Choose Your Poisson: Jonah and the Redemptive Sacrifice

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.

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Untangling Cliché: "Bless," Blessing," "Blessed."

So for the Hebrew / ancient Israelite, "blessing" was the gift of the king.  Anything bad was the scheming of one of the god's less sympathetic entourage.

If you want to know what the "system" is, look not at your Bible but first at your life.  Is it embued with good things?   Or is it brutal and beset with difficulty?

Now consult your imagination: how do you see God? 

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"Just A Story"

A little context: this comes from a conversation about reading scripture seriously.  We're talking about the fact that the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament comes to us as imaginative literature, as story.

From the Mailbag:

I was moving on to other places like the Book of Jonah, for instance. I've heard the book of Jonah referred to as 'just a story'.

The word "just" always strikes me as proof-positive that whoever is talking doesn't quite grasp how the mind and imagination really work. "Just" a story? By "just" do we mean, "Not true"? When we tell our kids stories ("How mom met dad," "How grand-dad lost his left eye") are we "just telling stories"? Are we telling pure fact? Probably not. Stories are who we are, and it's only in the age of news-broadcasts and hand-held digital cameras that "just a story" can be equivalent to "not true."

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