NOTE. If the Book of Jonah is meant to reflect actual conditions, the author's choice of prophet and historic background for his midrash is not without profound significance. Going back to the time when the historic Jonah of Gath-hepher had by his word averted a threatened calamity and under Jeroboam II witnessed the northern kingdom's greatest reach of external dominion (2 Kings xiv, 25-27), he strikes thus into the era when Amos and Hosea labored in judgment and love with Israel (see above, pp. 148–159), and makes coincident with this Jonah's call to proclaim judgment and mercy to the great world outside of Israel. It is the first revelation of Jehovah's gracious purpose to humanity at large, and it begins with the mightiest and wickedest city of all (cf. Jonah i, 2). The sequel, as the author portrays it, discloses both the world's readiness and prophecy's unreadiness to grasp the great occasion. The author means thus to show, perhaps, that from the beginning this unreadiness on the part of prophecy has been inveterate (cf. Isa. 1, 2; lxiii, 5), quite in contrast to the culmination of Jehovah's design as shown in the Second Isaiah (cf. Isa. xlv, 22–24; xlix, 6). By a rather loose term I have called his book an allegory, but it is more like a parable. The only thing suggesting allegory in our more restricted modern sense is the name Jonah son of Amittai, whose meaning, "Dove son of Truth," if meant to figure in the story, would only designate what in the gracious purpose of Jehovah the prophet ought to have been but failed to be. Such a use of the name, indeed, would not be meaningless a little subtler, however, and more of the character of a literary conceit, than we are wont to ascribe to Bible writers. A Nation's We are familiar with Hamlet's description of the purpose of the drama, "to hold, as 't were, the mirror up to nature; to show . . . the very age and body of the time his form and pressure."1 This allegory of Jonah has, it would seem, a similar purpose; it is at any rate an impressive mirror of the "age and body" of its time. It is minded to give the "form and pressure" in a picture of divine mercy encountering human frowardness; and this it does by a story that in the recalcitrant 1 Hamlet, Act III, sc. ii. mood of an old-time prophet portrays a static and stagnant Judaism mindless of its true mission in the world. This, I think, is the book's veiled sign of reaction and protest. It does not denounce; it is content to let portrayal speak for itself. There is in it a rub of satire, not without touches of caustic humor; but underneath it all, to my mind, is the burden of a tender heart made heavy over the cold intolerance and exclusiveness into which so much of the post-prophetic Judaism has congealed. A far cry this from the ideal of the Servant of Jehovah, or the impulse that brought the exiles home from Babylon. We leave it to the reader to linger on the details of the story. The personal traits and moods of the prophet his reluctance to obey his call, his fear lest God should be kind and thus spoil his threat of doom, his childish anger when his fear is justified — explain themselves and do not need our elucidation. The impressive background on which the story moves as it were a world full of divine good will and human responsiveness waiting only prophetic coöperation - reveals on the part of the writer a spiritual breadth and liberalism beyond that of any other Old Testament writer. To find its parallel we must review the whole prophetic movement. And this is what I think the writer has done. That his purview is much greater than one individual's experience, or even one generation's, is brought to light by the leading figure that has caused so much question, the metaphor of the great fish, which, as I have intimated, is, rightly interpreted as such, in reality the key to the writer's range and scope. Considered as a literal account, as a thing that actually happened, it verges on the absurd, not to say the unthinkable; the writer himself, bold as he is, would pause at that. Considered as a symbolic experience of a prophet who in broad consciousness is identified with the destiny of a whole nation, the figure is already prophetic property, used by Jeremiah and doubtless in this writer's mind. When the exiles were first deported to Babylon, Jeremiah thus portrayed the event: "Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon hath devoured me, . . . he hath, like a monster, swallowed me up, he hath filled his maw with my delicacies" (Jer. li, 34). Ten verses later he added: "And I will execute judgment upon Bel in Babylon, and I will bring forth out of his mouth that which he hath swallowed up" (li, 44). Here, as we see, the writer, whose whole story is a midrash, has his underlying imagery made to his hand, furnished by prophecy as the name was furnished by history. Let us see what comes of it, as estimated on this plane. The Fish and the Psalm It is worth while here to take a moment's retrospective glance at the large prophetic field and ideal that doubtless engaged the author's thought. As we have seen, the whole majestic movement of Hebrew prophof Thanks- ecy, with its presaged avails for Israel and the giving world, centered round an ordeal of captivity, exile, and eventual release.1 The vision of the two Isaiahs covers the whole inner movement; 2 Jeremiah predicts a new starting point of history from its crowning event (Jer. xxiii, 7, 8). The experience was meant for Israel's correction and redemption (cf. Jer. xlvi, 28; Isa. xl, 1; xliii, 1); meant still more for his appointed mission as servant and witness of Jehovah (cf. Isa. xli, 15, 16; xliii, 10, 12). And so its outcome, as contemplated from a later time by a just insight, was not bane at all but blessing. Is it any wonder that when our author tried to portray this engulfing exile experience in the terms of Jeremiah's figure the literal situation overflowed the image's congruity, that his imagination pictured the prophet as not only surviving for three days and three nights inside a sea monster but as composedly raising a psalm of thanksgiving for the deliverance thus wrought? Imagery had disappeared in reality, corresponding as it did 1 Cf. above, pp. 135-143. 2 Cf. above, pp. 168, 302–304. to a great literal fact of Israel's inner history. So read, its absurdity falls away. A New Testament writer, reading it as a sign for the generation of Jesus' time, connects it with the mystic idea of death and resurrection (Matt. xii, 40). The Grace, and the Grudge How did the prophet behave subsequently, or (if we have rightly shifted from figurative to literal) how did the nation, chosen, privileged, and commissioned, respond to the Gourd, its prophetic duty? The rest of the book, carrySelf-Willed ing the allegory onward to the impressive situation wherein the spiritual "form and pressure " of the author's time is mirrored, is the answer. It resolves into a well-wrought scene of contrast, the universal lovingkindness of God for His creation on the one hand, like a gracious radiance over all humanity, and on the other the childish vexation of a prophet clinging to unrepentant consistency and nursing a self-willed grudge against mercy. The metaphor of the gourd, with its ephemeral connotations, serves to accentuate the essential smallness into which the prophetic motive has fallen. This shown, with the prophet still unreconciled to the tender inconsistency of divine grace, the story abruptly ends, leaving the angry prophet still sitting, morose and unsheltered, outside the city, waiting for a doom that does not fall. As we sense the power of this simple situation, with the compassion of Jehovah offsetting it, we feel that the Book of Jonah, for all its mildness of method, is more than a reaction, it is in effect a tremendous indictment, pulsing with divine judgment. And that the indictment, made when it was, was all too just, we have the dominant race pride and intolerance and exclusiveness of the later Judaism to betoken. We have spoken of the reactions and veiled protests that this Puritan régime engendered. There were alleviations too. Let us, without. closely specifying, make brief note of their existence and influence. II While the Big Book is Growing. It will doubtless have been observed that the books of Ruth and Jonah, which we have associated with certain reactive tendencies during the Puritan régime, purport to have drawn their themes from the history subsequent to Moses, — Ruth from its primitive social conditions, Jonah from its inchoate prophetic activities; in both cases deducing a more lenient and liberal idea of divine and human nature than the current sentiment of the writers' time afforded. This fact, as far as it goes, is not without significance. It seems to imply that prevailing spiritual conditions are too narrow. Ezra's Pentateuch with a priesthood administering its Levitical ordinances, with busy scribes and rabbis "setting a hedge about the law "1 was not, could not be, the sole Book of Life. It was, indeed, the foundation stone of a magnificent literary edifice, the first division of what was to become a full and rich and varied library, but there was yet much to be built thereon. And the materials for this addition, under the care of these same scribes and men of letters, were all the while undergoing the sifting, selection, and editorship which would fit them for a place in the finished structure.2 So, during all this period which we have roughly bounded by the compilation of Chronicles, the "big book "- the Hebrew canon — was in silent process of growth. The second division, a kind of complement to the Law, came to be known, apparently about 300 B. C., as The Prophets, the largest division of the canon, containing, along with the prophets proper, also the history which elicited their warnings and counsels. In this chapter of our study we have spoken of the Puritan Era, as if it were a time that came and went; and we have traced its beginnings in literature and inducing national experience. But it was not so truly a period as a 2 See above, pp. 375, 376. 1 Cf. above, p. 384. |