Eternal Delight and Deliciousness: The Book of Jonah After Ten Years

Abstract

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The Book of Jonah in Recent Research

“…As Bolin observes in his review of Jonah research:The days when Jonah’s Nineveh was equated with the bloodthirsty city of Nahum, when the prophet Jonah was seen to represent a fictive post-exilic Judaism obsessed with ethnic purity or hatred of Gentiles, and when the author of Jonah was extolled as a preacher of universal divine love and tolerance are gone forever. (Bolin 2009)…”

“…Yet Bolin fears divine care of animals is anachronistic. Instead, he argues that the book about divine sovereignty actually understands the inclusion of animals as a reference to sacrifice in the context of kingship (Bolin 2009). In response to a humorous interpretation of the incorporation of animals, Bolin writes:One potential answer and often overlooked answer is that Yahweh, like all his divine colleagues in the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds, feasted on a daily diet of roasted animal flesh and that his reference to the animals is made in the context of forthcoming sacrifices from the newly pardoned (and grateful) Ninevites.…”

“…It has been nearly 15 years since someone surveyed contemporary scholarship on the book of Jonah (Bolin 2009). The time is ripe to account for a great deal of scholarship that has accumulated over this brief, yet perpetually intriguing book.…”

“…Yet rather than understand these different approaches in fundamental disagreement over the basic narrative, I suggest that these approaches have simply taken a different 'tack' in order to solve some of the book's enduring questions in addition to asking new ones. As Bolin noted in his review of Jonah research, scholarship has freed itself from notions of Nineveh as a bloodthirsty city and has begun to question the origins of its ostensibly assured results (Bolin 2009). Such questions include the book's primary message, whether there is a single message or several, the relationship between the book and the Babylonian Exile, the strangeness of the laconic prophet, the book's relationship to other canonical texts, the role that animals and non-human entities play, the function of humor, and more.…”

“…The days when Jonah's Nineveh was equated with the bloodthirsty city of Nahum, when the prophet Jonah was seen to represent a fictive post-exilic Judaism obsessed with ethnic purity or hatred of Gentiles, and when the author of Jonah was extolled as a preacher of universal divine love and tolerance are gone forever. (Bolin 2009) Indeed, freed from the evolutionary paradigm Sherwood describes, recent scholarship has instead attempted to account for the book's setting in Persian period Yehud composed by an elite class of Judahite literati. For example, scholarship has generally moved away from notions of Nineveh as a violent city representative of the Assyrian Empire and instead placed it alongside Hellenistic traditions or as a cipher for Jerusalem itself (Hunter 2022).…”