Choose Your Poisson: Jonah and the Redemptive Sacrifice

Michelangelo's Jonah. Curious perspective and composition, no? Almost violent.

From the Mailbag:

You've hinted that you take Jonah to be a symbolic story rather than history.  Can you explain your reasons for that in detail?  I believe that it is historically accurate, otherwise Jesus' statement that he would give the sign of Jonah doesn't mean anything.

I can have a crack at it.

First though I want to address the question of miracles and the extraordinary.  Whenever you get freaky shit in ancient stories, e.g., a man spends three days in gastritic solitary confinement, you have some decisions to make.

Personally I don't object to the idea of freaky shit happening in real, historical, factual terms.  I've seen plenty of that myself, and there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy.  I'm totally fine with the God-could-have-done-it argument.

But I do think that it's worth asking what the text is actually trying to accomplish. If you are going to come to the text right away saying, "It happened, because it is true," we'll get nowhere.  That would be demanding that I accept it as fact, and of course I have no reason to accept that and several good reasons not to accept it as fact.  You couldn't get away with that with Aesop's Fables, you couldn't get away with that with Pilgrim's Progress, you couldn't do that with The Lord of the Rings. 

My fundamentalist friend Steve always challenges me at this point and says, "But this is the Word of God."  Maybe so (though I have enormous problems with the abuse of that term), but it's also ancient literature, and you no more change the rules of literature by sanctifying it as "The Word of God" than you change the morphemes and grammar of a language.

The miraculous, extraordinary, and marvelous was a staple of ancient tale-telling.  There is no reason to suppose that this is because the miraculous, extraordinary, and marvelous was more common back then: they might have been, but I'm not sure how we would know it.  We do not look back to the mid twentieth century when superheroes gained in popularity and think, "Yes, but back then there were superheroes."  We think, "Wow, that said something about their imagination, feeling, and thought.  What was it, and what does it say to us?"

So my thinking runs, "Could a fish have literally, factually, amazingly, miraculously, preserved a guy from death by drowning?"  Well, no, but that's why we call it miraculous.  

Do I think God performed that miracle? 

To answer that, I have to look at what the text wants to say.

Let's start with Jonah's prayer (Jonah 2:1-9). 

The narrator says explicitly that Jonah's prayer (which is in Hebrew poetry, not prose) is to Yahweh "his God."  (Remember that most English Bibles write "LORD" in all capitals where the Hebrew has the name YHWH / Yahweh.)A;bert Pinkham Ryder's Jonah. I like its darkness. Click image for a larger image.

This points to an important feature of the book: the text is interested in the fact that Yahweh is the God of the Israelites, not everyone, but that the worship of Yahweh needs to be extended to those who "do not know their right [clean] hand from their left [unclean]" (Jonah 4:11).

That point was already emphasized by the juxtaposition of Jonah with the Gentile sailors, to whom he declares himself a Hebrew worshiper of Yahweh (Jonah 1:9).  They, by contrast, each worship their own gods: the captain enjoins Jonah to call on "your god" (Jonah 1:6), and the sailors "each cried to his own god" (Jonah 1:5).

In short the text is emphasizing a tension between the god of Israel and the gods of the nations, and the theological politics here are both chauvinistic ("our god is greater than theirs") and paternalistically compassionate ("they are wicked and need to be set straight").

The story had already at once very strikingly set itself up as a tension between Yahweh's Hebrew prophet (Jonah is a bit of a stock character in Hebrew literature) and the great unclean city of the Nations / Gentiles, Ninevah in the first verses.  The setting begins presumably in Israel but then rapidly launches itself out on to the sea, a habitual image in Hebrew literature for chaos and death, symbolic in a lot of cases of oppression of some kind. 

In that literature, invariably some action of God becomes salvific, and that salvation is given an image, most often wind or a chest of some kind.  Consider:

• The creation out of water by God's breath or wind in Genesis 1:1-3;
• Noah and his ark (the word means "chest"), delivered when a wind from God drives the water back (Genesis 8:1);
• The infant Moses and his "chest" (Exodus 2:1-3);
• The crossing of the Reed Sea by a wind from God(Exodus 14:15-31).

The psalms are filled with this imagery of the flood that must be overcome by the god of the Israelites.

The crisis of the storm comes when Jonah declares his intention to sacrifice himself, refusing the protective but unreliable covering of the boat that has sustained him, an image of salvation.  The pagan sailors refuse, but at last his suffering converts the Gentiles to the worship of Yahweh (Jonah 1:13-16).

Jonah then personifies a remarkable thing in the Israelite imagination: the one whose self-sacrifice becomes redemptive and salvific and extends the worship of his god to the Nations / Gentiles.

But it cannot be that the Israelites would see a despairing finality in their own sufferings in history (the destruction of the Northern Kingdom in 722 and the Southern Kingdom in 586 would be the most obvious candidates).

In this case the fish becomes both grave (Jonah 2:2) and salvation (Jonah 2:9), and the axis where paganism and the worship of Yahweh clash and are resolved (Jonah 2:8).

The incident of the plant in chapter four reiterates all this as a kind of retelling of the story.  Jonah refuses his mission again, renouncing the idea that the purpose of Israelite suffering in the world is redemptive for the Gentiles.  God removes the bush, suggestive of his protection, and an east wind (Babylon?  Assyria?) oppresses Jonah.  The image of the booth of course also sets the typology: it is drawn from the story of the Exodus.

For all of these reasons, I think that the story of Jonah is a dramatization of Israel's self-conceived mission to bring the worship of Yahweh to the unclean world, and its perception of its sufferings as being the result of that mission and their failure to perform it.  Jonah personifies Israel, who has become indolent on the chaotic seas of history as he tries to escape his mission, but he assumes the salvific sacrifice of himself.  Yet the very grave of his suffering is also his preservation.

Which, by an accident of history, or divine design, or the power of the imagination on the Jewish readers, happened to be the case.  For in their captivity they consolidated themselves as a people and left to their posterity a document that would bind together a cultural imagination: the Hebrew Bible.

You ask about Jesus' use of it.

Jesus of course never says that he will give the sign of Jonah "because Jonah was a factual story."  He, like all people who deal in stories, doesn't have to do that.  If the story of Jonah is in the imagination, he can refer to it as easily as you can refer to the journey of Sam and Frodo without reference to "fact" or "history."

But a word needs to be said about that.

I'm pretty sure that, however Jesus took it, as historical or allegorical or in some other weird rabbinic category that I don't yet understand, he treats it functionally exactly as I offer it here.

When he was on the cross, he seems to have seen himself as the Israelite sacrifice that draws the world to the worship of the Jewish god.

He quotes Psalm 22 from the cross ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?").  It's unfortunate that more people interested in the meaning of the cross don't read that psalm to the very end.  For while it sets the template for Jesus' own sufferings (and those of anybody who is afflicted and dying), it follows a pattern of cycles: despair and hope alternate, as they do in the Book of Jonah, and the poem resolves itself on this note (Psalm 22:27-31):

All the ends of the earth shall remember
   and turn to the Yahweh,
and all the families of the Gentiles
   shall worship before you.
For kingship belongs to the Yahweh,
   and he rules over the Gentiles.

 All the prosperous of the earth eat and worship;
   before him shall bow all who go down to the dust,
   even the one who could not keep himself alive.
Posterity shall serve him;
   it shall be told of the Lord to the coming generation;
they shall come and proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn,
   that he has done it.

Jesus himself then sees himself as a personification of Israel just as Jonah is, undertaking a dramatic self-sacrifice for the benefit of the Gentiles and those who will come after.  Like the author of Jonah, he urges that the grave is not the end: those who go down to the dust, says the Psalm, will bow down before God.

Righteousness and upright worship of God therefore are delivered to the unclean through the suffering of the servants of God.  Psalm 22, Isaiah's "suffering servant" (also Israel, in its original composition, I think) and Jonah collude to give Jesus the imaginative touchstones he turns to as he dies.

And at the death of Jesus, the Roman centurion at the foot of the cross (Mark tells us to emphasize all of this), who has heard all his life that Caesar is the divi filius , the son of the divine, announces, "Surely [Jesus] was a son of God." The phrase "a [or "the"] son of God" has been acknowledged all throughout Mark's gospel by the unclean spirits, symbols (among other things) of Gentile power, to emphasize that the mission of Israel is being fulfilled.

Like the sailors on Jonah's ship, the centurion's uncertain world has just been shaken (so Mark says) by the self-sacrifice of the Israelite who, whatever his faults, undertook to suffer when it was time, and so changed the world.

Comments

[Melissa]

How would all that change if you were to interpret the whale as a constellation as I have recently heard in reference to this story? Or would it?

[Victoria]

Okay, one thing we need to clear up: the stuff in Lord of the Rings TOTALLY happened. If anyone says it didn't, I shall be forced to stick my fingers in my ears and shout, "LALALALALALALALALA!"