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No, the book of Jonah cannot be read as history

No, the book of Jonah cannot be read as history

Last updated on: November 12, 2013 at 2:56 pm by Fred Clark

No, the book of Jonah cannot be read as history 2013-11-12T14:56:01-05:00 Fred Clark

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This isn’t about the big fish.

The book of Jonah tells the story of a chauvinist jerk named Jonah. Jonah doesn’t like Ninevites and Jonah doesn’t like God. His reasons for disliking Ninevites are understandable — their country was his country’s enemy, and their people had done great harm to his people. Jonah’s reasons for disliking God are less reasonable. Jonah hates God, he says, because “You are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.”

Those words sound like they come from the Psalms — from a hymn of praise and gratitude extolling God for demonstrating all these virtues. But Jonah doesn’t consider them virtues and he doesn’t mean any of this as praise:

But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord and said, “O Lord! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.”

That’s overly dramatic and over-the-top, but everything about Jonah is overly dramatic and over-the-top. His words and actions are exaggerated, and he always does the opposite of what everyone in every other story like this does. God calls every other prophet and almost all of them* come running. God calls Jonah and he takes off running the other way. The Psalmist praises God for God’s mercy and steadfast love and asks God for deliverance. Jonah condemns God for God’s mercy and steadfast love and asks God for death.

“Remorseful Camel” would also make a good band name.

That’s satire, kids. It’s pretty much the textbook example and definition of satire. It couldn’t be any more obvious about it if the author of Jonah had named the character Mr. Backwards-and-Upside-down, son of Don’t Be Like This Guy.

Yes, the bit with the big fish is another clue that we’re not dealing with historical realism here. But so is the scene in which the heroically pious heathen sailors lecture the Hebrew prophet on virtue. And so is the inexplicably dramatic repentance of the entire city of Ninevah. Sure, there are other stories in the Bible where people repent in sackcloth and ashes, but this is the only one in which all the animals also put on sackcloth and ashes.

These are jokes people. Picture a remorseful camel wearing burlap and crying out to God for forgiveness. It’s fair to say that’s a joke. And it’s unfair not to say that’s a good joke. A remorseful camel is funny.

Yet despite all of this, lots of Christians still read the story of Mr. Backwards-and-Upside-Down and insist that it’s not satire. The book of Jonah, they say, is a historical account.

Both RJS at Jesus Creed and Rob Bell recently wrote very generous posts attempting as best they could to accommodate the possibility that this “historical” reading of Jonah might possibly be legitimate.

Both posts gently, slantwise, recognize the fear that motivates the desire to read this satire as history. That fear has to do with a bunker mentality in defense of the miraculous and the supernatural. They see the bit about the big fish as a miracle, and that means fighting to insist that it really, actually happened just as it says. It’s a slippery slope argument. (I’m not sure exactly when “slippery slope” went from being the name of a fallacy to being an acceptable form of argument, but let that pass.) If Jonah wasn’t actually, historically swallowed by a big fish, then Christ is not risen and we are still dead in our sins.

Their problem, in other words, isn’t that they’re unable to get the jokes or that they’re always unable to recognize blatant satire when they see it. Their problem is that they’re unable to read the book of Jonah — or anything else — without approaching it as another round in their perpetual war against creeping liberalism.

And that’s a big problem, because reading satire as satire is not “liberal.” It’s the only way to be faithful to the text. There’s nothing “conservative” about being unfaithful to the text.

RJS and Rob Bell admirably try to say this in the nicest possible way, but their niceness still allows an escape hatch for those who insist on treating the book of Jonah as a “history.” And no such escape hatch exists.

This book cannot be read as a history. The text itself will not allow that.

Again, this isn’t about the big fish. And it’s not even about the remorseful camels, or about its anti-hero, Mr. Backwards-and-Upside-down. It’s about the story itself and the form of the story itself.

This is a story told by an omniscient third-person narrator. This is a story told by a story-teller. And that story-teller framed their story in such a way that no one should be able to mistake it for a historical account.

Consider, for instance, this bit:

Then [the heathen infidel sailors] said to him, “What shall we do to you, that the sea may quieten down for us?” For the sea was growing more and more tempestuous.

He said to them, “Pick me up and throw me into the sea; then the sea will quieten down for you; for I know it is because of me that this great storm has come upon you.”

Nevertheless, the men rowed hard to bring the ship back to land, but they could not, for the sea grew more and more stormy against them. Then they cried out to the Lord, “Please, O Lord, we pray, do not let us perish on account of this man’s life. Do not make us guilty of innocent blood; for you, O Lord, have done as it pleased you.”

So they picked Jonah up and threw him into the sea; and the sea ceased from its raging. Then the men feared the Lord even more, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.

But the Lord provided a large fish to swallow up Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights.

Who’s telling this story? The narrator. The third-person, omniscient narrator. There’s no historical witness to both of these scenes. If this were a “historical” account implausibly representing the perspective of Jonah himself then how did Jonah know what happened on board the ship after he sank beneath the waves?

Only a third-person omniscient storyteller has the vantage point to include both the scene on the ship and the scene inside the fish.

And that suggests a bigger problem than genre-illiteracy for those who insist on reading the book of Jonah “as history.” It suggests that what they’re really doing is making a claim about how the Bible was written. They’re really asserting that the book of Jonah was dictated by God rather than written by a human author.

And that’s wrong. That’s a falsifiable claim, and a claim that contradicts the testimony of the biblical authors themselves.

It’s rare for anyone to make this claim explicitly — even the most fundamentalist, “inerrantist” proponents of a “literal” reading of the Bible don’t like to admit explicitly that they believe the Bible is the product of word-for-word divine dictation. They’ll talk, instead, of “plenary-verbal inspiration” and take great pains to explain that whatever they mean by that is something other than human stenographers writing down words spoken to them by God.

But then they’ll turn around and insist that “Moses” somehow provides a journalistically accurate “account” of the literal creation of the universe, and they’ll insist that Genesis 1 be read, like Jonah, “as history.” And that’s only possible if the “historian” in question is God Almighty — the only truly omniscient narrator — dictating words recorded by human stenographers.

That’s a bad way to read the Bible. It twists the stories we’ve been given into something those stories themselves never claim to be.

Jonah-as-satire is a bit of a hobby-horse of mine partly because it’s what the Bible actually says and I think it’s always worthwhile to distinguish what the Bible actually says from the various misconceptions all of us (including me, of course) bring to it. This is also important to me because I think the message of the book of Jonah is vitally important, and that message is only conveyed when we understand that Mr. Backwards-and-Upside-down is backwards and upside-down — when we understand that the character of “Jonah” is a portrait of What Not To Be.

But it’s also important because this book is the work of a story-teller. Whoever he or she was, they nailed it. They gave us jokes that are still funny thousands of years later. And they created a character type that endures to this day — a character type that Jesus himself, another masterful story-teller, adopted in some of his most beloved stories. (The older brother in the story of the Prodigal Son? That’s Jonah.)

To deny the work of that story-teller just strikes me as rude and disrespectful.

Story-tellers matter. Good ones deserve our respect, our gratitude and our attention. Denying that the book of Jonah is a well-told story denies the existence and the achievement of a master story-teller — of someone whose craft, artistry and vicious wit deserves our admiration, not our dismissal.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

* One exception would be Balaam — you know, the guy with the talking donkey. That’s another over-the-top, funny story often defended as “history” despite all the textual signals that it’s actually satiric mockery and despite the presence of an opinionated, third-person omniscient story-teller. But Balaam’s talking donkey is, again, defended as history by those who believe God dictated the Bible and/or who fear that if an actual donkey never actually spoke then Easter never happened.

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