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.
The first reason must be the words of Jesus himself. He includes Jonah and the people of Nineveh as historical figures and he refers to the incident with the great fish as foreshadowing his own death and resurrection (Matthew 12.38-41). If the story of Jonah is a legend, then what does this tell us about the resurrection of Christ? second The reason to not concede this ground is that the reason for much dismis-siveness over the Jonah story stems from a general anti-supernatural bias. The stories of the great fish and the fast-growing desert plant involve miracle and do not fit with the assumptions and expectations of contemporary thought. Therefore, they may be relegated to the world of legend or saga.
No evidence that it’s not history
The range of genres into which scholars pop the book of Jonah – legend, saga, myth, allegory, parable – ought itself to alert us to how little they know! If Jonah is not history, then there is no consensus on what it might otherwise be. The text itself gives no indication that it is parable or allegory. In the classical world the book was read as historical. The Jewish historian, Josephus, recounts the events of the book as part of his history of the Jews, the Antiquities. It is remarkable that we think we are better placed 2,000 years later to judge the kind of literature the book of Jonah is than Josephus had been, much closer to its time of composition.
Historical setting
The setting of Jonah is mid-eighth-century BC (2 Kings 24.25) and there are a number of features that indicate the author’s knowledge of the time. Assyria was the dominant empire in the region and it is to its king in Nineveh that Jonah is sent.
The claim that a tour of the city required three days (Jonah 3.3) need not imply that the city was vast (we know it to have been three to seven miles in circumference), only that there was a lot to see. The city of London is tiny, but a visit benefits from a few days. If you were visiting the city to meet leaders in Westminster and Buckingham Palace it would certainly be a three-day visit. While Nineveh did not have a population of 120,000 (Jonah 4.11) it is not unreasonable for this to be the total population in its reach – again, a comparison of the city of London with the Greater London area is relevant here. A useful article from 1977 on ‘Jonah’s Nineveh’ by Donald Wiseman in the Tyndale Bulletin is easily accessed through a Google search.
A fishy tale?
But what about the great fish and the story of Jonah spending three days in its stomach? Surely, here lies the real bone of contention. Surely, this is the stuff of myth or legend, not sober historical fact?
There are various ways of responding to this scepticism. One way is the attempt by some to find natural explanations through parallel stories from other times and places. These are unconvincing. The often repeated anecdote of James Bartley who was supposedly swallowed by a sperm whale and later found alive when it was caught by whalers is a fishy tale indeed. It sounds more like a fisherman’s yarn than a historic episode.
Let the Bible speak
A better way to respond is through the text of the Bible itself. Notice how sober-minded the telling of the story is. In fact, very little is said about the sea creature itself – we really don’t know what it was. Jonah’s own reflection draws less attention to the fish than to what was more like a near-death experience (Jonah 2.1-9). Some scholars even think that Jonah literally died in the fish, and his being vomited onto dry land was his resurrection. That would certainly add a depth to Jesus using Jonah’s experience as a foreshadowing of his own forthcoming death and resurrection.
Closed minds?
And it is to the death and resurrection of Jesus that all these conversations must turn. To those for whom any supernatural event is ludicrous, the cross will remain a stumbling block. If a mind becomes closed to any possibility beyond what can be seen in our limited experience, then it’s not only the great fish of Jonah that becomes implausible. So does the possibility of life beyond the grave, and forgiveness of sin. Once we see that there is evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, based on level-headed historical sources, then we are open to the possibility that maybe more than once in history astonishing things have happened – that a Creator God continues to surprise us within his creation.
More than one physicist has quoted the famous words of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ Whether it is theoretical physics or biblical history, we are led to be open to a world with more possibilities than meets the eye.
