would “attack” (hakkôt) him during his wanderings east of Eden (Gen 4:15). Fittingly, therefore, after Jonah, facing the prospect of a world that falls short of his ideals, expresses a wish for death, God prompts a life-threatening “attack” on the prophet as he sits to the east of an Edenic domain.

58. Regarding ḥărîšît see the discussion in Sasson (Jonah, 302–304), who ultimately speculates that the word means “big, powerful” based on an analogy to rûaḥ qādîm ‘azzâ in Exod 14:21 – a passage that, as we have seen, indeed served as a source for our author. We should also consider the common suggestion that ḥărîšît gives the sense of “silent” (in line with one meaning of the root ḥrš), especially in view of the link between the plant episode in Jonah and the Elijah story in 1 Kgs 19: in that story God teaches Elijah a lesson by means of a “great wind” followed soon after by a sound of silence. Cf. the Targum and, inter alia, the discussion in Simon, Jonah, 44; and see Perry regarding the implications of the Elijah connection (The Honeymoon Is Over, 60–64). For that matter, might the ominous “sound” of God walking in the Garden of Eden during the rûaḥ of the day have constituted a similarly quiet rustle?

59. Cf. BDB: 361: “wood, wooded height.”

60. It thus bears adding ḥōreš to the impressive list of biblical terms provided by Stordalen that relate to a garden (Echoes of Eden, 36–40).

61. Regarding the various renderings of the root ḥws in this context, see at length Sasson, Jonah, 309–310.

62. Needless to say, there have been many attempts to explain the analogy between the plant and Nineveh (see, e.g., Muldoon, Divine Justice, 139–149, and Perry, The Honeymoon Is Over, 144–159), and it would be impossible to specify the strengths and weaknesses of every suggestion. For present purposes, it suffices to observe that any explanation would ideally account for God’s seeming mischaracterization of Jonah’s desire for the plant; the specific content of the contrast drawn between the plant and Nineveh; the selection of the plant motif for the purposes of this climactic scene, in a way that does not merely justify its de facto presence in the story; and the relevance of the book’s final scene to the theme of the story more generally.

63. Kim (“Function,” 390) is correct in affirming that, in addition to the philological difficulty of this rendering in both instances – which is why I relegate it to a secondary meaning – “it does not produce as good a sense” in the present verse.

64. Concerning the play on the root gdl see, inter alia, Sasson, Jonah, 308–310.

65. In the next chapter, I revisit this assumption that it is the Ninevites who “made [the city] great.” On the more general matter of human labor in biblical theology, see recently Amos Frisch, “The Biblical Attitude toward Human Toil,” in Jewish Bible Theology: Perspectives and Case Studies (ed. I. Kalimi; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2012), 101–108. According to the present analysis of Jonah, the book advances a favorable view of labor at least in a post-Edenic world, even placing constructive work in parallel to the quest for moral improvement.

66. See extensively R. Mark Shipp, Of Dead Kings and Dirges: Myth and Meaning in Isaiah 14:4b–21 (Academia Biblica 11; Atlanta: SBL Press, 2002), 67–79, 130–131 n. 6.

67. See, e.g., Wildberger, Isaiah 13–27, 645–646; cf. Muldoon, Divine Justice, 136.

68. See esp. Ackerman, “Satire and Symbolism,” 230, 242.

69. This particular analogy is drawn by Muldoon, Divine Justice, 136.

70. The notable repetition of ‘lh is acknowledged by Wildberger, Isaiah 13–27, 67.

71. On the difficulty of the formulation see, e.g., Simon, Jonah, 45.

72. Recall that the phrase ben-’ămittay (Jonah 1:1) – which features the only other occurrence of ben/bin in Jonah – is widely seen to bear a secondary, descriptive meaning (“the truthful one”). Moreover, other than in the ubiquitous phrase “Joshua bin-nûn (‘son of Nun’),” the word bin – with its distinctive vowel – appears just two times elsewhere in the Bible, and one of those occurrences likewise serves this uncommon descriptive function rather than indicating age or filial relationship (Deut 25:2).

73. See, inter alia, Yair Zakovitch, “Through the Looking Glass: Reflections/Inversions of Genesis Stories in the Bible,” BibInt 1 (1993): 139–152 (147–149).

74. Cf. Gen 19:21, 29; Deut 29:22; Isa 13:19; Jer 49:18; Amos 4:11; Lam 4:6.

75. The distinct expression “before me” in our text, taken together with Jonah’s subsequent escape “from before the Lord,” might well serve to underscore a similarity between the noncompliant prophet and the God-defying Ninevites.

76. In addition to these parallels, Jonah’s reluctance to save Nineveh is typically contrasted to Abraham’s efforts to save Sodom; see Zakovitch (“Reflections/Inversions,” 148–149) for discussion and some other proposed connections.

77. Simon (Jonah, 47), endorsing a position that the number 120,000 includes only the Ninevite children, speculates that these children composed one-fifth of the population. There is no apparent basis, however, for presuming such a ratio of children to adults. My own analysis, in any event, yields a preference for the alternative view that the number includes all the Ninevites. To be sure, on the simplest level of interpretation, I accept that the text might well mean to invoke the innocence of the children and animals of Nineveh, because this explanation accounts in a plausible way for the reference to these animals.

Koch (“Book of Jonah,” 286) draws a speculative connection between 120,000 here and the number 120 in the flood story (Gen 6:3), “the length of time allotted to mortal life by the Lord”; cf. Lessing, Jonah, 44. See also the discussion in Sasson, Jonah, 311–313.

78. The five sinful cities identified in these contexts appear as a group in Gen 14:2.

3. PEACEFUL DOVE

1. The term appears in Song 1:15; 2:14; 4:1, 5:2; 5:12; 6:9. On the varying resonances of Jonah’s name see, inter alia, Hauser, “In Pursuit of the Dove,” 22; Bolin, Freedom beyond Forgiveness, 71–72; Ben Zvi, Signs of Jonah, 41–42; Gesundheit, “Studies,” 160; and Kim, “Jonah Read Intertextually,” 502–503, 507–512. See also the novel connection to the word yônîm in Isa 60:8 proposed by Lacocque and Lacocque (Jonah, 18–20).

2. Cf., with variation, Simon, Jonah, xxxvi. Among many efforts to connect our story in a meaningful way to Jonah’s appearance in the passage in Kings, see Kim, “Jonah Read Intertextually,” 504–507. It bears mention that the phrase “the word of the Lord” occurs in connection with Jonah’s prophecy in that context, much as it does at the beginning of chapters 1 and 3 of our book (cf. Sasson, Jonah, 227; Ben Zvi, Signs of Jonah, 46; and Muldoon, Divine Justice, 116–117).

3. Significantly, even before Muldoon’s identification of the plant with the cedar that signifies Assyria, some scholars – on the basis of the contrast drawn at the end of the book – drew a direct connection between the process under gone by the plant and the fate of Nineveh. See Philippe Guillaume, “The End of Jonah Is the Beginning of Wisdom,” Bib 87 (2006): 243–502 (47); Perry, The Honeymoon Is Over, 167–169; and cf. my discussion in the final section of this chapter.

4. For sources, discussion, and some additional proposed connections, see the extensive treatment by Kim (“Jonah Read Intertextually,” 507–512). More recently, William W. Hallo has argued that our book presents a parody of other prophetic oracles on Nineveh, chiefly those of Nahum (“Jonah and the Uses of Parody,” in Thus Says the Lord: Essays on the Former and Latter Prophets in Honor of Robert R. Wilson [ed. J. J. Ahn and S. L. Cook; LHBOTS 502; New York: T & T Clark, 2009], 285–291).

5. Cf. Cooper, “In Praise of Divine Caprice,” 163 n. 1; Muldoon, Divine Justice, 138.

6. Outside of Jonah and Nahum, this usage of ḥšb occurs only in Hos 7:15, Dan 11:24, and Prov 24:8. A related usage, without a negative connotation, occurs in Ps 73:16 and Prov 16:9.

7. The change from za‘mô in Nahum, which denotes God’s anger, to za‘pô in Jonah, which denotes the storming sea, is understandable; cf. BDB s.v. z‘m (“indignation”) and z‘p (“storming, raging, rage”).

8. Fittingly, moreover, if the scorching rûaḥ qādîm in Jonah indeed corresponds to the locust-like fire in Nahum, then in all likelihood it alludes simultaneously to the rûaḥ qādîm in Exod 10:13 that, at the onset of morning, deposits a swarm of ravaging locusts onto the Edenic land of Egypt.

In addition, it warrants consideration that the sōkēk (“shelter”) in Nah 2:6, which serves an apparent protective function near the wall of Nineveh, bears a connection to the sukkâ of Jonah who, according to the present reading, seeks to rescue the city. Note also that in Nah 2:8 the sound of yônîm (“doves”) bemoans the destruction of Nineveh, suggesting that our yônâ might bear a similarly favorable attitude toward the city, and that an oft-noted orthographic similarity between the names and might likewise suggest that the prophet identifies with Nineveh. Regarding these last two points, see, inter alia, Mark E. Biddle, “Obadiah–Jonah–Micah in Canonical Context: The Nature of Prophetic Literature and Hermeneutics,” Int 61 (2007): 154–166. In Zephaniah 3:1, the city compared to a yônâ is probably not Nineveh but Jerusalem, despite the prophet’s reference to Nineveh just beforehand.

9. On this particular point, cf. esp. Hauser, “In Pursuit of the Dove,” 21.

10. Indeed, according to Hauser (“In Pursuit of the Dove,” 22, 35), Sternberg (Poetics, 319–320), and Lessing (Jonah, 362–363), Jonah’s reaction reorients the reader’s perception of the prophet’s motive for fleeing his mission.

11. For an alternative reading of Jonah’s distress, and for multiple interpretations of God’s remarks at the end of the book, see Perry, The Honeymoon Is Over, 139–141, 166–172.

12. A summary of approaches to the problem, including textual emendation, appears in Sasson, Jonah 287–289.

13. Our author prefers using the participle yôdēa‘ (“know”) to indicate an unambiguous present tense, as in 1:12 and 3:9 (although the latter occurrence admittedly derives from a formulation in Joel). The qāṭal forms here and in 4:11, by contrast, allow either present- or past-tense renderings, and in each case we find use for both alternatives.

14. Regarding the lack of clarity in Jonah’s words, cf. Ben Zvi, Signs of Jonah, 59.

15. Cf. the discussions by Perry, The Honeymoon Is Over, 139–141; “Changing God’s Mind: Abraham versus Jonah,” in Universalism and Particularism at Sodom and Gomorrah: Essays in Memory of Ron Pirson (ed. D. Lipton; Ancient Israel and Its Literature 11; Atlanta: SBL Press, 2012), 43–52 (47–48). In the first of these studies, Perry does not quite say that Jonah was appealing to divine mercy by running away. Rather, he suggests that Jonah withheld his warning because he did not believe that God would consider sparing Nineveh, even though, as the prophet now ruefully acknowledges, he knew deep down that God is merciful. In his later treatment, by contrast, Perry affirms that Jonah, knowing that the Lord is inclined to forgive, was indeed seeking to elicit such compassion and that the prophet became encouraged to return to Nineveh after he saw that God answered his prayer for personal salvation.

16. This helps explain, moreover, why the verse recounts Jonah’s departure from “the city” to a location east of “the city,” instead of employing a pronoun or other more succinct formulation. (The problem is duly noted by Sasson [Jonah, 287]). In this way, the text underscores the standing of the city in the eyes of the prophet, who wishes Nineveh to retain its Edenic character and, after worriedly leaving its confines in the wake of his pronouncement, remains in close proximity to it in hopes of inhabiting the paradisiacal domain that it embodies. Like the Eden-seeking Cain, then, who was compelled to leave the divine presence after disdaining the prospect of self-improvement, Jonah leaves the paradisiacal “city” of Nineveh harboring deep skepticism about the possibilities of repentance and places himself to the east of that very Edenic “city,” yearning fruitlessly for an idyllic existence.

17. Any distinction between “Should I” and “May I” is peripheral for our present purposes. Regarding these alternatives, see Terence E. Fretheim, “Jonah and Theodicy,” ZAW 90 (1978): 227–237; Craig, Poetics, 69–70.

18. Cf. the suggested translation in Perry, The Honeymoon Is Over, 166. To be sure, Perry does not elaborate on this rendering and adjusts it shortly thereafter.

19. Cooper, “In Praise of Divine Caprice,” 158–163. Scholars who support Cooper’s exclusive declarative rendering include Muldoon (Divine Justice, 140–149) and Guillaume (“End of Jonah”), the latter of whom also attributes such a reading to the LXX (cf. idem, “Caution: Rhetorical Questions!,” BN 103 [2000]: 11–16; “Rhetorical Reading Redundant,” JHS 9.6 [2009; online: http://www.jhsonline.org/Articles/article_108.pdf]). Ben Zvi (“Jonah 4:11 and the Metaprophetic Character of the Book of Jonah,” JHS 9.5 [2009; online: http://www.jhsonline.org/Articles/article_107.pdf]) and Perry (The Honeymoon Is Over, 166–172) regard a declarative translation to be one of multiple alternatives intended by the author. Cf. also Carolyn Sharp, Irony and Meaning in the Hebrew Bible (ISBL; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 184; George M. Landes, “Textual ‘Information Gaps’ and ‘Dissonances’ in the Interpretation of the Book of Jonah,” in Ki Baruch Hu: Ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, and Judaic Studies in Honor of Baruch A. Levine (ed. R. Chazan, W. W. Hallo, and L. H. Schiffman; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1999), 273–293 (291–292).

20. Cooper, “In Praise of Divine Caprice,” 158. On the possibility that bĕhēmâ here means “human beings with beastlike sensibilities,” see Sasson (Jonah, 319) for sources and discussion. It bears emphasis that, in view of the book’s extensive multivalence, the phrase “people who do not know their right from their left” would seem to call for a condemnatory reading at least according to one layer of meaning. The phrase “and many animals” would thus follow suit.

21. See Ben Zvi (“Metaprophetic Character,” 7–10) for examples of rhetorical questions that do not begin with hê, and for an affirmation that a striking formulation of this sort is probably designed to yield multiple meanings.

22. Prior declarative readings retain certain disadvantages. Cooper’s interpretation requires reading Jonah in conjunction with Nahum, to the point where he must assume that our book not only draws on other biblical texts but “was never intended to be read apart from [its] canonical context” (“In Praise of Divine Caprice,” 159–163). (In this connection, it warrants acknowledging the growing literature pertaining to the formation and unity of the Book of the Twelve. The present study relates to those issues only insofar as my analysis, which ascribes significance to almost every textual nuance in Jonah, resists any notion that the book was altered to serve the purposes of the collection to which it belongs.)

According to Muldoon’s reading, Jonah does not initially understand the crucial symbolism of the qîqāyôn, which represents Nineveh (Divine Justice, 140). Thus, the prophet’s intense emotional reactions to the plant’s growth and demise reflect (apparently) nothing more than a misapprehension that it serves merely to provide shade. The presence of these emphatic reactions in the story, therefore, remains in need of basic explanation. The same problem obtains for Perry’s declarative reading, which does not address these components of the account (see The Honeymoon Is Over, 167–169), and for that of Guillaume (who does, to be sure, make some effort to explain Jonah’s reaction to the plant’s demise; see “End of Jonah,” 247–248).

Ben Zvi (“Metaprophetic Character,” 10–13) grants that earlier parts of the story lead to an interrogative reading of the final verse; however, he affirms that the book’s intended readership would have perceived an additional, declarative reading – one that balances the portrait of a merciful God who saves Nineveh with that of a punishing God who eventually destroys it. Yet even if some postmonarchic works, as Ben Zvi argues, require the reader to balance conflicting expressions of theology, it would seem far preferable that any proposed meaning of a verse in a narrative book like Jonah accord with at least one viable conception of the storyline.

23. To be sure, the switch from ‘ālêhā (“on it”) in chapter 1 to ’ēlêhā (“to it”) in chapter 3 amounts to a drawback for this reading, because it is precisely in the latter instance that God wishes to stress the need for a proclamation of doom on the city. The switch to ’ēlêhā thus serves the purposes only of our first reading and the first version of our second reading, according to which God insists that Jonah speak to the Ninevites to encourage them to repent.

24. See, inter alia, Sasson, Jonah, 263.

25. Sasson (Jonah, 264) proposes that the phrase as it stands (wĕlō’ ‘āśâ) has the advantage of paralleling wĕlō’ nō’bēd (“and we will not perish”) at the end of the preceding verse. Lessing (Jonah, 294) speculates that the clause, particularly with the omission of the pronoun “it,” has the effect of ending the section with an emphasis on God’s compassion. More suggestively, Zakovitch (“Reflections/Inversions,” 148) notes that the expression resonates with God’s assertion that he would not destroy Sodom should righteous people be found in it (lō’ ’e‘ĕśê; Gen 18:29–30).

26. This always struck me as the straightforward meaning of the formulation, even when I could make no sense of it in context.

27. On the syntactic difficulty of this explanation, see Simon, Jonah, 33–34.

28. Sasson (Jonah, 263) likewise presents this as a serious possibility. The statement, he suggests, thereby “reassures us that God’s mercy is not showered prematurely on undeserving folk.”

29. Cf. Guillaume (“End of Jonah,” 247) and Muldoon (Divine Justice, 139) regarding the death of the plant as a symbol of Nineveh’s future destruction. The fall of Nineveh, moreover, occupies a central place in Ben Zvi’s argument in favor of the book’s multivalence.

30. Perry refers to both alternatives, favoring this latter one (The Honeymoon Is Over, 156; “Changing God’s Mind,” 50–51). In this connection, it warrants mentioning Rüdiger Lux’s argument that our book emphasizes God’s relationship to the entire creation – in particular several “great” entities that he brought into being – and that the present verse, accordingly, means to underscore the value of the “great” city of Nineveh in the eyes of the Lord (Jona: Prophet zwischen ‘Verweigerung’ und ‘Gehorsam’: Ein erzälanalytische Studie [FRLANT 162; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994], 203–204). Lux’s observation, to be sure, follows the conventional reading whereby God is expressing why he saved the city.

31. Cf., e.g., the “vineyard” prophecy at the beginning of Isa 5, where the prophet underscores the Lord’s investment in the people of Israel and his consequent inclination to abandon them when they disappoint him.

4. A SONG OF THANKS IN WATERS OF EDEN

1. George M. Landes, while accepting that the prayer derives from a different source, began the process of appreciating its relationship to the narrative (“The Kerygma of the Book of Jonah: The Contextual Interpretation of the Jonah Psalm,” Int 21 [1967]: 3–31). Since then, many commentators have endorsed the prayer’s authenticity. See esp. chapter 3 of Bolin (Freedom beyond Forgiveness) and the literature cited there. My analysis shows that the prayer is constructed – as is the rest of the book – to imply that Jonah is pursuing a sacred, Edenic domain and that the poem shares other subtle motifs with the surrounding prose.

My analysis also suggests that the book was composed entirely by a single author, who incorporated no source material apart from phraseology adopted from earlier biblical books. For extensive discussion, citations, and an argument to the contrary, see James D. Nogalski, Redactional Processes in the Book of the Twelve (BZAW 217; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1993), 255–262.

2. Cf. Ackerman, “Satire and Symbolism,” 235; “Jonah,” 237; Greenfield, “Jonah’s Ark,” 67. Landes, too, acknowledges that Jonah seems “quite happy inside the fish” (“Information Gaps,” 283–284). By contrast, according to the more standard view, the fish’s belly is merely the “instrument of salvation” (Sasson, Jonah, 202). Cf., inter alia, Sweeney, Twelve Prophets, 319. For discussion and some additional citations, see Craig, Poetics, 85–87.

3. On the general matter of tenses in the prayer, see the remarks by Sasson (Jonah, 162–164; cf. 206–207), who inclines toward present-tense renderings and, attributing a timeless quality to the poem, affirms that it need not give expression to Jonah’s actual situation. I argue, by contrast, that the deeper meaning of the prayer accords with the prophet’s experiences in a precise way. An alternative present-tense translation appears in Trible, Rhetorical Criticism, 163–164. An argument in favor of a past-tense rendering appears in Craig, Poetics, 85–86.

4. See esp. Sweeney (Twelve Prophets, 320), who attributes a pointed irony to this syntactic anomaly.

5. The recognition that it is God who, by means of the fish, has “cast” Jonah into a protective environment resolves certain apparent inconsistencies with the narrative; see the difficulties noted by Nogalski (Redactional Processes, 254–255).

6. Feuillet, “Sources,” 178.

7. Perry (The Honeymoon Is Over, 31) likewise connects mĕṣûlâ to these later terms, the analogy signaling Jonah’s perception of the fish as an eventual source of rebirth.

8. See, e.g., Holbert, “Satire in Jonah,” 71.

9. This is the position of Ibn Ezra and the fourteenth-century commentator Menaḥem ha-Meiri (Cohen, Haketer, Psalms Part 1: 135). Ibn Ezra pointedly affirms that context does not permit an unfavorable reading.

10. See esp. the suggestion by Shalom M. Paul that nigraštî evokes the “turbulent undulation” of the waves, a sense of grš that occurs, inter alia, in Ezek 27:28 (Divrei Shalom: Collected Studies of Shalom M. Paul on the Bible and the Ancient Near East, 1967–2005 [CHANE 23; Leiden: Brill, 2005], 487). Indeed, we have seen that this passage in Ezekiel was prominently on the mind of the author of Jonah. Whereas my proposal identifies a more important motive for the use of nigraštî, it does not preclude the simultaneous validity of Paul’s observation.

My analysis, moreover, confirms the standard view that Ps 31 predates Jonah’s prayer, contra J. Henk Potgieter, “ ‘David’ in Consultation with the Prophets: The Intertextual Relationship of Psalm 31 with the Books of Jonah and Jeremiah,” OTE 25 (2012): 115–126 (122).

11. Sweeney (Twelve Prophets, 321) underscores this incongruity.

12. Perry (The Honeymoon Is Over, 88) makes the connection to Genesis, albeit with a different objective in mind.

13. The last verse in Jonah likewise uses wa’ănî as a term of contrast.

14. See the discussion in Sasson, Jonah, 179–181.

15. Cf. the rendering, “I nevertheless want to continue to gaze upon your holy sanctuary” in Sasson (Jonah, 180), which, to be sure, retains the standard unfavorable conception of Jonah’s present circumstance.

16. Regarding the widely noted compatibility of Jonah’s prayer with the form of a song of thanksgiving, see recently the convenient table provided in James D. Nogalski, The Book of the Twelve: Hosea–Jonah (SHBC 18.1; Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 2011), 428. A summary of perspectives on the poem, along with a new approach, appears in the recent study by Amanda W. Benckhuysen, “Revisiting the Psalm of Jonah,” CTJ 47 (2012): 5–31.

17. For one of many (moderately varied) summations of such difficulties in connection with the prayer more generally, see Ackerman, “Satire and Symbolism,” 213–214.

18. This problem has prompted the speculation that the term may also refer to seaweed, but no such usage is attested elsewhere. See esp. Hans W. Wolff (Obadiah and Jonah: A Commentary [trans. M. Kohl; CC; Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1986], 136) and Sasson (Jonah, 184–185), who emphasize the anomaly.

19. The most elaborate account of biblical parallels to Jonah’s prayer, including many speculative correspondences, appears in Sasson, Jonah, 168–201. The present parallel is acknowledged on p. 183.

20. Cf. Sasson, Jonah, 184, 187.

21. See, e.g., Wildberger, Isaiah 13–27, 645–646; cf. Muldoon, Divine Justice, 136. The most notable biblical Zaphon imagery for these purposes appears in Isa 14, whose relationship to Ezek 31 we have already seen.

22. The quoted material appears in Ackerman, “Satire and Symbolism,” 230. The poetic parallel was initially highlighted by J. J. M. Roberts, “SĀPÔN in Job 26:7,” Bib 56 (1975): 554–557 (556–557).

23. Significantly, even without recognizing the Eden imagery that pervades our book, Clifford (Cosmic Mountain, 81 n. 55) acknowledges the resonance between the imagery in Jonah’s prayer and that of the cosmic mountain standing above the watery abyss.

24. The term bĕ‘ad most often means “for the sake of.”

25. On a more basic level of interpretation, I am inclined to accept a recent argument by Shalom M. Paul that the base of the mountains and the earth signify the netherworld itself (cf. “Sheol” in v. 3), whose bars prevent the prophet from escaping (“Jonah 2:7: The Descent to the Netherworld and Its Mesopotamian Congeners,” in Puzzling Out the Past: Studies in Northwest Semitic Languages and Literatures in Honor of Bruce Zuckerman [ed. M. J. Lundberg, S. Fine, and W. T. Pitard; Leiden: Brill, 2012], 131–134; see also the discussion in Wolff, Obadiah and Jonah, 136). The more ambitious layer of meaning proposed here, however, resolves several additional problems, and it accords with the motifs of Eden and the divine mountain, which pervade the subtext of the book.

Perhaps, in fact, these two senses of the imagery operate simultaneously rather than contributing to in de pen dent layers of meaning. That is, Jonah’s body figuratively descends to the base of the mountains and to the watery earth, both of which represent the actual netherworld, and the bars of the earth block the prophet from getting out. Yet at the same time, the expression qiṣbê hārîm, in keeping with standard Zaphon imagery, signals the boundary between the sacred mountain and the abyss, where the bars of the earth – with the help of coastal reeds – keep Jonah’s head above the surface. Thus, in line with the twin images of Chaos and Eden borne by the fish’s multivalent belly, the mountains and the earth contribute to a composite image of the prophet entering – and then being rescued from – a chaotic region and being prevented, at any point, from falling entirely into the Pit beyond the protective scrutiny of the Lord (“I had thought that I was banished from before your eyes / And yet – I continue to gaze on your holy sanctuary!”).

26. See esp. Sasson (Jonah, 305), who adds that “both these verbal forms have the word nepeš in close proximity.” Cf. Simon, Jonah, 23; Lessing, Jonah, 400.

27. For tĕpillâ as the act of prayer rather than the content of the utterance, see, e.g., Isa 1:15: “Though you pray at length (tarbû tĕpillâ) I will not listen.”

28. See recently Lessing, Jonah, 200–201, 219–220.

29. For a summary of interpretations of ḥasdām, see Sasson, Jonah, 198–199.

30. See, e.g., Magonet, Form and Meaning, 43.

31. See Nogalski (Redactional Processes, 268–269) who, inter alia, makes the connection that I present here; and cf. the recent discussion by Emmanuel K. E. Antwi, who endorses Nogalski’s proposals (The Book of Jonah in the Context of Post-Exilic Theology of Israel: An Exegetical Study [ATSAT 95; St. Ottilien: EOS, 2013], 63). The kernel of the observation appears earlier in Michael L. Barré, “Jonah 2,9 and the Structure of Jonah’s Prayer,” Bib 72 (1991): 237–248 (240).

32. Landes (“Kerygma,” 447–448) draws a connection between this span of three days and the one in our text.

33. Cf., e.g., Nogalski, Redactional Processes, 269.

34. On the similarity between the relevant formulations in the psalm and the Hosea text, see Yehuda Keel, The Book of Hosea (Hebrew; Da‘at Mikra; Jerusalem: Rabbi Kook Institute, 1990), 47 n. 93*.

35. Cf., e.g., Sasson, Jonah, 199. In the opinion of Leslie C. Allen, this psalm also resonates with the corresponding devotions of the sailors at the end of chapter 1 (The Books of Joel, Obadiah, Jonah, and Micah [NICOT; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1976], 212).

36. Sasson, Jonah, 197.

37. It would not have escaped our author’s notice that, shortly thereafter in Hosea (7:11), the prophet compares the Northern Kingdom of Israel to a silly yônâ that seeks out the help of Egypt and Assyria. Notably, these are two of the Eden-like lands that our yônâ pursues because of his own lack of genuine fealty to God. For suggested connections between Jonah’s name and that verse, see Wolff, Obadiah and Jonah, 99; Raymond F. Person Jr., In Conversation with Jonah: Conversational Analysis, Literary Criticism, and the Book of Jonah (JSOTSup 220; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), 64.

5. NAUTICAL AND HERMENEUTICAL DILEMMAS

1. This explanation appears in the medieval commentaries of Rashi (Bob, Commentaries, 10) and Joseph Qara (Cohen, Haketer, The Twelve Minor Prophets: 159) and is one of two simultaneous meanings advocated by Abarbanel (Bob, Commentaries, 81). (On multivalence in Abarbanel’s exegesis more generally, see Jonathan Grossman, “Abarbanel’s Stance towards the Existence of Ambiguous Expressions in the Bible” [Hebrew], Beit Mikra 52 [2007]: 126–138.) I offer a different multivalent reading in what follows. A discussion of the problem that engages a range of medieval rabbinic commentaries appears in Leah Frankel, Studies in Scripture 2 (Hebrew; Jerusalem: Eliner Library, 2001/2), 330–332.

A declarative reading appears in the medieval commentary of David Kimḥi (Cohen, Haketer, The Twelve Minor Prophets: 159) and has since become standard. Exceptions to the modern consensus include Landes, “Information Gaps,” 279–280, and Döhling, “Das Wüten der Welt,” 19–20. Indeed, Döhling, in a more limited variation of the argument that I offer here, attributes a double meaning to the sailors’ question.

2. All told, these difficulties have led some critics – with support from the LXX – to deny the authenticity of the line, seeing it as an accidental duplication of an essentially identical phrase that appears in the previous verse. On the entire issue, see Sasson (Jonah, 112–113) and his citations of earlier treatments. Note also his argument that the more standard rendering accounts for the shift from bĕšellĕmî to ba’ăšer lĕmî.

3. Moreover, Jonah’s goal of emphasizing his relationship specifically to the God of Israel accounts for his placement of the direct object before the verb in the second clause of his response: “it is the Lord God of the heavens whom I fear,” not any other deity. Cf. the elaborate argument advanced by Bosma (“Jonah 1:9”) that the prophet pointedly seeks to exclude other deities from responsibility for the storm.

4. Cf. Abarbanel and the nineteenth-century commentary of Rabbi Meir Leibusch (Weiser) Malbim (Bob, Commentaries, 85, 121); and recently Rob C. Barrett, “Meaning More than They Say: The Conflict between [Y-HWH] and Jonah,” JSOT 37 (2012): 237–257 (242–243).

5. Regarding these two questions, see the speculations offered by Sasson (Jonah, 125). In view of the multivalence that I perceive in the text more generally, I am sympathetic to a proposal by William J. Horwitz that the phrase (“I know”), with its notable qāmeṣ under the ’ālep, bears the added translation “the ship knows,” especially because of the analogous personification in the phrase “the ship plotted to break apart” in 1:4 (“Another Interpretation of Jonah 1:12,” VT 23 [1973]: 370–372).

6. In accordance with their interpretation of the sailors’ question in verse 11, Abarbanel and Malbim favor the latter explanation of the present phrase (Bob, Commentaries, 86, 122). Cf. the variation of this in Wolff, Obadiah and Jonah, 119.

7. Verse 11 contains a similar line albeit without the expression “on them.” The added prepositional phrase here thus underscores that the sailors, despite their uncertainty in that earlier context, now recognize that they will remain at the mercy of the storm until they dispose of Jonah.

8. See the discussion in Sasson, Jonah, 104.

9. I am indebted to Dr. Ditza Berger for this observation.

10. Magonet, Form and Meaning, 72–73.

11. The use of this verb, in fact, is seen as possibly the most enigmatic choice of terminology in the book; see esp. the recent discussion by Christian Meredith, “The Conundrum of in Jonah 1:13,” VT 61 (2014): 147–152.

12. Note the observation by Sherwood (Biblical Text and Afterlives, 247 n. 148) that “the same verb is used in Amos 9:2 to describe the burrowing activities of those who dig into Sheol, in the frantic attempt to escape God’s wrath.”

13. See the discussion in Sasson, Jonah, 136–137.

14. Sasson (Jonah, 135), among others, cites both this text and Ps 135:6, where a similar phrase appears. For the reason I provide here, Ps 115:3 would appear to be our author’s actual source-text.

15. Sasson (Jonah, 18) expresses skepticism that a genuine solution is possible – an assessment that I challenge here. For a sampling of the many treatments of the issue, see the literature cited in his discussion. A full solution would properly account, in a consistent way, for the deployments of each divine designation: “the Lord,” “God,” “the God,” and “the Lord God.” I am not aware of any prior suggestion that does so successfully.

16. Regarding these implications of the divine name, cf., inter alia, Christopher J. H. Wright, “God, Names of,” ISBE 2:504–509 (507); and see also the next note.

17. Cf. with variation the discussion by Sasson (Jonah, 147–149, 291), who identifies a progression from the most to the least “personal” of divine names in the four verses that employ wayĕman. A version of the progression that I describe here appears already in Magonet (Form and Meaning, 33–38), and my discussion accords with much of his analysis in this respect. Ultimately, however, Magonet resorts to multiple systems of meaning to account for the varying divine names.

18. Significantly, it is the Ninevite king who first uses the term “the God”: as I have suggested, it might well be that the mournful, not-yet-repentant population fails to recognize the possibility of eliciting divine compassion. It is likewise understandable why the text switches to the term “the Lord” only in the book’s final verse, rather than on the rescinding of the decree in chapter 3. In the story’s concluding line, in an expression of divine immanence and magnanimity, the Lord directly communicates his merciful disposition toward a large population of unwitting sinners – in stark opposition to the compassionless ideology of the moralistic prophet. Chapter 3, by contrast, concentrates on the role of the Ninevites’ repentance, rather than that of God’s mercy, in the city’s salvation. Accordingly, it maintains the transitional designation “the God,” which limits the emphasis on divine benevolence.

19. It is quite possible, as many have proposed, that, in chapter 3 as well, the progression from “God” to “the God” marks – in addition to the eliciting of divine mercy – the Ninevites’ emerging recognition of the Israelite deity.

20. Indeed, observe that when the sailors ask the prophet, “What shall we do to/for you so that the sea will quiet down from on us?” the verse concludes by saying, “for the sea was/is becoming increasing stormy (sō‘ēr).” Most commentators assume that it is the narrator who adds this ominous remark. (For discussion, see Sasson, Jonah, 123–124.) Possibly, however, on another level of meaning, the text places this apparently redundant clause into the mouths of the sailors in order to attribute to them a more subtle intent: if you Jonah really seek a divine abode that brooks no imperfection, then perhaps we can arrange for you an existence inside the raging waters, where the unforgiving wrath of God awaits your eager embrace.

21. All of Jonah’s efforts to reach Eden in chapter 1 are ironically marked by descent. His wish to be lifted into a divine realm by being cast down into the water is arguably the sharpest example of this irony.

Sasson (Jonah, 124–125) suggests several possible reasons for the inclusion of the phrases “lift me” and “they lifted.” Among these reasons, he proposes that the verb might hint at “forgiveness” – a usage that likewise occurs twice in the Cain story (Gen 4:7, 13). Such a resonance would accord with Jonah’s anticipation of a favorable outcome, whereby he would find himself forgiven.

22. Recall, furthermore, that the phrase “for you are the Lord, you do as you wish” – whose verbs may equally indicate the past tense – derives from a verse near the beginning of Ps 115. Significantly, that psalm occupies a place in a sequence, following a depiction of the divine power that figuratively prompted the sea to “flee” at the time of the exodus. I submit, accordingly, that when the sailors allude to Ps 115 in their plea for Jonah’s survival, they fittingly invoke the exodus by affirming that the Lord “did as [he] wished” when he parted the sea.

23. In further support of this interpretation, let me offer one additional, more ambitious proposal. Whereas our book mostly uses a classical Hebrew style, it features a sprinkling of terms and other linguistic features characteristic of Aramaic and/or a late stage of Biblical Hebrew. Consistent with this varied style, my reading of Jonah suggests that, in select instances, the text invokes newer usages and expressions because of the literary value that they afford. For example, the verb ‘št (“think/consider”; hithpael “pay heed”) and the word ṭa‘am in the sense of “authority” – both of which, I have argued, contribute genuine meaning to the story – find analogs in Aramaic only. Similarly, the adjective ḥărîšît, notwithstanding the parallel to ḥōreš in Ezekiel 31, would best have evoked a tree-lined location in the minds of readers who regularly used the Aramaic noun ḥûrĕšā’ to mean a wooded area. (ḥûrĕšā’ does not appear in Biblical Aramaic, but it is the standard targumic rendering of Hebrew ya‘ar [“woods”].) In all probability, then, our author not only made judicious use of late terminology but also appealed to the Aramaic proficiency of the book’s audience to help communicate meaning.

With this in mind, I propose that the key root ṭl is meant to evoke ṭll, meaning “to provide shade or covering.” Often employed in Aramaic noun forms denoting shade or shelter, ṭll occurs as a verb once in Biblical Aramaic (Dan 4:9) and once in Late Biblical Hebrew, evidently as a loan word from the Aramaic (Neh 3:15). Significantly, hiphil forms of Hebrew ṭll, although unattested, would closely resemble the four hiphil forms of ṭl that appear in Jonah. Crucially, moreover, ṭll bears an equivalence to the Hebrew root ṣll used to denote the shade of the qîqāyôn, where the text also links ṣll to nṣl (“save”) by means of wordplay. Indeed, in connection with the fish as well, the word mĕṣûlâ (“the deep waters”) generates a meaningful resonance with these two roots. If the occurrences of ṭl in our passage, accordingly, likewise bear this additional sense of “providing shade/salvation,” then the text, on a more profound level of meaning, directly affirms that the great wind, Tarshish-bound treasures, and Eden-seeking prophet descended into a place of shade and protection.