-John R. Salverda
In recent times, relatively little attention has
been paid to the connections that the Jonah story may have to Greek tales, apart
from a few notable recent and not so recent exceptions; elements of the legend
of Heracles and the story of Perseus and Andromeda, for instance, are strikingly
similar, as Cyril of Alexandria and Jerome had already noted.**3** In the end,
though, these parallels have failed to impress most exegetes, who have concluded
that they are not helpful in the interpretation of the book.
Yet, an interesting and hitherto little explored
possibility is that the book of Jonah presents puzzling parallels with Jason and
elements of the Argonauts' story. The parallel between Jason and Jonah, not
mentioned by early Jewish or Christian writers, has been evoked by a few
classicists at the beginning of this century, because of an unusual
representation of Jason found in 1833 in Caere (Cerveteri). Their comments are
very brief, however, usually framed within a very broad comparative format, and
without seeing and developing any analysis of the details that show the extent
of cultural interaction.**4** Furthermore, the possible connection between the
two stories seems to have been long since forgotten and has not drawn any
attention from commentators of the text in the past sixty years.**5**
What I propose herein is to reexamine the parallels
between Jonah and Jason. In particular, I hope to show how the author of Jonah
plays with one of the variants of the story of Jason, or that Jonah's story, at
the very least, can be placed within the nebula of variants of Jason's tale.
The saga of the Argonauts seems to have been widespread in oral, written, and
pictural forms, while numerous representations of various elements of their
story, conveniently gathered now in the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae
Classicae,**6** are sufficient
proof of its diffusion around the Mediterranean. Many stories attached to
Jason as a kind of patron of navigators circulated widely. The differences to
be found in the written versions of Pindar (518-438 BCE), Euripides (ca. 485-ca.
406 BCE), Apollonius of Rhodes (third century BCE), Valerius Flaccus (flourished
in the first c. BCE), and the so-called Orphic Argonautica, attest to the fluidity of a multi-faceted
tradition which one imagines to have also been a living, ever-changing, oral
tradition. One may suppose that from an early date, written, oral, and
iconographic versions influenced each other in multiple ways.
My thesis, therefore, is that the author of the
Jonah tale used bits of this widely circulating oral cycle within the framework
of his own Hebrew tradition. His is a highly literate story, the work of a
writer who used chiastic structures, repeats, puns, and ironic twists. In their
re-employment in the Hebrew story, the elements of the tale of the Argonauts
appear only as vestiges, although I think they are more significant than has
been granted until now.**7** At a minimum, their selection and the way in which
they are recast suggest an anti-polytheistic attitude turned against Ionians, as
well as against the more obvious Ninevites. Many more elements are at work than
were previously thought to be, as the study of parts of the story, especially
philological and iconographic aspects, will soon make clear ––an important
consideration for the on-going debate on the nature and complexity of cultural
borrowings. Such study also sheds some light on the extent of Near Eastern
influence on early Greek culture.**8**
The argument will proceed as follows. First, after
a rapid synopsis of the stories, the mythological motifs they have in common
will be laid out in detail. Secondly, I will propose an explanation for their
use and shape in Jonah.
Finally, it will be shown that the use of some of these common themes persisted
in the later (mostly Christian) iconography of Jonah.
THE STORIES
In the extant written versions of the Argonauts'
tale, Jason, son of Aeson, and great-grandson of Aeolus the wind, is given by
his rival Pelias the impossible task of bringing back the Golden Fleece from
Colchis. This is the fleece of a ram which was sacrificed after saving Phrixus,
in a story reminiscent of the Aqedah in Genesis 22. The Golden Fleece is
hanging on a tree in Ares' sacred wood in Colchis, Aeetes' kingdom, and is
guarded by a never-sleeping dragon. At Jason's call, the bravest of the Greeks
hurry to the Argo, a ship built for Jason by Argos, with Athena's help. On
their way to Colchis, the country of the sunrise in the Orient, the Greeks meet
with many challenges. The greatest danger they encounter in trying to reach
their goal is a stormy sea in which they must pass through the shifting or
clashing rocks, the Planctae or Symplegades, which the sea alternately pushes
apart and brings together. Once in Colchis, they ask king Aeetes for the
Fleece. He promises it to Jason, provided the latter can subjugate the
brazen-hoofed and fire-breathing bulls, plow a field, and sow the teeth of the
local dragon. Jason manages these feats with the crucial help of the king's
daughter, Medea. Because Aeetes goes back on his word, Jason sets out to steal
the Golden Fleece. He succeeds, again with the help of Medea, who puts the
ever-watching dragon to sleep with a magic potion. The Argonauts then flee with
the Fleece and the king's daughter.
Jonah's tribulations, in contrast to Jason's, begin
with a divine call. The task proposed by God to the hero of the book of Jonah
is to bring a divine warning to the traditional enemy of Israel. However,
rather than obeying, Jonah flees to the other end of the world, on a ship going
to Tarshish. During the storm caused by God, the pagan crew, in great fear,
prove to be respectful of all gods, especially Jonah's, and helpful to the
hero. Jonah tells them he is the cause of the storm and following his advice,
they reluctantly throw him overboard. He is swallowed by a large fish, kept in
its entrails for three days, and finally vomited out onto dry land, after a long
prayer which he expresses in the form of a psalm.
God reiterates his call, in spare words, and Jonah
goes to Nineveh where he reluctantly announces the oracle, insisting on the
impending doom. The oracle has been barely broadcast —Jonah has walked but one
day in a city "of three days"— yet its call is immediately heeded by the
Ninevites, and even more surprisingly, by the king who, though hardly informed
of it, takes sackcloth and begins to fast. He orders all his subjects, even
animals, to do likewise, in the hope of turning away God's anger.
God's anger gives way to mercy, which in turn makes
Jonah very angry. He storms out of Nineveh, builds a hut wherein he waits to
see what will happen. Overnight, God makes a miraculous tree grow; Jonah finds
its shade soothing and pleasant. Next, God sends a worm which causes the tree
to die and a hot wind which makes Jonah wish for death. In the ensuing
discussion between God and Jonah, God shows that his concern for the Ninevites
is at least as valid as that of Jonah for the shade tree. The story ends
abruptly, without indicating whether Jonah accepts God's point of view or
not.
MOTIFS COMMON TO THE
ARGONAUTICA AND
JONAH
Several parallel motifs are of considerable
significance in both stories: the names of the heroes, the presence of a dove,
the idea of "fleeing" like the wind and causing a storm, the attitude of the
sailors, the presence of a sea-monster or dragon threatening the hero or
swallowing him, and the form and meaning of the difficult word
kikayon. Looking at these
themes and motifs reciprocally illuminates both accounts.
Names
First of all, the names of the two sea adventurers
appear to be strikingly similar, at least in Greek. Jonah’s name in Hebrew,
Yônah, when transliterated in
Greek as Iônas, can easily be
seen as a metathesis of Iasôn.
Whether that was a factor in the author's choice of a name cannot be known. But
it is curious to read in the twelfth-century commentator Eustathius that an
ancient tradition thought the name Jason was a metathesis of his own father’s
name, Aisôn.**9** The fluidity
of this name, together with the personality of the hero, may explain why Jason
was one of several Greek names often used by Jews in Palestine, Egypt, and
Cyrenaica, at least from the third century BCE on.**10** Regarding Cyrenaica,
it is notable that in some of the many variants on the return of the
Argonauts,**11** the latter reach Africa and meet a Triton, the merman of
pre-Greek mythology, who announces to them that Cyrene would be the possession
of their descendants. The legends and the name of an heroic sailor
circumnavigating the sea on the first mythic long-ship would have appealed to
Jews and other peoples who were settling around the Mediterranean sea. This
interest is still in evidence at the time of the so-called “Tomb of Jason” in
Jerusalem, which is dated to the beginning of the first century BCE and contains
a Greek inscription and the drawing of a military ship.**12**
Doves
The second element in the comparison of the two
stories concerns the name of Jonah alone. Yônah in Hebrew means “dove,” one of the birds used in
very ancient sailing practice to guide lost sailors to land, as we see both in
the story of Noah and the saga of Jason and the Argonauts.**13** When the
Argonauts arrive at the Clashing Rocks (the Symplegades) and are unable to find
a way out, Phineus, a king-prophet hunted by the Harpies (perhaps because he has
betrayed divine secrets), advises the heroes to release a dove to see if it will
go through (The story uses an old theme which appears already in a different
form in the Odyssey: the flock of doves bringing ambrosia to Zeus must also go
through the Planctae but invariably one dove is lost). The Argo eventually
follows the dove; bird and ship find a passage through the rocks, but not
without leaving a few vestiges behind them —one, its feathers and the other,
pieces of rigging. In other variants of the story, doves also play an important
role; in Virgil's Aeneid, for
instance, two doves lead Aeneas and the Sybil to the Golden Fleece hanging in a
tree.**14** In other texts, the prophecies uttered by an oracular oak are
reported by doves.**15**
Boreas the fleeing wind
There is a further connection to Phineus, who in
Apollonius’ Argonautica, is
pursued by the vengeful Harpies because he has betrayed prophetic secrets.
After promising the Argonauts that he will help them with his prophetic gifts,
he is delivered from his pursuers by the Boreads, the “fleers,” sons of Boreas,
the northern wind that brings the worst storms at sea.**16** The story of
Jonah begins very abruptly with his flight, right after God's command that he go
and deliver his oracle to Nineveh. Jonah betrays nothing of the divine message
entrusted to him, but he flees to avoid its accomplishment (as he sees it), and
does so without explanation. He flees from the consequences of the message he
has received but, paradoxically, not the structure of prophetic tales, in which
one expects failure. In these stories, the structure is as follows: the more
trustworthy the prophets, the less willing to hear them their audience will be.
Above all, kings are expected to resist the message and punish the messenger,
thereby increasing the element of veracity for the audience of the story. In
fear of retaliation, Elijah flees to the Horeb after his victory over the
prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel, walks one day in the desert, sits under a
broom tree, and asks for death, saying: "Israel has forsaken the covenant,
slain prophets, and I, even I only, am left."**17** In the second part of his
adventure, Jonah also flees to an analogue of the desert, that is, a dry place,
with wind, as opposed to the fluid and humid vastness stirred up by storm
winds. But he is not pursued. Jonah does what prophets (and Jason and his
friends) are supposed to do, namely, he flees, but for no apparent reason. He
is pushed by rhetorical reason alone, the force of the text and previous
biblical stories.
The puzzling motif of Jonah's flight, however, is
connected to the Argonautic cycle of stories in two ways. First of all, it
indirectly creates a storm caused by God’s great wind, in Hebrew ruah
gdolah. Secondly, the Hebrew word
for fleeing in Jonah 1.2,
boreah, corresponds closely to
the name of Boreas, the storm god and father of the Boreads. A "fleeing" sea
creature, a leviathan, actually appears in the texts of Ras Shamra and is
mentioned in Isaiah 27.1 and Job 26.13. It is a sea monster originating in the
primordial chaos and threatening chaos. In the story of Jonah, however, the
"fleeing" is separated from the monster, yet still connected to a storm. I
propose therefore that the Greek word Boreas has a semitic origin, perhaps the
Ugariticboreah. Chantraine’s
Dictionnaire étymologique du grec classique gives no sure origin for the Greek word, but the
presence of other Argonautic elements in the story of Jonah makes it distinctly
possible that mythical elements surrounding Boreas were borrowed by the Greeks,
together with the name, from Semitic mythology. The stories surrounding this
divinity or hero associated with storms were adopted at a much earlier stage,
perhaps at the end of the second millennium before our era. The sound change
from a pharyngeal to an alveolar fricative ("heth" to "s") is natural, since Greek lacked the former
(a later example of this sound change appears in one of Jerome's letters, in
which he speaks of a Silas whose Hebrew name is Shaloah).
Sailors
In Greek stories and in ancient folklore in
general, sailors had a terrible reputation. It was thought that they were only
after passengers’ possessions and money, which they could try to obtain, for
example, by forcing a victim to sign a will in their favor before throwing the
person into the sea. The sailors in the Argonauts’ saga are of an heroic type
and do not do this. They are dangerous, however; in the later Argonautica
Orphica, these adventurers behave
according to expectations and become angry at Medea, because she has been
denounced by the speaking or prophesying beam of the Argo. They are ready to
throw her to the fish but Jason calms them in time to save her.**18** In a
different story reported by Herodotus, sailors behave also as expected, throwing
Arion of Mytilene overboard, out of greed for his money and possessions. He is
saved by a dolphin which is sensitive to his poetic and musical
gifts.**19**
By analogy, then, the much debated psalm in the
book of Jonah could be, among other things, a parody of widely known stories
about music-loving animal helpers. In any case, Jonah’s sailor companions,
contrary to what an ancient audience would expect, are respectful, tame, and
even unselfish, though the reason for their civility may be simply a healthy
fear of Jonah's God. Here is a man who, seemingly imprudently or rashly, has
hired the whole ship and paid in advance, an action noted as unusual in talmudic
literature.**20** He is a foreigner, alone, without protector or friend, at
the mercy of a whole crew against whom he could never retaliate. Yet, these
rough fellows not only do not attempt to kill him out of greed, but they do a
most dangerous thing in stormy weather: they try to bring the ship to shore to
save their onerous passenger.**21**
According to a literal interpretation of his Hebrew
name, Jonah is a "dove" kept in the hold of the ship, something light and
capable of flight. Yet, he engages in a downward movement, going down to Jaffa,
into the ship, then down into its hold, where he falls into a deep sleep
(wayyerâdam, a word also
evoking, phonetically at least, a downward movement), and finally down into the
great fish. Normally, passengers and crew were on the deck. The Hebrew text
suggests that Jonah himself becomes part of the cargo; he is a piece of the
ballast, often merchandise but normally stones or sand, kept in the depths of
the hold of the ship. Surely, he is stowed in the most dangerous place of the
ship, among stones and heavy cargo which could crush him in a storm. One might
think of him as being in the same position as the oak beam placed by Athena
Pallas in the Argo, a beam which occasionally utters "true" prophecies or
predictions. The beam reveals Zeus' anger and invites the heroes to purify
themselves,**22** or warns that they are being pursued by the Erinyes, who
avenge wrongs, especially murders committed among kinsmen.**23** Another
similarity is that in helping the crew, and being "helped" by them, Jonah is
acting like Phineus the seer, already mentioned above, whom the Argonauts
–specifically the Boreads, Calais and Zetes, sons of Boreas– help after
receiving precious information from him.**24**
Sea-monsters
There is no musically enchanted dolphin in the book
of Jonah, but a large fish or ketos who swallows and then vomits up the hero. Neither
is there a leviathan or dolphin in the extant textual variants of Jason’s
odyssey. But Jason does fight a sea- or land-monster in several of the variants
of the tale, often represented on vases, in actions similar to those of
Heracles.**25** Or in scenes found widespread around the Mediterranean, Jason
emerges from a coiled, upright serpent or monster.**26** It is in this context
that earlier scholars briefly noted the connection with Jonah. In particular, a
beautiful red-figured cup found at Cerveteri (Caere) in 1833 and dated from the
beginning of the fifth century BCE (490-475) shows a scaly and wide-eyed monster
vomiting a limp, naked, bearded, and long-haired Jason (see plate). To the
right of the scene is Athena, with spear in her right hand, bird in her left,
and perhaps looking into the eyes of the dragon, whom she has commanded to
disgorge Jason.**27** Behind the dragon’s head, at left, the Golden Fleece
hangs as limp as Jason, on a tree laden with fruit (apples?). It is most
natural to conceive of this monster as a sea-monster, as did A. Flasch and other
scholars,**28** given the position of Cerveteri, an Etruscan sea-port which
would be understandably interested in Jason's Gesti as those of the first navigator. An abundance
of maritime themes at the place is evidence of this interest. The Boreads
themselves do not appear to be represented at Caere but they figure prominently
in many other places, for instance, in Laconia.**29**
This cup has been widely commented upon in the
past, but has remained unnoticed, as far as I am aware, by biblical
commentators. Late XIXth and turn-of-the-century commentators offer varying
interpretations of this scene. A. Flasch thinks that the dragon is alive,
forced to disgorge a passive Jason, which is also my interpretation.**30**
Flasch is followed by H. Schmidt and others, e.g. Pfuhl and Kerényi. Vian, in
his recent edition of Apollonius' Argonautica, mentions the cup without comment. M. Lawrence,
after E. Pfuhl and K. Kerényi, thinks it is a sea-monster "forced by Athena to
disgorge Jason [....] a rare variant of the famous story."**31** The rest of
Lawrence’s article deals with the iconography of Jonah's story. But the
commentary of P.E. Arias and M. Hirmer on Athena is inexact. They think that
Athena, with owl, is looking with surprise at Jason coming out of the dragon’s
mouth.**32**
It is interesting to discover that a version of
Jason's story had Athena as his helper, rescuing him from death, which is
perhaps closer to the role of the Hebrew God in the book of Jonah. The bird she
carries on her left hand, however, is not necessarily the usual owl, as all
commentators seem to identify it,**33** but could actually be a dove (or a sea
bird). Athena's owl is usually represented with its head turned outward, facing
the viewer, at least in all images of her catalogued in the Lexicon
Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae.**34** On the Caere cup, the bird has a straight
beak and a more sloping body. However, since ornithological details may not
have been the concern of the vase painters, the idea of a dove can only remain a
suggestion. The role played by doves in reporting prophecies and helping
heroes has been mentioned above: in Apollonius’ Argonautica, the crew of the Argo takes along a dove in a
cage. They also are featured in several illustrations of the episode of the
capture of the fleece.**35**
The "kikayon"
In the second part of Jonah's story, the word
kikayon is a famous hapax
legomenon which, in its context,
refers to a plant, with later tradition hesitating between a type of gourd and
ricinus communis (castor
oil).**36** Many interesting explanations have been offered, none of them
entirely convincing.**37** No one seems to have noticed, however, that this
word sounds very much like the brew prepared by Medea, kukeon or kukaon (from the verb kukaô, to stir up, to create confusion), in Apollonius'
version and in the Argonautica Orphica.**38** Here, a mysterious potion, a mixture made
of medicinal and dangerous plants,**39** is used by Medea to put to sleep the
serpent or dragon guarding the tree where the fleece was hanging. In
Apollonius, Medea rubs the head of the monster with the potion and sprinkles it
to achieve the same result. In some later (Roman) representations, she is shown
presenting a vial to the serpent coiled around the tree, while Jason, unseen,
grabs the Golden Fleece. The kukaon or kikaon is also the name of the drink of barley gruel and
water, associated with Eleusinian mysteries,**40** where perhaps the role of the
python had been similar to that of the sea monster in ancient versions of the
tradition. The problem is that the kikayon of the Hebrew story is obviously a fast-growing
plant, not a potion or brew. Yet, the Greek magic mixture is clearly made with
pharmacological plants. Furthermore, whatever the Hebrew
kikayon denotes, it acts as an
emetic or aims at making Jonah rid himself of his anger, in a punning parallel
with his disgorgement from the fish. I would like to suggest, then, that the
kikayon of the book of Jonah
may have lost its original meaning but has retained the idea of a magic act,
perhaps together with the emetic or purging virtue of the original, suggested by
the Hebrew sound (wayaqe` in
Jonah 2.11, from the verb
qi`) associated later with
other plants, such as the ricinus. In the Hebrew text also, the dragon has been
reduced to a worm, an annoyance whose night work, however, makes Jonah wish for
death. In the second part of Jonah's story, there is no magician (daughter of a
king) or any dragon to be put to sleep. There is, however, a gleeful and absurd
reduction of the Greek monster to the size of a worm and the fire-breathing of
an irate Jonah whom God attempts to calm down.
THE FUNCTION OF GREEK MOTIFS IN JONAH
It is not surprising in itself that motifs and
characters from a version of the story of the Argonauts would appear in the book
of Jonah, when one considers how widespread they are in the literary (from the
fifth c. BCE) and iconographic record (from the eighth c. BCE) of the whole
Mediterranean region. Furthermore, the Hebrew story is far from being a pale
recasting of Jason's adventures. First of all, the related elements of flight
and storm complicate the picture, in that Semitic versions of this story had
been circulating for an even longer time, and had themselves been borrowed by
the earliest Greek settlers of the Mediterranean. The Greeks seem to have
borrowed a Boreas and sea-monsters at an early date. Textual and pictorial
materials show that Greeks took over stories of sea-monsters from the East in
the early, so-called “orientalizing” period.**41** Behind Jonah's story and its
vestigial echoes of Jason and the Argonauts, there are remains of an older, more
widely told story of a fight between a god and a sea-monster.**42** These
stories all seem to belong to the category of tales of voyages to the
netherworld.**43** Secondly, the creator of Jonah appears to be playing in a
very conscious manner with some of the elements and motifs of the Greek story,
inverting some, laminating others, or fusing them with Hebrew themes on the
basis of linguistic or structural similarities.
One may begin with the complex geography of the
Argonauts' saga, which has been drastically simplified in the story of Jonah,
with only Tarshish and Nineveh mentioned as presumably summarizing the known
world contained between these extremities. And then there is, at least at a
superficial level, the beneficial dove of the Argonauts' tale which is turned
into an occasion of trouble for the sailors of the Hebrew story. At a deeper
level, however, it causes the conversion of the crew, who sacrifice to the
proper god after they have been saved. Throughout the ordeal they act civilly,
even generously, though not heroically, instead of showing the greed and lack of
courage which are their normal attributes, as in the much later and edifying
story of Paul of Tarsus' shipwreck in Acts 27.**44** The storm is not a dangerous moment for
Jonah but rather simply a means to return the hero to the land he should not
have left. Instead of being sent away on a highly risky journey by a jealous or
fretful king figure, he chooses to bring his fate upon himself. The king in the
second part of the story is not a frightening or vengeful character bent on
eliminating or testing the hero or prophet, as are Pelias, Aeetes, or even
Jezebel in Elijah's story. Rather, he is most pliable, a keen listener,
obedient and prompt to repent. The never-sleeping dragon guarding the Golden
Fleece has been miniaturized and become a worm. I have suggested above that
some of its characteristics have been given to Jonah himself, who watches
intently over the city he wishes to see destroyed. Like the dragon preventing
Jason's possession of the wondrous Fleece (a magical remain of a foundational
sacrifice), Jonah fiercely blocks access to divine mercy. He is willing to face
God in hot anger and apparently knowing no reason. The pharmaceutical mixture
which Medea uses to put the monster to sleep has changed in form but retained
its soothing quality for the overheated Jonah. Yet, the leafy
kikayon remains somewhat of a
conundrum. In the later iconography to be mentioned below, Jonah is seen
resting under, or surrounded by, a large-leafed bush which resembles some of the
earlier images of the tree in which Jason finds the Golden Fleece. Perhaps tree
and magic mixture have been associated from the earliest times.
The question now is whether this recasting of the
Greek story has been done simply in jest, or is part of a more complex
structure. The comparison of certain themes present in both stories may throw
some light on this problem. Jason’s calm, contrasted with Aeetes’ anger,
parallels Jonah’s extraordinary passivity. Jason needs assistance at every
crucial turn of the story and appears weak, a kind of anti-hero.**45** But
Jonah’s passivity does not stem from meekness, rather it comes from his extreme
view of prophecy. Medea’s night monologue in Apollonius’
Argonautica 3.771ff., when she
is wavering in her desire to help Jason tame Aeetes' monstrous bulls, presents
interesting parallels to that of Jonah. Perhaps it is not overly speculative to
say that the way in which Apollonius presents hellenism as immensely seductive
to Medea, daughter of a tyrant, has its counterpart in the Hebrew author’s idea
of a natural attraction that pagan sailors, and Nineveh’s king and people feel
for the Jewish God. This appeal has little to do with Nineveh, whose historical
kingship ended at a much earlier time than the composition of this story, but
would make sense in an atmosphere of competition between Hebrew and Greek
cultures. The author might be inverting the image of attraction presented by
Greek civilization and so present foreigners suitably attracted to the Hebrew
divinity when they are Greeks (the sailors?), and stupidly so when they are
Ninevites.
Recent studies of the book of Jonah, while
discovering new layers of meaning in the story, have exposed the complex
structure of the narrative.**46** They reinforce the notion that the work is an
ironic parable, one with a pointed question. The parallels we have detected
between the story of Jonah and that of Jason point even more strongly in the
same direction. To the irony underlined by several commentators,**47** it is
possible to add a new twist, namely that Nineveh encompasses the “Ionians”
also. Nineveh and Yavan sound
similar, as do Yônah the
"dove", Yôniyah the ship, and
Ionia the region. Phonetically as well as mythopoetically, it appears that the
author of the book of Jonah is playing with a variant or variants of Jason's
adventures as told in Greek and other languages, selecting some of its motifs or
sounds and refashioning them for altogether different purposes, all the while
with a view to entertain. The author manipulated a myth which had become alien
and re-elaborated parts of it in order to reflect on and reinforce his own
culture.**48** The hero’s name, a storm caused by a fleeing/northern wind,
uncontentious sailors, a sea-monster swallowing and regurgitating the hero under
divine command, a monster diminished to worm size in the second part, a magic
emetic ––all these serve the author’s meaning.
If it is true that the element of mockery of the
Greeks is part of this story, then all the more reason to set aside the view of
the book of Jonah as a didactic parable teaching that divine compassion knows no
boundaries and is universal.**49** Christian exegetes in particular have often
propounded a universalistic interpretation, put forward by Jerome, for instance,
and especially by Ephrem the Syrian, who had his own neighborly reasons to offer
a literal interpretation and present the Ninevites in a flattering light.**50**
Philo of Alexandria could have been expected to offer this kind of
interpretation but it is absent from his commentaries on Jonah.**51**
In line with tradition, I would argue rather that
the problem posed by God's boundless compassion is the primary subject of this
story. The question is framed in an ironic and even tragic mode, in spite of
the author's apparently jocular manner. The geographical or ethnical
considerations on the bounds of divine compassion which later (Christian)
interpretation found congenial add a new, secondary dimension to the original
story, the main point of which is to highlight a debate or question intrinsic to
Israel. It is the answer to that question, in turn, which may be given
universal significance.
As commentaries have long shown, the book of Jonah
presents a reflection on the dangers of prophecy. In Israel, oracles of doom
had long before given place to conditional oracles, which were better suited to
the vagaries of historical circumstances. But the conditions for belief in
conditional oracles appear to have developed also in the Graeco-Roman world.
Even though on the surface they differ in mode, goals, and significance, a
self-questioning or ironic discourse on prophetic traditions arose in both
cultural areas.**52** Similar questions were raised in Hebrew and Greek stories
regarding the functioning of divine justice and mercy and their mechanism. This
is not to say that the Greek and Hebrew Weltanschauungen of the time were identical. Rather their
differences are to be sought at another level, in the tautness of the question
that the author is asking Israel, as will presently be seen. This tenseness, I
suggest, stems from the structure of the Hebrew faith, in which the dialogue
regarding the mechanisms of history was projected as being conducted with a God
who is creator of the universe, and therefore free and totally gracious, above
any contingency. This divinity might well decide to reverse or change the flow
of nature or history, thus lifting the burden of fatality. From the prophet's
point of view, however, the kind of conditional oracles that the nature of the
divinity required made the dangers of life altogether too
predictable.
Yet, the story of Jonah contains a more poignant
idea than a concern for the prophet's thorny position. If the tale places its
hero Jonah in a rhetoric of prophecy that is problematic, it also implies a
basic questioning of Israel's relation to God. Jonah is apparently caught in a
dilemma between basic tenets of Israel's faith whose consequences the author
exaggerates to bring them into clear conflict. Jonah is shown as trapped
between two extreme ideas: one is the notion of the automaticity, swiftness, and
infinite range of God's justice and anger in response to Israel's failures; the
other is its converse, namely the automaticity, and infinite patience, of divine
compassion.
One may imagine the ancient Hebrew or Judaean
audience of the story smiling at the Ninevites' (or Ionians') expense, for how
could the latter be so dense as to think of divine mercy as remotely possible
for them? Furthermore, how could this compassion be exercised towards people
who, in Israel's estimation, did not even know the boundaries of sinful action
and included in it their domestic herds? Here, there may have been a dark joke
or innuendo, still having force for later Jewish commentators, regarding the
sexual mores of Ninevites (or Greeks/Ionians; it may have been a joke often
reciprocated). But Nineveh is the converse of Israel, where prophetic and
Deuteronomistic traditions would have it that conversion has hardly ever been
completed in the past, or that it has been accomplished by a few rare
individuals, and specifically not by kings, who need repeated warnings in the
normal discourse of prophecy.
The story contains a logical exercise or equation
which can be formulated as follows: If a conversion which is rhetorically and
historically wrong (no effort by the "prophet;" too obedient a king; in Nineveh
the paradigmatic enemy) brings about the immediate and full benefits of divine
mercy, then shouldn't the listeners ask themselves what is the proper dynamics
of conversion and mercy? "How much" conversion is actually necessary, at what
point does mercy "kick in," and what must one do, short of total conversion,
which is actually so impossible that it looks silly? The author's vision of
what a divine determinism would entail is amusing, at least superficially. But
this vision of the world is ironic, in that it questions the listeners' ordinary
notions, which are of a world bound by determinisms of all kinds, yet freed,
even at the most physical level, by the word of God.
In the book of Jonah, physical nature is entirely
removed from the reach of determinism: storm, fish, worm, are all appointed by
divine command. But, and this to me is part of the irony of the book,
determinism is applied to the divine sphere. In Greek stories, on the contrary,
there is considerable fickleness to be found in the Greek gods. So, here too,
the author might be thinking about Greek conceptions of the world, under cover
of anti-ninevism. The lesson of the book, if there is one, is the strengthening
of "ordinary" or common perceptions —I mean ordinary for a listener or reader of
the biblical stories— not for a non-Hebrew, say a Greek, who precisely has these
beliefs, namely that the gods are all powerful, and that nature is essentially
ruled by unpredictable gods. The hidden philosophy of the book, to be derived
from its ironical posture, would be exactly contrary to its surface story and to
popular forms of Greek wisdom. It would be suggesting that there is determinism
in nature, but complete divine freedom.
In Greek mythology and theater, the precautions
taken to keep the heroes away conspire to bring them back to the center of the
drama through a complicated chain of events. The book of Jonah does away with
the niceties of the complex mechanism which Greek drama slowly unfolds and
presents a hero who, though naked and battered, remains proud before his
God.
ECHOES OF JASON IN THE LATER ICONOGRAPHY OF
JONAH
Jonah as naked hero features prominently in later
Christian iconography. Scholars have shown that ancient versions of sea stories
and especially their iconography (for instance combinations of the story of
Heracles and Hermione), were integrated more or less successfully in Christian
retellings and illustrations of Jonah’s story.**53** I suggest that among the
themes re-employed in this iconography, some of the motifs of the Jason cycle
might have an important role which has not been brought to light until now, at
least to my knowledge. Motifs which were common to both stories in the fifth
and fourth centuries BCE (and even before?) are still fused together in the
first centuries of our era. I can indicate only briefly some of the parallels
and adaptations, however, while hoping that a full study of the representations
of Jason and Jonah be undertaken in the future to check the hypothesis.
The transformation of motifs taken from
Graeco-Roman depictions of other heroes and their re-employment in Christian and
Jewish representations of Jonah have long been noted. For instance, it has been
shown that the image on a sarcophagus from Santa Maria Antiqua of a naked Jonah
resting languidly under a vine, closely resembles that of Endymion reclining in
seemingly beatific pleasure, with his right arm stretched behind his
head.**54** Structurally speaking, however, and without dismissing the
aforementioned striking comparison, the presence of a ship, a sea monster to the
left (not a whale or fish), a tree (not a gourd?) above Jonah, with a ram and
two sheep (?) above him, and a woman standing to his right ––all of these
elements make sense as the continuation of the Jason imagery. I propose
therefore that the artist conflated stock images of both Jason and Endymion. I
note also that this paradisiac interpretation of Jonah under the gourd, though
in line with the Jewish interpretation of the sukkah and the Christian idea of resurrection, and
fitting long-standing representations of Endymion and even Jason (there is an
Edenic quality to the wood where the latter finds the Golden Fleece), is
completely contradictory to the sense one gets of Jonah in the Hebrew story,
namely that of an angry and sulking man. Furthermore, in the Biblical story,
the episode of the gourd is placed after Jonah goes to Nineveh and is well
separated from the storm and disgorgement episode. But in the Jewish or
Christian iconography of Jonah, the gourd scene is set close by the ship and
sea-monster or whale, and Nineveh is altogether absent. The simplest
explanation for this juxtaposition is that painters and sculptors were fitting
familiar images from Greek mythology onto Jonah's story.
In one of his letters, Augustine answers, or rather
dodges, a curious question asked by a pagan friend of the Carthage priest
Deogratias, who is writing to the bishop of Hippo for intellectual ammunition he
might use in his discussions with that friend.**55** The question seems to be
occasioned by a representation of Jonah very much like the one described above,
and other similar images in which the ocean adventure and the “gourd” scene are
juxtaposed. The pagan friend wishes to be enlightened about the meaning of the
gourd plant growing above Jonah, who has just been disgorged by the
monster.**56** This pagan man may have heard the biblical story but more
certainly he has seen Jonah represented as vomited by a monstrous sea-creature
on the seaside, probably naked,**57** under the gourd. The scenes of the
vomiting and the gourd could be kept apart, as in the fourth century mosaic at
Aquileia, for instance. Yet there are numerous representations setting both
motifs side by side. One could argue that this proximity was a function of
artistic convenience alone but it makes good sense to see in it the direct
influence of the figurative Jason cycle.
A proper elucidation of the role of the Jason story
in these traditions might help to explain some of the questions that ancient
representations posed for early Christian interpreters and exhortative
preaching. There are curious silences in early Christian teaching regarding,
for instance, the treatment of the episode of the gourd, Jonah’s nakedness and
baldness, which stand out in contrast to the images of Jonah. The latter detail
forms an interesting puzzle: compare Jason on the Cerveteri cup, bearded, with
long wavy and glistening hair, hanging below him like the fleece, and Jonah.
Jason’s lustrous hair is also mentioned by Pindar.**58** Early pictures of
Jonah, likewise, show him long-haired, occasionally bearded. An eastern
Mediterranean marble figure from the second half of the third century CE, for
instance, has a bearded, long-haired and naked Jonah being vomited out of a
sea-monster (part whale?).**59** For the Midrash on Jonah, however, the heat inside the monster was so
intense that Jonah lost his clothes and his hair. But in this case, it may have
been the classical representations of yet another hero, namely Heracles, which
brought about the theme of baldness and nakedness (though, as mentioned in a
note above, nakedness seems to have been a standard component of any image of
shipwrecked victims). As for the gourd usually shown above Jonah, it might have
been part of the stock images used for Jason at a very early stage. In an
Etruscan bronze mirror of the fifth- or fourth-century BCE, a long-haired Jason
(HEIASUN, see plate) emerges from the dragon with sword in his right hand,
fleece in his left, surrounded by what appears to be a broad-leafed plant having
the shape of a vine and bearing fruit which look like melons.**60**
These are only a few of the iconographic parallels
and adaptations. A thorough study of the representations of Jason and Jonah
would show in detail in what way century-old images of Jason were attached to
Jonah in the first centuries CE. Eventually, though, the Christian messianic
interpretations of the Hebrew story asserted their influence and slowly altered
the nature and presentation of the repertory of stock images.
To conclude, I note that the persistence of these
images and themes over the centuries in a wide cultural area is a striking
phenomenon. The cultural bonds between Greece and Israel were stronger than has
been thought sometimes, although the borrowings were made in all directions and
the resulting knots are near inextricable. Yet I hope to have shown that
replacing the stories of Jonah and Jason in the wider context of their
Mediterranean matrix enriches their meaning and leads serendipitously to new
philological observations. Now, the use of widely scattered mythological themes
by the author of the book of Jonah does not necessarily mean that the influence
of Greek language and institutions was very deep in Israel, even in the last
centuries B.C.E.**61** In fact, the author plays with these heroic stories very
much as he questions the Hebrew prophetic accounts. The book might therefore be
interpreted as a chapter in the multi-sided resistance to hellenistic culture.
It is hoped that a more thorough study of the rhetoric of prophecy in Israel and
Greece, together with a fully developed analysis of the iconography of Jason and
Jonah, will yield even more assured results in the future.
**1** See A. Feuillet, "Les sources du livre de
Jonas," Revue biblique 54
(1947) 161-86; P.L. Trible, Studies in the Book of Jonah (Ph.D. Diss., Columbia, 1963) 107-8, 110-12; J.
Sasson, Jonah. A New Translation with Introduction, Commentary, and
Interpretation (The Anchor Bible,
24B; New York: Doubleday, 1990) passim.
**2** 2 See Sasson, op. cit., pp.
331-40.
**3** 3 See A. Feuillet, art. cit., p. 162; E.
Bickerman, Four Strange Books of the Bible (New York: Schocken, 1967) mentions also the
stories of Arion in Herodotus and Heracles’ three day sojourn in a sea cave.
A. Feuillet, after reviewing the possibilities, thinks that the results are
meager and unimportant. P. Trible reviews all previous proposals, op. cit., pp.
127-52.
**4** 4 The most important work is by H. Schmidt:
Jona. Eine Untersuchung zum vergleichenden Religionsgeschichte
(Göttingen, 1907), pp. 22-23.
As the title indicates, this is a broad comparative study which, in the opinion
of Y.M. Duval (in: Le livre de Jonas dans la littérature chrétienne grecque
et latine. Paris: Études
Augustiniennes, 1973) is carried too far. Flasch, Angebliche
Argonautenbilder (Munich: F.
Straub, 1870); Welcker (Alte Denkm˛ler); Radermacher (Mythos und Sage bei den
griechen, Leipzig: R.M. Rohrer,
1938, p. 183; alsoDas Jenseits im Mythos der Hellenen, pp. 67ff.); Kerényi also (in The Heroes of the
Greeks, London: Thames &
Hudson, 1959).
**5** Not in Feuillet or in Sasson. The work of
H. Schmidt (above, note 4) is not mentioned in J. Sasson’s
bibliography.
**6** Abbreviated as LIMC from now on, vol. V, books 1 and 2, see under
Jason.
**7** J. Sasson speaks of "vestiges of tales" but
does not specify their origin (pp. 16-18).
**8** A question most recently addressed by W.
Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press) 1992,
about the archaic period. The book appeared in German in 1984.
**9** Eustathius, Commentarii ad Homeri
Iliadem
pertinentes (M. Van der Valk,
Leiden: Brill, vol. 1, 1971, p.773, lines 15-17).
**10** See Corpus Papyrorum
Judaicarum, vol. 3 (1964), p. 179,
9 mentions. For Cyrenaica, see index in W. Horbury and D. Noy, Jewish
Inscriptions of Graeco-Roman Egypt
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 326. Also: A. Lalonde,
“La Cyrénaïque romaine des origines à la fin des Sévères (96 av. J.-C.–235 ap.
J.-C.),” Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt, vol. II/10.1 (1988), p. 1045. Note the names of
high priests under Antiochos IV: Onias, then his brother Jason, then Menelas.
**11** In Pindar, Pyth. 4.
**12** See The New Encyclopaedia of
Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 2 (Jerusalem/New York: Israel Exploration
Society and Carta; Simon andSchuster, 1993), p. 751.
**13** Apollonius, Argonautica 2.317f.; 2.555f. The use of doves may have been
a most ancient technique. It is not documented in J. Rougé, La marine de
l'antiquité, Paris: P.U.F. (1975),
or in L. Casson, Travel in the Ancient World (London: Allen & Unwin, 1974).
**14** Aeneid 6.190f.
**15** Soph. Trachiniae 169f.; Servius, In Aeneidem 3.466.
**16** Bora is still the name of a northern wind
coming from Dalmatia and causing storms in the Adriatic Sea: J. Rougé, La
marine de l'antiquité, Paris:
P.U.F. (1975) 24. The Boreads are pictured as winged creatures, often naked, as
in LIMC III/1 (1986), pp.
126-33.
**17** 1 Kings 19.10. The whole story of Elijah in 1 Kings
18.20-40.
**18** AO 1155-77.
**19** Herodotus, History 1.4. Parallel evoked by E. Bickerman, among
others (see note 3 above).
**20** bNedarim 38a; PRE 10. Tradition hesitates about the nature of the
payment: Jonah’s passage alone, or the value of the entire cargo, a problem
evident in the difference between MT and LXX, and which puzzled Jerome, In
Ionam 1.3. See Y.M. Duval, Le
livre de Jonas dans la littérature chrétienne grecque et latine (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, vol. 1, 1973) p.
100, n. 158, following L. Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, vol. 6 , p. 349, n. 28.
**21** As noted by J. Sasson,
Jonah, New York: The Anchor
Bible (1990), 141-42.
**22** AO 1157; Apollonius of Rhodes,
Argonautica,
4.580-91.
**23** AO 1159.
**24** AR 2.172-530.
**25** Like Heracles, who fights a sea-monster to
save Hesione, for instance; see E. Bickerman, Four Strange Books of the
Bible, p. 11.
**26** LIMC V/2 (1990), p. 427, no. 30: seventh century scene,
with Jason long-haired and bearded; p. 428, no. 34.
**27** Reproduced in color in P.E. Arias and M.
Hirmer, Le vase grec, Paris:
Flammarion (1962), fig. 147 (Italian original 1962. Also ET, with marked
differences). Also in H. Schmidt, op. cit., p. 23; Kerényi, The Heroes of
the Greeks, fig. 62; now in
LIMC, vol. V/2, p. 428 (fig.
Iason 32).
**28** Flasch, Angebliche
Argonautenbilder (Munich: F.
Straub, 1870), p. 27.
**29** See Laconian
iconography. Check
LIMC on Boreadae.
**30** Angebliche
Argonautenbilder (Munich: F.
Straub, 1870), chapter 3, p. 25. See also Radermacher, Das Jenseits im
Mythos der Hellenen, p. 67. But
see Welcker, Alte Denkm˛ler, p.
378.
**31** "Ships, monsters and Jonah," American
Journal of Archaeology 66 (1962),
294, pl. 78, fig. 7. She is following E. Pfuhl, Malerei und Zeichnung der
Griechen, vol. 3, Munich (1923)
pl. 164, no. 467; and K. Kerényi, The Heroes of the Greeks (1959) fig. 62, pp. 264–65, for a commentary on
the Cerveteri vase.
**32** "A l'intérieur, Athena casquée, armée de
l'égide et de la lance, la chouette dans la main droite, assiste, étonnée, à
l'approche du héros Jason (ijvason) qui sort de la gueule ouverte du dragon."
**33** P.E. Arias and M. Hirmer, Le vase
grec, Paris: Flammarion (1962),
fig. 147 and p. 80 for a brief commentary.
**34** LIMC II/1 (1984) 975-76; II/2 (1984) No. 187,
etc.
**35** A fifth to fourth century BCE Greek
volute-krater features doves in two trees connected with the Jason story:
LIMC V/2 (1990), Iason 17. The
Golden Fleece hangs from an olive-tree, to the left, and a dragon is coiled
around the trunk of an apple-tree (?) to the right.
**36** Note that Aquila and Theodotion
transcribed the word, kikeôna
(Sasson, p. 292).
**37** Surveyed and evaluated by B.P. Robertson,
"Jonah's Qiqayon Plant," ZATW
97 (1985) 390–403.
**38** Not in Pindar, but in several passages of
the version in Apollonius of Rhodes and in the Argonautica
Orphica.
**39** Note also the tradition of fast-growing
trees in AO (?).
**40** See A. Delatte, "Le Cycéon, breuvage
rituel des mystères d'Eleusis," Revue d'Histoire et de Philosophie
Religieuses 32 (1954)
690-748.
**41** K. Shepard, The Fish-Tailed Monster in
Greek and Etruscan Art, New York
and Menasha, Wisc.: Privately printed and G. Banta Co. (1940), 4-9, for mermen
10-11, 19, 43-44 for discussion of the origins of Skylla, a sea-monster popular
in the 5th c. BCE. There is no mention of Jonah in this work. See also G.
Ahlberg–Cornell, Heracles and the Sea-Monster in Attic Black-Figure
Vase-Painting, Stockholm: P.
Åströms Förlag (1984), 17, for Near Eastern influence on Greek art in the middle
of the 7th c. B.C. This author suspects Corinth had a special role in this
cultural transmission in that period. Now see W. Burkert, The Orientalizing
Revolution. Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1992.
**42** See J. Fontenrose, Python. A Study of
Delphic Myth and its Origins.
Berkeley: UC Press (1959) 121–45, esp. 133–34; 143–45.
**43** Fontenrose, ibid., p. 485.
**44** On which see G.B. Miles and G. Trompf,
"Luke and Antiphon: The Theology of Acts 27-28 in the Light of Pagan Beliefs
About Divine Retribution, Pollution, and Shipwreck," Harvard Theological
Review 69 (1976)
259-67.
**45** For Jason as anti-hero, see G. Lawall,
“Apollonius’ Argonautica: Jason as Anti-Hero,” Yale Classical
Studies 19 (1966)
119-69.
**46** Especially J. Magonet, Form and
Meaning: Studies in Literary Techniques in the Book of Jonah (1976); D. L. Christensen, "The Song of Jonah: A
Metrical Analysis," Journal of Biblical Literature 104 (1985) 217-31.
**47** On Jonah as a parody: A. Band,
"Swallowing Jonah: The Eclipse of Parody," Prooftexts 10 (1990), 177–95, who may be exaggerating the
comic effect. Band is in substantial agreement with J. Miles especially, M.
Burrows, B. Halpern and R. Friedman, J.C. Hulbert, J. Ackerman and others. The
parodic interpretation has been strongly opposed by several authors, esp. A.
Berlin.
**48** Cf. E. Gruen, "Cultural Fictions and
Cultural Identity," Transactions of the American Philological
Association 123 (1993)
1-14.
**49** For instance, this is considered the main
point of the story in The New Jerome Biblical Commentary (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990), pp.
580-84.
**50** See E.E. Urbach, "Tshuvat anshey Nineveh"
Tarbiz 20 (1959) pp.
119-20.
**51** Duval, vol 1, p. 77. See F. Siegert,
Drei hellenistisch-jüdische Predigten (Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum NT, vol. 61,
Mohr: Tübingen, 1992).
**52** See E. Bickerman, Four Strange Books of
the Bible (1967), pp. 29-33,
where he explains the evolution of oracles of doom (fata
denuntiativa) and conditional
prophecies.
**53** See important pages in Y.M. Duval, Le
livre de Jonas dans la littérature chrétienne grecque et latine (Paris: Etudes augustiniennes, 1973), esp. pp.
13-19 for texts and 19-39 for figurative art.
**54** T. F. Mathews, The Clash of Gods. A
Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993,
fig. 13, and pp. 30-31 (following Von Sybel, see Mathews’ note 16). A
structurally similar image of Jonah asleep under staked up gourds, with long
hair and no beard, appears on a third century (end) fragment of a sarcophagus
lid in the Louvre museum: see P. Du Bourguet, Early Christian
Art (New York: Reynal &Co.;
William Morrow & Co., 1971), p. 39.
**55** Letter 102.6; see Y.M. Duval, vol. 1, p. 28.
**56** Augustine, Letter 102.6.30: “Quod sibi etiam vult supra euomitum
Ionam cucurbitam natam?”
**57** He mentions the incredible fact that a man
could have been swallowed fully clothed by the fish. Nakedness, however, was
part of the motif of the shipwrecked victim, and applies to Jason as well as to
Jonah.
**58** Pyth. 4.82-83.
**59** P. Du Bourguet, Early Christian
Art, p. 109.
**60** LIMC V/2 (1990), Iason 35; see also H. Schmidt, op.
cit., fig. 5, p. 24.
**61** The book was probably written in the fifth
or fourth c. B.C.E. But as J. Sasson writes (op. cit., p. 328), this book is
not written "in a style favorable to historical inquiry," and is difficult to
date.
