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Swallowing Jonah: The Eclipse of Parody
- Jewish Publication Society
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Swallowing Jonah:The Eclipse of Parody Nineveh and Tarshish, understood literally or figuratively, are obvious polar opposites in the Book of Jonah. From the author’s unnamed vantage point, apparently Jerusalem, they are directions in the prophet’s career. For the reader, they are two cardinal modes of human behavior: engagement and flight. Since these two modes involve the relationship between an individual and his God, the text of Jonah has attracted special attention in each of the three Scripture-based religions and has generated countless interpretations, some serious, some whimsical. Most modern scholars note that the reader is immediately confronted with a strange paradox: the book was canonized as part of the classical prophetic literature by the second century, B.C.E., but the portrayal of the prophet, Jonah, is strange, to say the least. It is precisely this paradox and this strangeness that intrigues us and establishes the point of our departure. In our attempt to understand the strangeness of the book, its intriguing hermeneutic history, i.e. its canonization despite its whimsicality, we shall have recourse to some theoretical studies generated by the recent renewed interest in parody. Foremost among these is Margaret A. Rose’s Parody//Metafiction (1979), which deftly fuses many strands of critical thought on parody from traditional poetics to Russian Formalism, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, and Reception Theory.1 Strangeness, we should recall, is a basic feature of the poetics formulated by the Russian Formalists. It is Elias Bickerman who most forcefully called attention to the book’s strangeness. In introducing his English essay on Jonah as one of the Four Strange Books of the Bible,2 Bickerman indulges in several 87 paragraphs of scholarly play by simply cataloguing an artfully chosen disconnected series of facts. He begins: The Book of Jonah contains only forty-eight verses according to the reckoning of the ancient Hebrew scribes. But the name of no prophet is better known to the man in the street. Jonah is that man who was swallowed alive by a whale and was spewed up three days later, unhurt. The Hebrew Bible contains fifteen prophetic books, but Mahomet speaks only of Jonah, “him of the fish.” As early as the second century B.C.E. Jonah in the belly of the sea monster and Daniel among the lions appeared as outstanding examples of deliverance, and in the eyes of the first Christians the emergence of Jonah alive from the depths of the sea prefigured the Resurrection. (p. 3) Bickerman continues with a desultory history of the book’s interpretation designed to convince the attentive reader that the book is a literary creation which has generated the most disparate interpretations, then shifts to an implicit attack upon modern readers: Despite the discomfort the story aroused in the faithful, its literal historicity was declared as late as 1956 in a Catholic Encyclopedia, and admitted, albeit halfheartedly, in a Protestant biblical dictionary in 1962. In a mosque bearing the name of Jonah near the oil derricks of Mosul the pious visitor can still admire the remains of Jonah’s whale. (p. 4) The essay that follows this whimsical introduction is sober, thorough, erudite, but the author could not refrain from introducing it with his comic, parodic introduction named, naturally, “Jonah and the Whale.” Ironically, writing at precisely the same time in Irony in the Old Testament,3 E. M. Good can declare with relief: Controversies over the Book of Jonah have apparently all but ceased. One’s viewpoint on the historicity of the “great fish”…no longer determines his orthodoxy or heterodoxy….That theological battle has been finished. There is even a remarkable unanimity on the interpretation of the book among Old Testament scholars (a notably quarrelsome lot), which seems suspicious were it not so welcome. (p. 39) And yet, Good, the professed lover of irenic, dispassionate scholarship can state near the end of his essay on Jonah: But the author of the Book of Jonah challenges this isolationism to consider the implications of such a reign and such a compassion. In that sense, we may see Jonah as a representative of Israel. Such an untenable understanding of God’s ways with man as that held by Jonah was a persistent notion in Israel. Jesus was battling the same pattern of belief when he said to the chief 88 Interpretation of Traditional Texts [44.205.2.188] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:55 GMT) priests and elders, “The tax collectors and harlots go into the...