COMMENTARIES ON THE BOOK OF JONAH

In another post entitled “Bible Commentaries and Dictionaries,” I presented several factors influencing what kind of Bible helps you may want to consider consulting and/or purchasing. I thought I would get a little more specific by looking at some commentaries on the short book of Jonah as an example of the differences between types of Bible aids, limited myself to books in my own library or available on-line. First to note is the fact that there are a huge number of commentaries available on this minor prophet – a search on the Christian Book Distributors site shows that they sell 126 different ones still in print.

Starting at one end of the spectrum, I first chose an example of a scholarly commentary on this two- page prophetic book. Those not familiar with scholarly Bible volumes will probably be astounded to learn that the commentary by Jack Sasson in the Anchor Bible series runs 350 pages long. This fact, however, is by no means an unusual case for scholarly works, especially if the author, in this case the chairman of the Religion Department at a major university, may have devoted a major part of his career researching this one subject.

The first 62 pages of this AB commentary are devoted to introductory material before even tackling the text verse by verse. These pages contain standard subjects such as authorship, text, translation, date of composition, and organization of material. And in addition, there is an extensive bibliography of earlier commentaries and scholarly articles on the book.

Often it is in this first section of a commentary that one can get a general feel for the author's approach to Scripture as a whole and one can gauge how broad- or narrow-minded he or she is, as well as whether leaning toward a conservative or liberal stance. As an example, here is quote from Sasson's comment on the composition of Jonah:

    “Traditional Jewish exegetes and 'conservative' Christians identify our protagonist with the prophet of Jeroboam II's reign (2 Kings 14). Because, however, Jonah is not a writing prophet but rather one about whom narratives are recorded, the dating of his book is not a test for religious or theological orthodoxy in the same way as is his survival in the fish's belly. Therefore, traditionalists can be free to decide whether Jonah himself or a later admirer wrote the book bearing his name, even when they do not question the historical accuracy of the activities reported in that book.”

Note that there are hints in the statement above that although Sasson may not classify himself in the “conservative” camp, he is sensitive to their concerns and willing to repeat their stance concerning the date and authorship of the book. But since he mentions the sticky issue of the historicity of the man-in-a-fish episode, let us turn to what he says about that. Sasson actually spends 15 pages on Jonah 2:1-3a during which he quotes from an Aldous Huxley poem and a Paul Simon song; discusses the various ways animals figure in other OT passages; explains the reasoning behind the chapter divisions at this point; looks at the various key words in these three verses and where they appear elsewhere in the book; considers the differences between the Greek, Hebrew, and Latin texts of Jonah; spends considerable time discussing the various ancient and modern attempts to pin down the exact identification of the fish; brings up historical accounts of other people being swallowed by large sea creatures; and concludes by discussing the overall religious message intended by the author.

Sasson manages to accomplish all of this without making any hard-and-fast judgments either way regarding the historical accuracy of the account. Such even-handedness is admirable in an author from an academic background, where often liberal biases and concerns can totally turn off most evangelical readers. The only remaining question is whether a general reader really wants to know all the minutia that Sasson has collected. That is always the issue when considering whether a scholarly tome is really what you are looking for. Personally, I enjoy reading about such things, but when I am called on to teach on a book of the Bible, I have to carefully cherry-pick a scholarly commentary for just those few items that might add interest to the lesson and perhaps provide spiritual insights that are not found in standard lesson guides and devotional material easily purchased on-line or in Bible book stores.

One compromise between the devotional and scholarly types of commentaries is to purchase a scholarly book written by an evangelical author. These are generally found among the Bible commentaries published by houses such as Eerdmans, Baker, InterVarsity Press, or Word Books. I happen to have a rather large commentary by Douglas Stuart (Professor of Old Testament at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary) which covers the minor prophets from Hosea to Jonah as part of the Word Biblical Commentary Series. Almost ninety pages of this book are devoted to the book of Jonah, ten pages for the introduction.

The subjects treated within Stuart's introduction are probably of more interest to general readers than those within Sasson's book. Discussed are authorship, date of composition, what is known about the person of Jonah outside of the book, the general acceptance of the book into the Bible, the purpose behind the writing, how the book is organized, its style of writing, the overall unity of the book, and its historical accuracy. But what about the issue of Jonah being kept alive inside the fish for three days, which has served as one of the issues to divide religious liberals and conservatives? Here is what Stuart wisely says:

    “Yahweh can easily toss the wind around to make a storm when he wants to. Miraculously rescuing someone from drowning via a fish is no great feat, either. But it is not, also, a feat to be described analytically. A miracle is a divine act beyond human replication or explanation. The numerous attempts made in the past to identify the sort of fish that could have kept Jonah alive in it are misguided...What sorts of fish people can live inside is not an interest of the scripture.”

Such a statement by Stuart may be dismissed by liberals as an example of a scholar trading in his intellectual honesty for mere superstition or branded by fundamentalist Christians as another case demonstrating how Christians who go to Harvard for a PhD (as did Stuart) will lose their faith, assuming they even had any to begin with. But to my mind, Stuart strikes exactly the right note in regard to this issue.

Another book to discuss within the scholarly evangelical class is Leslie Allen's contribution on the minor prophets to the New International Commentary on the Old Testament series put out by Eerdmans Publishing Company. Of the sixty pages he devotes to discussion of Jonah, twenty-five are spent discussing introductory matters. And in this opening section, he includes four major topics not found in any of the other scholarly works above: literary genre, theology, “the sign of Jonah,” and structure. The first and last of these subjects reflect the more recent interest in the Bible by evangelicals as literature in addition to being history and theology. Those of you who have read any of my posts subtitled

“: Introduction to the Literary Structure,” will know that I share that interest. Note also the clear intention to treat all of the Bible as a unified whole by bringing up the NT usage of Jonah's story.

But how does Allen deal with the story of Jonah in the fish? At this point in his commentary, Allen confines himself mainly to a theological and devotional exegesis with comments such as:

    “The gracious gift of God is life. He does not abandon his servant to death, but snatches from its clutches the drowning man.”

    “The fish stands for the amazing grace of Yahweh, which came down to where he was and lifted him to new life.”

    “The Lord of the sea is Lord also of its creatures, and his providential control extends over both.”

    “He [Jonah] is spared the due reward of his sins.”

But Allen does not totally avoid more scholarly aspects of the text. Instead he cites an ancient Sumarian myth that might help explain the meaning behind the three days on the fish.

The next commentary I would like to discuss comes from Phillip Cary, and it is part of the relatively new series called Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible. The introduction to the whole series states its basic purpose: “This series of biblical commentaries was born out of the conviction that dogma clarifies rather than obscures...and advances up on the assumption that the Nicene tradition, in all its diversity and controversy, provides the proper basis for the interpretation of the Bible as Christian Scripture...For this reason, the commentators in this series have not been chosen because of their historical or philological expertise. In the main, they are not biblical scholars in the conventional, modern sense of the term. Instead, the commentators were chosen because of their knowledge of and expertise in using the Christian doctrinal tradition.”

So how does that goal play out in Cary's commentary? For a start, there are two extremely interesting sections in the book that alone are almost worth the price of the book. The first discusses the subject of “Christian readers of a Jewish book,” and the second is an insightful comparison of the book of Jonah with Jesus' parable of the prodigal son. My own structural analysis of Jonah uses Cary's ideas in that latter chapter as a jumping-off point to show further similarities between this prophetic book and Jesus' words. See my post entitled “Book of Jonah: Introduction to the Literary Structure.”

The two chapters of Cary's book that are mentioned above plus an excursus on “the sign of Jonah,” clearly mark it as a commentary specifically geared toward Christian readers.

Then we move along to the episode of Jonah and the great fish. Cary does not concern himself at all with attempting scientific explanations of the event, but contents himself with drawing out its spiritual significance instead. This is witnessed by the following comments:

    “For even the waste places of the deep hide nothing from the God of Israel. Just as Jonah confessed, he is the God of heaven who made the sea as well as the dry land (1:9).”

    “So the LORD prepares a great beast from the deep to do his work. The word 'prepared' can also be translated 'appointed.' It is a verb for governing, arranging, and ordering rather than creating, but its use here presupposes that the LORD is the sovereign creator of all things, even of the denizens of the deep.”

    “The great fish is a comic version of an ancient nightmare, the great monster of the deep that represents chaos and destruction, the flooding and the undoing of the world.”

    “This is a reversal of the view of ancient Near Eastern mythology, which bases the ordering of the world on a primal battle between a god like Baal and the monsters of the watery chaos.”

    “So in completing the trajectory of descent that he began by going down to Joppa in Jonah 1:3, descending now to the bottom of the sea, Jonah ends up testing the limits of the power of the LORD his God, the God of heaven who makes the sea and the dry land.”

You can see that by confining himself mainly to the theological aspects of the story, Cary's work may strike some scholars as being too shallow in that it does not bombard the reader with the nuances of Hebrew word meanings or detailed parallels in ancient Near Eastern texts. At the same time, those more familiar with devotional commentaries that jump directly into modern day applications may be put off by the fact that Cary devotes too much time to such subjects as well as theology without immediately ministering to them by giving them advice and comfort. But I feel that he strikes just the right tone and has written a welcome supplement to both existing scholarly and devotional books on this “minor” prophet.   

And to demonstrate that there are many ways in which to approach Jonah, there is Jacques Ellul's 100-page book The Judgment of Jonah. I have already discussed this book briefly in the post “Jacques Ellul: An Introduction.” But it is really impossible to capture the flavor of Ellul's writing in a few words since it doesn't really fall into the category of a scholarly, theological, or devotional commentary. I will just repeat a few sentences from his comments regarding the fish episode to give you an example of his thoughts:

    “Thus, for Noah in the Flood, Moses in the Red Sea, and Joshua in the Jordan, the waters are the power of death and drowning. He who is plunged into them is plunged into death; he who traverses them transverses death.”

    “In Jewish thought, the realm of the dead was surrounded by a river called the River of Destruction. There are several examples of this in Scripture, for example Psalm 18:4; 2 Samuel 22:5.”

    “God brings a great fish. It is idle to seek its name or to consider zoological possibilities with a view to identifying its species...The real question is: Of what is this the sign?”

    “For some it is the sign of grace...But to argue thus is first of all to neglect the text...The fish was sent primarily to swallow up. The sea-monster, the dragon, or the beast that comes up out of the sea is a well-defined entity in Scripture.”

    “In every case, we have a power of destruction...We also know that this unleashed force is obliged to obey when God commands...We should know, too, that God will destroy this power, since it has no more place in the new creation.”

You can see that this is no mere devotional book. And yet it is not really a scholarly tome either or a dry book of theology. It is filled with sometimes controversial statements that cause one to spend time contemplating their meaning. It is in a class all by itself.

Turning lastly to resources on the internet, we come across this statement from Matthew Henry's Commentary regarding Jonah 2:1:

• I. When he prayed (v. 1): Then Jonah prayed; then when he was in trouble, under the sense of sin and the tokens of God's displeasure against him for sin, then he prayed. Note, When we are in affliction we must pray; then we have occasion to pray, then we have errands at the throne of grace and business there; then, if ever, we shall have a disposition to pray, when the heart is humbled, and softened, and made serious; then God expects it (in their affliction they will seek me early, seek me earnestly); and, though we bring our afflictions upon ourselves by our sins, yet, if we pray in humility and godly sincerity, we shall be welcome to the throne of grace, as Jonah was. Then when he was in a hopeful way of deliverance, being preserved alive by miracle, a plain indication that he was reserved for further mercy, then he prayed. An apprehension of God's good-will to us, notwithstanding our offences, gives us boldness of access to him, and opens the lips in prayer which were closed with the sense of guilt and dread of wrath.

Notice that Henry does not even allude to the historical accuracy or context of the text, but instead jumps in immediately with devotional thoughts regarding it. This is fairly typical of some of the older commentaries you can find on-line that are now in the public domain. I have nothing against devotional commentaries in general, but they should also wrestle with some of the practical questions concerning the text itself before attempting to apply it to a current audience. Another factor that is somewhat off-putting for modern readers is the rather stilted and archaic (to our way of thinking) manner in which they express their thoughts.

Also on-line are a few more modern commentators, who tend to be church pastors rather than seminary professors. These are generally a little more understandable than the older generation of commentaries and a little more likely to introduce facts relating to the history and context behind the passages being discussed. However, their emphasis remains on the devotional and practical applications of the Scripture, and many of these “commentaries” are in fact better described as sermon notes and summaries.