Finding Words in the Belly of Sheol: Reading Jonah’s Lament in Contexts of Individual and Collective Trauma

Abstract

By reading Jonah’s lament in Jonah 2 through the lens of trauma hermeneutics, this article will try to better understand the words that have been assigned to the main character Jonah, which represent a community’s deep sorrow in the aftermath of the unspeakable horrors of warfare. Read as an attempt to ascribe meaning to individual and collective trauma, I propose that Jonah’s lament in Jonah 2 taps into the metaphors and images available in the lament tradition of the Book of Psalms. The application of symbolic language in ascribing meaning to traumatic events is particularly significant, and may help us derive new layers of meaning from the words placed into the mouth of the prophet who finds himself in the belly of Sheol.

Biblijsko podzemlje o čistilištu

“…Rev 1:18). 40 His »descent over š e ᵓôl« denotes the opening of that gate on which souls knock and invoke the name of God to save them. 41 This is why the theology of the š e ᵓôl's gate in the New Testament is closely related to the theology of the resurrection, according to which there is a process from weakness to strength, from shame to glory, from flaw to perfection, from natural to spiritual and from corruptible to incorruptible life (cf.…”

The Book of Jonah in Recent Research

“…They will include insights from recent scholarship on the ‘Book of the Twelve’ and incorporate trends in affect theory, animal studies, performance studies, postcolonial theory, psychological criticism, spatial theory, trauma theory, and a significant section on the book’s reception history (email exchange with Graybill, Nov 2022). L. Juliana Claassens is publishing a forthcoming commentary in the Old Testament Library series and draws on trauma hermeneutics to dialogue with feminist, postcolonial, and queer lenses to ‘take seriously the woundedness of the prophet, and the community he represents’ (email exchange with Claassens, Dec 2022). Beyond traditional line-by-line commentaries, Jione Havea (2020) recently published a commentary within the Earth Bible Commentary series from an indigenous Oceanic perspective.…”