The Reluctant Prophet

In the first of a five part series, Carla Lindsey examines the book of Jonah. Here she asks, ‘Was there really a fish?’ and other important questions.

If you attended Sunday school as a child you are probably familiar with the Old Testament story ‘Jonah and the Whale’. Or … was it Jonah and the big fish?

Well that’s just one of the many debatable points that we find in the book of Jonah. But whatever you call that giant creature that swam in the sea and swallowed Jonah, you are probably quite familiar with the story. Jonah was sent by God to deliver a message to the people of Nineveh, but instead he jumped on a boat and headed in the opposite direction. When a storm came up at sea, Jonah was thrown overboard where he was swallowed by a large fish—who spewed him back up on a beach three days later. Yuck! The story was both disgusting and exciting. It was an action packed tale that was larger than life.

A very fishy tale

But as adults, what do we do with such a story? A story, which, by the way, is about much more than a bloke who survived being swallowed by a whale. In fact, the ‘fishy’ aspect of the book is really just a small part of it.

We’ll see, as we work through the book of Jonah over the next five issues, that the book is a well-crafted narrative, with considerable depth to it. It’s a story about relationships. Particularly Jonah’s relationship with himself, his relationship with others, and his relationship with God.

But you can’t ignore that fish! So let’s address it right at the beginning of the series and then put it to bed!

Did Jonah really get swallowed by a whale and survive? I mean … really? It does sound a little far-fetched. Do I have to take the story literally or are there other ways of understanding it? Do I lack faith if I don’t believe it? Do I lack common sense if I do? Daring to ask these questions can be quite unsettling, but for many people they are very real, and so we need to be open and honestly discuss them.

No doubt the people reading this will have a range of views on the book of Jonah. From those who have only ever considered the story literally, to those who have only ever considered it a made up story, and those who don’t know what to make of it! And that’s okay. There is room for everyone in this discussion.

Let’s weigh up the reasons for and against literal and non-literal interpretations of Jonah.

Getting swallowed by a fish—actually!

We’ll start by taking the book literally. That is: Jonah was an actual person who survived being swallowed by an actual fish. This is the oldest and most natural way of reading the book.

In fact it’s only been in modern times that people have questioned this way of seeing it. The vivid way the events are described, particularly in chapter one, read as if they really happened. Jonah’s existence is supported by the mention he gets in 2 Kings.

The book also refers to real places that we know existed. And, most significantly, Jesus seems to have taken Jonah literally when he said that ‘as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth’ (Matt 12:40).

Further to that evidence, would you believe that people actually have been swallowed by large fish and survived! In 1891, James Bartley was swept off the whaling ship he was working on. Fifteen hours later the crew harpooned a whale and to their amazement, found Bartley in the whale’s stomach, unconscious but alive. Bartley did lose his sight and was bleached because of the experience, but he did survive.

So then, what are the problems with reading Jonah literally? The first one that springs to mind is the fish. While a handful may have survived a whale’s belly, the chances of it seem highly improbable!

But the fish is not actually the biggest problem with taking the book literally. There are several other puzzling things. Firstly, the book claims that walking across Nineveh would take three days, but ... Nineveh was only five kilometres in diameter. You’d have to be going pretty slow to make that a three day walk! Perhaps the three days was allowing time to stop and preach on the way, or maybe it included the greater Nineveh area?

Secondly, Jonah refers to the King of Nineveh, but Nineveh was the capital city of Assyria. The king who reigned there was the king of Assyria, not Nineveh. Nowhere in the book of Jonah is there any evidence for a king of Assyria.

Finally, the conversion of the whole city of Nineveh to Jonah’s God seems unlikely, and isn’t documented in any Assyrian records. However, we’ll come back to this point when we look at chapter four, where we’ll see that because of the superstitious nature of the Assyrians, we can’t rule out their conversion.

Getting swallowed by a fish—but not really!

If Jonah isn’t to be taken literally, what are the other options? Well, we could read it as an allegory or as a parable. The most famous allegory is Pilgrim’s Progress. If you are familiar with that story, you know it is a fictional story in which everything represents something else much deeper than what you see on the surface. It is about Christian, who is on a pilgrimage to the celestial city, carrying his back pack (his burden). He meets Mr Worldly Wise and Legality, and is tempted to settle in the village of Morality on the way.

If we were to read Jonah similarly, then maybe Jonah is really disobedient Israel and being swallowed by a fish represented Israel’s punishment for not preaching to her neighbours. That’s one option.

Might we read it as a parable? Jesus told many parables: short earthly stories that had a spiritual meaning. Could it be that the point of Jonah wasn’t about actual events, but was really about a simple spiritual message that lay behind the story? When we read the parable of the Good Samaritan, for example, we don’t look for proof that the beaten up man really existed. It doesn’t matter if he did or not, that’s not the point. The point is the message the story contains: treat everyone as your neighbour.

A story can be filled with truth without being literally true. Could that be the case with Jonah? Perhaps it was also a story that, like the Good Samaritan, meant to challenge the way we think about people who are different to us?

Perhaps the message of Jonah was simply that God cares about non-Jewish people too! These certainly are important messages contained in the story, and they are not impacted by whether we take the story literally or not.

Does reading Jonah as an allegory or a parable work? Well, not perfectly. If a book is an allegory, usually it’s obvious that things in it represent something deeper. But that is just not the case with Jonah. Unlike Pilgrim’s Progress, reading Jonah as an allegory involves a lot of guess work in order to work out what represents what. And if it is a parable, it is a very unusual one. Usually parables are short and simple, with one obvious message. By comparison, Jonah is not short and there is not one obvious message, but rather many that can be taken from it.

What is Jonah really saying?

Where do we go from here then? Both literal and non-literal ways of seeing the book of Jonah have problems. Was there really a fish? In the end the answer is … we don’t know. Maybe there was. God is a God of miracles. God could have sent a fish along to swallow and spew up Jonah. But did he? And does it matter if he didn’t?

We could spend the next four issues debating the existence of Jonah and the whale, but we are not going to! Because in the end the message behind the story is what really matters. ‘The teaching value of a story does not necessarily depend on its historicity,’ says Old Testament scholars Lasor, Hubbard and Bush.

More important than asking if there was a real fish, is asking: ‘what is being communicated in this book?’. Or, ‘what was so important about it that it was included in the Bible?’ and ‘what do I learn from it?’

Let’s focus on these questions as we move forward, and leave to the side the questions that will have to wait until we get to heaven to find the answers to. Let’s concentrate on the whole book, not just one small debatable point within it.

If the book is not really about a fish, then what is it about? Who is this Jonah and what’s the story behind him?

The reluctant prophet

If you take your Bible and flick through the four major prophets and 12 minor prophets at the end of the Old Testament, you will immediately notice that Jonah is unique. He is unique in several ways, but the one that stands out after a flick through, is that the other prophetic works are mostly poetry. Jonah, however, is mostly prose. Jonah is a narrative—a story—not a poem. That changes the way we read it.

A closer inspection reveals that the other prophetic works mainly comprise a message from God, which the prophet had to deliver. But in Jonah, the message he had to deliver was only eight words long: ‘forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown’. Actually, in Hebrew, the message is only five words long! Jonah is about much more than the message itself.

An even closer look reveals that the other prophets gave messages to the Jewish people, but Jonah’s message was for foreigners, the Assyrians in Nineveh. While some other prophets did occasionally prophesy about other nations, there is no evidence to suggest that these prophecies were ever given directly to the people they were about. This is another unique feature of the book of Jonah.

Jonah is also rare among the prophets as he is mentioned outside of the prophetic books. In Jonah 1:1 we read that Jonah was the son of Amittai, and in 2 Kings 14:23–27 we find a prophet of the same name with the same father. This reference in Kings places Jonah in the reign of Jeroboam II, from 795–753 BC.

During this time, the Assyrians—who had been a threat to Israel’s borders and who had taken a tribute from Israel—had lost some of their strength. This background helps us understand why Jonah wasn’t keen to deliver a message to Nineveh. The Ninevites were his enemies. They had been oppressing Jonah’s people. Why would he want to do anything for them—let alone give them a special message from God!

Herein lies the tension that we find inside the book of Jonah. And herein lies the tension brewing inside Jonah himself. He was caught in a dilemma. How could he possibly deliver a message that might allow the Assyrians to repent, when any loyal Israelite would want them to be punished by God? After all, they deserved to be punished! Yet God called Jonah to go to them. And he did … not immediately, but he got there in the end.

Jonah is known as the ’reluctant prophet’. He really didn’t want to do what God had called him to, and—as we’ll see in the next issue—he took deliberate steps to avoid doing what God asked of him. Even when he did finally get to Nineveh he still wasn’t too happy about it!

He’s certainly not the poster boy for prophets. He made mistakes, he was cranky and he thought he knew better than God. That’s what I like about him. He wasn’t perfect, but God still chose him and trusted him to do something that would make a difference.

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by Carla Lindsey (c) 'War Cry' magazine, 14 May 2016, pp20-21
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