IV. RITE DE PASSAGE AND SPATIALITY
4.2.3 The Sea and the Belly of the "Big Fish"
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wait for God's directive to be forgotten. As it is beyond a liminal boundary (the sea), Jonah presumes that he can escape God's control there. Yet although he has ventured into peripheral areas and secured his own isolation there Jonah discovers that it would not have mattered even if he had reached Tarshish.
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laid waste to Xerxes' attack fleet at least twice:274 "All this was the work of heaven's providence, that so the Persian power might be more equally matched with the Greek, and not much greater than it."275 Storms were not random events; the gods sent storms and deliverance from them. In this context it is appropriate for the shipwrecked sailor of the Egyptian tale to offer a sacrifice as thanksgiving to the gods he deems directly responsible for not only saving his life but also for washing him upon a bountiful isle.
Whereas in earlier periods of Israelite history the forces of the sea were believed to be under the control of a host of numenistic deities, within the book of Jonah that authority was subsumed by the God of Israel "who made both sea and land‖ (1:9) and has the ability to "cast a mighty wind upon the sea" (hēṭîl rûaḥ-gedôlâ ʾel-hayyam, 1:4).276 In
"no-man's land" the unexpected is reality, and a place where things may not be as they first seem; Jonah's engulfment by the fantastic dag gedôl saves him from one great (gedôl) danger but seems to put him in an even more precarious position. The possibility that Jonah's mission might end in his death is ever present.
This is what makes Jonah's episode within the "belly" or "inward parts" (mēʿeh) of the big fish so fascinatingly fantastic. Not only is Jonah swallowed but not digested but this also does not occur even over the course of three days and three nights.277 Another marvel follows: Jonah seems genuinely grateful for being alive! Of most interest here, however, is the language of his psalm, which is laden with cosmological
274 Hist., 7.188, 8.10-13, 8.118-120.
275 Hist., 8.13; also cited in Sasson, Jonah, 91.
276 For more on God's dominion over the sea, see F. Stoltz, "Sea," DDD, 737-742; note especially the verb hēṭîl. This root and its derived forms are somewhat unusual but very strong in meaning; BDB, 376-377.
277 The repetition of the number three is a well-attested meme in folklore from across the world including the Hebrew Bible, which "is especially fond of the number three, resorting to it only slightly less than the number seven." Sasson, Jonah, 153.
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and mythological allusions to this place in which he finds himself. Jonah refers to being in the ―heart of the sea,‖ (bilbab yammîm, 2:4), an expression which occurs in an
alternate form (leb-yammîm) six times in the prophetic pronouncements against Tyre in Ezekiel 27-28 and in a few other texts as leb-yām (e.g., Prov 23:34). In conjunction with the "belly" of the fish, these anatomical descriptions are reminiscent of Marduk's triumph over the primordial sea-serpent of watery chaos, Tiamat, from the Enūma Eliš:
When Tiamat opened her mouth to consume him, he drove in the evil wind that she did not close her lips. As the fierce winds charged her belly,278 her body was distended and her mouth was wide open. He released the arrow, it tore her belly, it cut through her insides, splitting the heart.279
In this case, also, we have a hero who is swallowed but not consumed by a sea creature, but, unlike Marduk cutting through Tiamat's internal organs, Jonah relies on God to get disgorge him from the fish.280 As is the case with the other wondertales, the "no man's land," liminal space, is an area for the protagonist to confront with the primal and visceral aspects of existence.
Even more vivid is the equation of Jonah‘s predicament with the ―belly of Sheol‖
(beṭen šeʾôl), a unique construction within attested Hebrew literature. The conception of Sheol is not easy to reconstruct but to generalize we may say that it is the chthonic realm of the dead, where one descends to after death, and is connected with the grave and the
278 Akk. kar-ša-ša. Though not a cognate of mēʿîm, karšu is a very close approximation in meaning for both specific organs (belly, womb, etc) and for a part of the lower body in a more general sense; ―karšu,‖ CAD 8.223-225.
279 ANET, 67; ―her insides‖ (qer-bi-šá) and―heart‖ (ŠÀ-ba) reinforce the visceral imagery of this passage.
Composite text adapted from Philippe Talon, The Standard Babylonian Creation Myth: Enūma Eliš (SAACT, 4; Helsinki: The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2005).
280 God is consistently depicted in the Hebrew Bible as having the power to placate the sea and its creatures. See, e.g., Job 26:12, Pss 74:13, Pss 89:9.
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underworld.281 This area was conceived of as being underneath the earth‘s surface, underneath both the continental land mass, the sphere of human activity, and the oceans surrounding it.282 There are several notable parallels with the netherworlds of other peoples, owing perhaps to cultural diffusion, but Sheol signifies a very unique cultural construct as well. In the Hebrew Bible it is seldom described directly but is often used metaphorically for despair or a place beyond God‘s control.283 As a domain of the dead Sheol is the great equalizer, a place to where all of the dead go "no matter what their earthly social status or spiritual condition.‖284 Thus to be in the "belly of Sheol" is
tantamount to being stripped of all standing in the social order, the divestment of which is a critical function of liminality.
Jonah's placement in the "big fish" puts him in a world completely unfamiliar to him and the story's audience, a place intended to evoke shared cultural virtues that affirm his status as a hero. As we saw with the Lugalbanda narrative and "The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor," the protagonist is stranded and on the brink of death in "no man's land" when his transformation begins. Thus in spite of Jonah's efforts to throw his mission off-course by going to a foreign land in the opposite direction he still proceeds
281 Theodore J. Lewis, ―Dead, Abode of the,‖ ABD 2.101-105.
282 The Hebrew notion of oceanic geography was likely very similar to that of the Mesopotamians, from whom so many Hebrew ideas were adapted. Mesopotamian texts consistently evince the belief that the surface land mass of the earth was surrounded by a cosmic ocean that reached to all of the earth‘s ends. For a treatment on this point, see Wayne Horowitz, Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography (MC 8; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1998), 325-330.
283 Lowell Handy suggests that the Jonah story reflects changing attitudes about Sheol in this respect: ―In Jonah it is clear that Yahweh can command even the region of Sheol…most biblical passages presume that the dead are beyond Yahweh‘s realm;‖ Jonah’s World, 39.
284 Sasson, Jonah, 171; cf. Eccl 9:10: ―Whatever you may find in your palm to do, do with all of your strength, for there is no action, no reasoning, no knowledge, and no wisdom in Sheol, where you are going.‖
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along the course of a rite de passage although it will be again diverted, this time finally and irrevocably, by the prophet's failings.
4.2.4 ―Dry land‖
Following the ordeal inside the belly of the "big fish" Jonah is regurgitated upon
"the dry land" (hayyabbāšâ, 2:11), a place like that the sailors had so furiously tried to reach during the storm at sea (1:13). If the fish's belly is a "no-man's land" one
interpretation may be that Jonah has reemerged into the human world by setting down upon "dry land," but this place is neither qualified nor identified. On the other hand, in tandem with the cosmological implications of Jonah's episode at sea we may see
symbolic significance in the use of the term yabbāšâ. The most conspicuous use of this term in Hebrew scriptures occurs in "first" creation story, Genesis 1:9-10, as a
fundamental component of Hebrew cosmography:
wayyōmer ʾĕlōhîm yiqqāwû hammayim mittaḥat haššāmayim ʾel-maqôm ʾeḥad wĕtērāʾeh hayyabbāšâ wayĕhî-kēn wayyiqrāʾ ʾĕlōhîm layyabbāšâ ʾereṣ ûlmiqwēh hammayim qārāʾ yammîm wayyarʾ ʾĕlōhîm kî-ṭôb
God said, "Let the water beneath the heavens be gathered to a single place, that the dry land may appear, and so it was. And God called the dry land
"earth" and the gathering of the waters he called "sea." And God saw that it was good.
This understanding of yabbāšâ conforms neatly with Jonah's transformative process since rites of passage are frequently articulated as a rebirth or a new creation while in the liminal state. Moreover, the use of this term here preserves the literary congruence of the third scene and the first scene since this word parallels with its earlier occurrence (1:9) and God's repeated directive comes again while Jonah is on terra firma. However brief this description is, we may see this as another liminal stage in Jonah's transition back to
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the human world from the chaotic sea.285 Previous attempts to locate where Jonah has landed miss the point inasmuch as Jonah's location is not a matter of real geography; he is still in a place where reality is not comprehensible to human beings.286