Clarel, Jonah, and the Whale: A Question Concerning Rachel's Missing Children

Clarel, Jonah, and the Whale: A Question Concerning Rachel’s Missing Children THOMAS L. THOMPSON University of Copenhagen, Emeritus Moby Dick: Jonah, Ahab, and Ishmael F ather Mapple’s sermon on Jonah in Moby-Dick is a biblical narrative in the form of a short story, allegorically structured as a parable on nationalist hatred and divine compassion. It takes its point of departure from the obscure figure of a pre-exilic prophet, borrowed from the brief story about the reign of Jeroboam II (2 Kings 14.23-29). Jeroboam was king in Samaria for forty-one years. He not only saved Israel from extinction, but also “restored” its utopian “Solomonic” borders (1 Kings 8.65) south to the Dead Sea and north as far as the great Syrian cities of Hamath and Damascus. Jeroboam’s great success is attributed to his obedience to the advice of the prophet, Jonah Ben Amittai, who was from the town of Gath ha-Hepher in the Lower Galilee. This prophet Jonah incited Jeroboam to a holy war with the ambition of bringing all of Yahweh’s land back to Israel.1 The Book of Jonah’s use of this figure—a classic biblical portrayal of the prophet of Yahweh’s judgment, ever zealous for Israel’s messianic victory over nations in uproar (Psalms 2.1-2)—offers a man who is eager to complete the great victories of 2 Kings by bringing Yahweh’s judgment to the heart of the empire itself. This Jonah wishes to be another Elijah in his zeal: a veritable Nahum, a prophet of doom to bring divine destruction on the great city of Nineveh (Nahum 1-3). The book opens as Yahweh tells Jonah that the news of the great evil of Assyria’s Nineveh has come to him (Jonah 1.2). This same motif is used in Genesis 18.21 when Yahweh tells Abraham about his plans to destroy the evil city of Sodom. Although in Genesis, Abraham had argued against Yahweh that the innocent not be destroyed with the guilty, in Jonah’s book, the prophet is no Abraham, one in whom all the nations of the world are to be blessed (Genesis 12.3). Jonah knows already that his Yahweh has become “a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in C  2010 The Authors Journal compilation C  2010 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1 The present text is a revised version of the original oral presentation at the Seventh International Melville Conference on “Melville and the Mediterranean,” delivered on 17 June 2009 at the École Biblique, in East Jerusalem. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 53 T H O M A S L . T H O M P S O N steadfast love.” He will come to repent of the evil and destruction he promises against Nineveh (cf. Jonah 4.1-2 and Genesis 8.21). He will not destroy the city. As Father Mapple points out in his sermon, Jonah chooses disobedience. He will not go to Nineveh to save it, but rather sails for Tarshish, far from Yahweh’s presence. Yahweh himself tells us that Tarshish is in a distant land. Its people had never heard of him, nor had they ever seen his glory. Even so, Tarshish is the very place to which, in Isaiah’s new creation, Yahweh will send a messenger marked with his sign (Isaiah 66.18-21). The reader who knows Isaiah also knows that Jonah cannot escape his destiny as Nineveh’s savior: He is marked by the choice of his ship, marked like Abraham to bring blessing to the nations. When the gospels reiterate Isaiah’s trope and use it to describe the blind and deaf generation of that day’s Judaism, which is likened to the people of Nineveh, they are to be given only “the sign of Jonah.” While the surface of the New Testament riddle stresses Jonah being born again from the belly of the whale as a form of...