One of the Bible’s most popular books is also one of the most derided for any historical value.
The main events of Jonah remain well known in popular culture. Bruce Springsteen included ‘Swallowed Up (In the Belly of the Whale)’ on his 2012 Wrecking Ball album. In the recent Avengers movie Iron Man, Tony Stark, compares a monster he is about to face to Jonah’s sea creature. But despite its popularity the reasons to reject the book as anything more than a meaningful parable are numerous and almost taken for granted by some scholars.
Why does it matter?
At first glance it does not seem to matter if Jonah is a historical book or not. The Bible includes Psalms, parables, songs and stories whose meaning and relevance are not dependent on whether the events they describe happened. However, on further reflection there are a couple of reasons to not concede this ground.
Comedy, free speech and warnings from the past
Hannah Arendt was a Jewish philosopher who grew up in Nazi Germany. Eventually she had to flee to France and, …