III. TOWARDS A FOLKLORISTIC READING OF JONAH
3.2.2 Internal Folkloric Features
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surprisingly) becomes repentant (3:5-10) upon the tersest of oracles from the least convincing of prophets.
2) Lack of tangible historical context: Other than the reference to the prophet of II Kings there is no chronological marker for placing Jonah in a particular period of Israelite history. 236 Were it not for the story's fantastic content it would be easier to associate the Jonah narrative with legends known from Hebrew scriptures. The book of Jonah's
opening and closing in media res are reminiscent of folktales rather than, for example, the patriarchal legends of Genesis which are placed between a genealogy (Gen 11:10-32) and the death of Joseph (Gen 50:26). The Jonah story leaves details about its setting to inference or imagination, thus resisting a historicized interpretation and deferring our attention to the plot events themselves. Though Jonah son of Amittai, Joppa, and
Nineveh are factually existent names in the ancient Israelite lexicon, neither the historical character of that prophet nor experiential knowledge of those places is ever emphasized.
Notwithstanding the prophet's name, the story's author(s) portray Jonah as an archetype or an everyman. Joppa and Nineveh, which both lay beyond the periphery of the Israelite homeland, were places known to exist by all but were known in detail by only a few.
Lowell Handy has called this setting the "imaginary real world" of Jonah insofar as these locales may be charted but that there was likely no concern for these as actual places.237 Wondertales are deliberately hazy on matters like this; they employ a contrived scenery expressed by only the vaguest of terms because the truths of their lessons are not delimited by time or place.
236 The king's anonymity and title of "the king of Nineveh" underscores the non-historical nature of the narrative. For a full discussion of this see Sasson, Jonah, 247 ff.
237 Handy, Jonah's World, 23.
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3) Style and characterization: We have already noted that Jonah is a relatively straightforward narrative, moving one scene to the next. Each scene may be treated as an individual unit of the whole. There are no parenthetical asides distracting our attention from this flow, and the single flashback (4:2) serves only to tie the entire narrative together and reemphasize the tale's symmetrical structure. We will observe that the story's characterization is relatively simple as well. The only named characters are Jonah and the God of Israel; the sailors and the Ninevites are distinguished not by name but by their "otherness" as non-Israelites.238 We are not given insight as to the operations of these stock characters' minds. They only react to the things going on around them.
Jonah, on the other hand, demonstrates self-knowledge but his emotional expression is limited to extremes. In the fourth chapter alone, he moves abruptly between being
"greatly displeased and grieved" (wayyēraʿ ʾel-yônâ rāʿâ gedôlâ wayyiḥar lô; 4:1), being
"very happy" (wayyiśmaḥ yônâ ʿal-haqqîqāyôn śimḥâ gedôlâ; 4:6), and being "grieved"
again (hêṭêb ḥārâ-lî; 4:9). Dialogue is exchanged between no more than two characters at a time.239 All of these features facilitate telling and memorizing the story in an oral context.
4) Brevity: This hardly needs mentioning since it is related closely to the previous point, but the entire narrative is relatively concise in comparison with other biblical stories. A third-person narration such as this one is "omniscient," free to explicate the situations in which Jonah finds himself or to further describe the story's odd turns of
238 Ehud Ben Zvi interprets these characters' depictions as evidence of shifting attitudes about the
"Israelitizeable" quality of the foreign in a postexilic social context. Signs of Jonah: Reading and Rereading in Ancient Yehud (JSOT Supp 367; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2003), 89-90.
239 The mallāḥîm and the Ninevites are not given individual voices; they act collectively, undifferentiated for the purposes of the narrator. This only adds to the simplicity of their characterization.
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events, yet the narrator consistently declines to do so. For example, there seems to be no language barrier between Jonah and the sailors or the Ninevites because detailing the story in this way would divert our attention. Folktales are very often laconic in this way, both for the ease of transmission of a shorter story and because the saliency of the folktale lie in the easy recognition of motifs, topoi, and dramatis personae.
5) Embellishment: Wondertales aggrandize, embellish or otherwise twist reality in order to express the fantastic. The city of Nineveh is so huge that it is a three day's walk across (wenînewēh hāyetâ ʿîr-gedôlâ lēʾlōhîm mahălak šĕlōšet yāmîm, 3:3). The penitent zeal of the Ninevites, the size of the fish (2:1), the rapid growth of the qîqāyôn (4:6), and the intensity of the sun (4:8) cumulatively present a world of extremes. If the story is indeed meant to inculcate social norms or values, then it is in such a setting that the wondertale‘s teaching becomes most focused; the world is presented as given to extremes in order to clearly differentiate states of being and modes of conduct.
6) Outright fantasy: Though embellishment is not uncommon within Hebrew scriptures, the explicit use of fantasy separates Jonah from other Hebrew Bible narratives.
The fantastic aspects of the Jonah story bothered Josephus, for example, who endeavored to minimize or rationalize the story's miracles in order to make it more acceptable for a wider audience.240 The book's fantastic qualities also caught the attention of Martin Luther, who mused,
But this story of the prophet Jonah is so great that it is almost
unbelievable, yes it sounds like a lie, and more full of nonsense than any poet's fable. If it were not in the Bible, I'd consider it a silly lie. Because if one thinks about it, Jonah was three days in the huge belly of the whale.
where he could have been digested in three hours and changed into the flesh and blood of the whale. He could have died there a hundred times, under the earth, in the sea, inside the whale. Isn't that living in the midst
240 Feldman, "Josephus' Interpretation of Jonah," 16.
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of death? In comparison with this miracle the wonder at the Red Sea was nothing.241
Wondertales ask for the "willing suspension of disbelief," as Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it, to transport the audience to another world where the impossible is made possible.
This most often takes the form of inversions to the natural world; animals may speak or exhibit other human behaviors, for example. The Jonah narrative includes many such fantastic sequences in its plot progression, especially for so short a story. That Jonah becomes entangled in so many strange events and reversals of fortune is part of the fantasy. In this world, a man may be eaten by a fish but not digested and a plant may grow to an extraordinary size and rapidly. Yet the Jonah story articulates an important theological belief inasmuch as natural elements--the storm, the ―big fish,‖ the qîqāyôn, and the caterpillar (tôlaʿat)242--are all "directed" (mānâ) by God rather than existing autonomously. This does not diminish the fantasy, it only qualifies it. Rather than existing as whimsical entertainment, the story conveys important moralizing points.