The Song Of Jonah: A Metrical Analysis*
Duane L. Christensen
American Baptist Seminary & Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA 94704
The psalm of Jonah (2:3–10) has attracted considerable attention in the history of modern literary criticism of the Bible, and most scholars have focused on apparent incongruities between the psalm and the surrounding prose narrative. Some have chosen to interpret these discrepancies by seeing the psalm as an early source on which the story itself was based. The analogy of the Song of Hannah (1 Sam 2:1–10) or of the Song of Moses (Exod 15:1–18) is suggestive to illustrate this particular approach. In both cases there are scholars who see these poems as archaic in nature, ancient sources that have been preserved in later prose contexts which quote them. But if such lyric material was the original source and perhaps the very incentive for drafting the prose story, why did the author not bring the narrative into greater harmony with the psalm? It is this question that, at least from the time of W. DeWette (1817),1 has taken the mainstream of critical discussion in a different direction. The resulting scholarly consensus is still dominantly on the side of those who see Jonah’s psalm as an insertion into an existing narrative, either by the author of the prose account or by some later redactor or editor. H. W. Wolff’s recent popular presentation of the book of Jonah as “A Drama in Five Acts” is illustrative in that he omits the psalm altogether from his presentation.2 An increasing number of scholars, however, are taking issue with this consensus.3 This particular paper is an attempt to further that discussion through an assessment of the relation of the psalm to its immediate prose framework on metrical grounds.The book of Jonah is a profound work of literary art as J. Magonet, in particular, has shown.4 And as Kenneth Muir once put it, “The artist in words must collaborate with the genius of the language in the same way as the sculptor collaborates with the grain and texture of the wood or the markings of the stone.”5 The problem for the biblical scholar is that such an approach, which focuses on the craft of the artist with words, takes one directly into the morass of conflicting opinions about the nature of Hebrew poetry. In a recent assessment of this problem, James Kugel has suggested that we might do well to question the very use of our term “poetry” in the Hebrew Bible.6 He takes this position on two accounts. First, he demonstrates rather forcefully that there is no clear boundary to separate what scholars normally call prose and poetry in the Bible. We are dealing rather with some sort of continuum. Second, Kugel questions the very existence of any meter as such in the poetry of the Hebrew Bible. The history of the elusive quest to find a metrical structure is such that he doubts if any theory of Hebrew meter can ever be demonstrated to the satisfaction of the scholarly community. And, though it is certainly true that few subjects in the history of biblical criticism have generated greater differences of opinion, it remains a fact that few issues have generated more sustained interest.
The time may well be right to synthesize the apparently divergent views of metrical analysis in the light of specific texts. Jerome Walsh has made an important step in this direction in his recent study of Jonah 2:3–10.7 Refusing to join either contemporary camp—of those who count syllables or those who count stress groupings—he uses both approaches. Since the latter turns out to be more useful in his particular rhetorical critical study, it receives primary attention. He is also careful to distance himself from earlier metricists who tended to emend the text rather freely to fit their particular theories. As Walsh put it, “The MT presents a version of that psalm which is available for study without prejudice to arguments for potential textual emendation.”8 I heartily concur with this perspective. This particular study is an attempt to combine two complementary approaches to the assessment of Hebrew meter in relation to the Song of Jonah, without resorting to textual emendation.
It is interesting to note that Eduard Sievers in his monumental study Metrische Studien (1901–1907) included so-called prose texts in developing his particular metrical theory, including Jonah 1–2, where both chapters were treated with the same meticulous care from a metrical perspective.9 Wilhelm Erbt (1907) went even further as he used Sievers’s principles of metrical analysis to divide the entire book of Jonah into two separate literary sources.10 Though Erbt’s conclusions must be rejected, the basic approach itself is worth a second look. When scholars like Wolff describe the book of Jonah as “poetic fiction,”11 they clearly have in mind those very chapters which most scholars designate as prose, since these same scholars have dismissed the psalm of Jonah (2:3–10) as inauthentic.
Though I have subjected the entire book of Jonah to detailed metrical analysis, this particular paper is concerned primarily with the Song of Jonah (chap. 2), where I will attempt to demonstrate that the prose framework of Jonah’s psalm is in fact an integral part of the song itself, particularly from a metrical point of view. This is not to say that there is no difference between chap. 2 and the rest of the book of Jonah in matters of poetic style. Anyone who reads the book with sensitivity feels that he or she has entered a rather different world in 2:3–10 from the rest of the book—a world closely akin to that of the Psalter. As Jonah resumes his journey downward, to the very depths of hell itself, the language in turn soars to lyrical heights. The numerous allusions to various psalms at the beginning and end of Jonah’s psalm can be understood as a literary technique on the part of an author who, perhaps on a subliminal level, is urging the reader to “think Psalter” at this particular point in the narrative. But what is indeed interesting to note is that this difference in language is not marked metrically. There is a metrical boundary separating the psalm from its “prose” framework, but the change in metrical structure is no different from that observed elsewhere in the book of Jonah. Moreover, a number of metrical features suggest that the so called prose framework around Jonah’s psalm is in fact an integral part of the structure of the larger Song of Jonah (2:1–11).
The traditional approach to Hebrew meter remains that of the Ley-Sievers method, which focuses on patterns of word stress within given poetic lines.12 Recently, Jerzy Kurylowicz has criticized this approach suggesting an important modification that will be used in this study.13 As Kurylowicz noted, Sievers was quite right in excluding such factors as “parallelism of members” and other stylistic factors from the domain of Hebrew metrics. As he put it, “Parallelism of members, etc. are adornments proper to poetic style, but must be left out of consideration in the analysis of the metre.”14 This statement deserves some qualification in that it is only with meter in the sense of rhythm in terms of accentual “beats” in a given line that “parallelism of members” as such is not significant. Some aspects of parallelism itself can be described quantitatively through a second metrical approach to be described below. Here it is important simply to describe how Kurylowicz’s approach differs from that of Sievers. By paying careful attention to the diacritical marks of the Masoretic accentual system, Kurylowicz has devised a system of “syntactic-accentual meter.”15 In short, he counts syntactic units rather than individual words. Thus, some independent nouns and verbs lose their accent altogether when considered from a metrical point of view.
A second approach to the study of Hebrew meter in vogue at the present time focuses on the actual length of poetic lines in terms of counting syllables.16 Though this particular approach does produce interesting, and often persuasive, insights into the prosodic structure of some texts, the method itself is in need of refinement.17 Since counting syllables is essentially a means of assessing the actual length of poetic lines rather than the rhythmical manner in which these same lines were spoken (or sung), there is no real reason to see the method of syllable counting as inherently in opposition to that of stress counting. The presence of “parallelism of members” in Hebrew poetry does produce quantitative parallelism, which can often be shown by counting syllables, regardless of how the rhythmic stresses of that particular line were read. Since the Hebrew language makes a distinction between long and short vowels, there is a need to modify such an approach if one hopes to assign a meaningful number to the length of a particular line in terms of the actual amount of time required to speak or sing that line.
The most useful approach to measuring the length of lines in Hebrew poetry is that of counting morae, that is, the length of time required to say the simplest syllable from a phonetic point of view. Though this particular approach to scanning Hebrew poetry has been around a long time, it has not been the subject of serious discussion in recent years. It was a dominant approach in German scholarship from the middle of the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. The most prevalent of the early advocates were J. Alting (1608–79) and J. A. Danz (1654–1727), who gave their names to this approach—namely, the Alting-Danzian System, which survived into the nineteenth century.18 B. Spinoza (1677) was an advocate of this approach, as were such scholars as H. B. Starke (1705), J. W. Meiner (1748, 1757) and J. F. Hirt (1771).19 Nineteenth-century “Metriks” who counted morae included J. Bellermann (1813), J. Saalschütz (1825) and Hubert Grimme (1896–97, 1903).20 The basic problem with all of these early approaches to counting morae is that their systems were much too complex and overly refined. The system evolved into three and then four major categories which took into account the consonantal environment of each vowel.
When I was first introduced to counting morae two years ago by James Hoard, who has used this approach in scanning modern Japanese poetry, my first question was, “What do I do with the shewa? Is it a half mora?” His response was immediate: “Don’t overrefine the system. Two categories are sufficient—long and short.” I have since learned of a similar counting system in Indian poetry based on the concept of mātrās (“instants”) with the same long versus short vowel distinction.21 In modern languages that make a significant distinction between long and short vowels, it is sufficient to distinguish vowels into phonetically short and long categories, assigning a count of one for the former and two for the latter. The same holds for biblical Hebrew. There is no need to take into account the consonants as such; nor is there any reason to break down the possibilities into the four categories commonly listed.
The system of counting morae is foundational to the present analysis. It is by this means that the essential prosodic units were determined and the boundaries between the larger groupings of these binary units ascertained. It is at this point that the syntactic-accentual method of Kury-lowicz was useful in determining the rhythmic meter as such. The two approaches were found to complement each other. Together they make up a system that was the basis of a structural analysis of the entire book of Jonah, which is indeed remarkable in its simplicity as well as in its beauty.22 A surprising result of the analysis as such was a fresh glimpse into some of the theological concerns of the author of the book of Jonah as reflected in the architectural design of the book taken as a whole.
The following is a translation and transliteration of the Song of Jonah (2:1–11) together with a summary of the metrical analysis:23
The Song of Jonah (2:1–11)
A A Great Fish “Houses” Jonah (2:1–2) [4:4: 4]
| { | 12 wayěman YHWH / dāg gādôl / | (1) Now YHWH appointed / a Great Fish / |
2
| } | |||||||||||
| 9 liblōa‘ / ’et-yônâ // | To swallow / Jonah. // |
2
| |||||||||||||
| { | 13 wayhî yônâ bim ‘ê haddag / | And Jonah was / in the belly of the fish / |
2
| } | |||||||||||
| 9 šělōšâ yāmîm | three days, / |
1
| |||||||||||||
| { | 10 ûšlōšâ lêlôt // | and three nights. // |
1
| ||||||||||||
| 9 wayyitpallēl yônâ / | (2) And Jonah prayed / |
1
| } | ||||||||||||
| { | 9 ’el-YHWH ’ĕlōhayw // | to YHWH his God, / |
1
| ||||||||||||
| 9 mimmĕ‘ ê haddāgâ // | from the belly of the fish; // |
1
| |||||||||||||
| 4 wayyō’ mer / | (3) And he said: / |
1
| |||||||||||||
B Jonah’s Prayer from Sheol: a Lament (2:3) [3:3]
| 17 qārā’ tî miṣṣārâ lî /’el-YHWH / | “I called out in my distress / to YHWH; / |
2
| } | |||||
| { | 7 wayya‘ ănēnî // | And he answered me. // |
1
| |||||
| 10 mibbeṭen šĕ’ôl / šiwwa‘ tî / | From the womb of Sheol / I cried for help; / |
2
| } | |||||
| 9 šāma‘ tā qǒlî // | You heard my voice. // |
1
| ||||||
C Jonah’s Descent from YHWHs Presence (2:4–5) [3:3: 3:3]
| 13 wattašlîkēnî měṣûlâ / | (4) You cast me toward the depth—/ |
1
| } | |
| 6 bilebab yammîm / | into the heart of the seas; / |
1
| ||
| 13 wĕnāhār yĕsōbĕbēnî // | Where River swirled about me. // |
1
| ||
| { | 6 kol-mis̆bārêk(a) / | All your breakers, / |
1
| } |
| 13 wĕgallêk(a) / ‘ālay ‘ābarû // | And your waves / passed over me.” // |
2
| ||
| { | 9 wa’ ănî ’āmartî / | (5) And then I said: / |
1
| } |
| 11 nigrašti / minneged ‘ênêk(a) // | “I am driven away / from your? presence; // |
2
| ||
| 9 ’ak / ’ôsîp lĕhabbîṭ / | Yet / I persist in looking / |
2
| } | |
| 6 ’el-hêkal qodšek(a) // | to your holy Temple. // |
1
|
D The Final Descent to the “Roots of the Mountains” (2:6a–7a) [3:3]
| { | 12 ’ăpāpûnî mayim / ‘ad-nepeš / | (6) Waters choked me / to death; / |
2
| } | |
| 11 tĕhôm yĕsōbĕbēnî // | The Abyss swirled about me. // |
1
| |||
| { | 11 sûp ḥābûš lĕrō’ sî // | Weeds tangled about my head; // |
1
| } | |
| 8 lĕqiṣbê hārîm / | (7) To the roots of the mountains / |
1
| |||
| 5 yāradtî / | I went down. / |
1
| |||
C’ Jonah’s Ascent “from the Pit” (2:7b–8) [3:3: 3:3]
| { | 5 hā’ āreṣ / | The netherworld, / |
1
| } |
| 14 bĕriḥêha ba‘ădî / lě‘ôlām // | With its bars closed upon me / forever. // |
2
| ||
| { | 6 watta‘al miššaḥat / | But you brought me up from the Pit / |
1
| } |
| 10 ḥayyay / YHWH ’ĕlōhāy // | alive, / O YHWH, my God! // |
2
| ||
| { | 11 bĕhit ‘aṭṭēp ‘ālay / napšî / | (8) When my soul-life had expired / within me, / |
2
| } |
| 9 ’et-YHWH zākartî // | I remembered YHWH. // |
1
| ||
| 15 wattābô’ ’ēlêk(a) / tēpillātî / | And my prayer / came to you—/ |
2
| } | |
| 6 ’el-hêkal qodšek(a) // | to your holy Temple. // |
1
|
B’ Jonah’s Prayer in YHWH’s “Temple”: a Thanksgiving (2:9–10) [3:3:3]
| { | 10 mĕs̆ammĕrîm / hablê-šāw’ // | (9) Those who cling / to empty nothings, // |
2
| } |
| 9 ḥasdām ya‘ǎzōbû // | Abandon their covenant trust. // |
1
| ||
| 11 wa’ ănî / bĕqôl tôdâ / | (10) But I, / with the voice of thanksgiving, / |
2
| } | |
| { | 6 ’ezbĕḥâ-lāk / | Let me sacrifice to you. / |
1
| |
| 13 ’ăšer nādartî / ’ăšallēmâ // | What I have vowed / let me pay; // |
2
| } | |
| 11 yĕšû‘ātâ la-YHWH // | Salvation belongs to YHWH!” // |
1
|
A’ The Fish Returns Jonah to Dry Land (2:11) [2:2]
| 10 wayyō’ mer / YHWH laddāg // | (11) And YHWH / spoke to the fish; // |
2
| ||
| 10 wayyāqē’ ’et-yônâ / | And it vomited out Jonah, / |
1
| } | |
| 7 ’el-hayyabbāšâ // | upon the dry land. // |
1
|
In terms of mora count, the Song of Jonah falls into two equal halves: vv 1–5 (213 morae) and vv 6–11 (210 morae). And within these two major sections there is still further symmetry in length as shown in the following table:
vv 1–3 (I)
|
127 morae
|
vv 6–8 (III)
|
123 morae
|
vv 4–5 (II)
|
86 morae
|
vv 9–11 (IV)
|
87 morae
|
Total
|
213 morae
|
Total
|
210 morae
|
| { | 12 ’ăpāpûnî mayim / ‘ad-nepš / | (6) Waters choked me / to death; / | 2 | } | |
| 11 tĕhôm yĕsōbĕbēnî // | The Abyss swirled about me; // | 1 | |||
| 11 sûp ḥābûš lĕrō’ šî // | Weeds tangled about my head. // | 1 | |||
| { | 8 lĕqiṣbê hārîm / | (7) To the roots of the mountains / | 1 | } | |
| 5 yāradtî / | I went down. / | 1 | |||
| { | 5 hā’ āreṣ / | The netherworld, / | 1 | ||
| 9 bĕriḥêha ba‘ădî / | With its bars closed upon me—/ | 1 | |||
| { | 5 lĕ‘ ôlām // | Forever! // | 1 | } | |
| 6 watta‘ al miššaḥat / | But you brought me up from the Pit / | 1 | |||
| 10 ̣ḥayyay / YHWH ’ĕlōhāy // | Alive, / O YHWH, my God! // | 2 | |||
| { | 11 bĕhit‘ aṭṭēp ‘ālay / napšî / | (8) When my soul-life had expired / within me, / | 2 | } | |
| 9 ’et-YHWH zākart̂ // | I remembered YHWH. // | 1 | |||
| { | 15 wattābô’ ’ēlêk(a) / tĕpillātî / | And my prayer / came to you—/ | 2 | } | |
| 6 ’el-hêkal qodšek(a) // | to your holy Temple. // | 1 | |||
A close reading of the text will lend further support to the prosodic analysis as such. As Walsh has noted, the two internal sections of this poem are delineated by rhetorical markers.24 At the beginning of each section we have similar verbal phrases: wĕnāhar yĕsōbĕbēnî (v 4a) and tĕhôm yĕsōbĕbēnî (v 6a). The end of sections II and III is marked by the identical phrase ’el hêkal qodšek(a). In a similar manner the outside sections I and IV are also marked, but in a chiastic manner. Section I ends with the term qôlî (v 3c), which is stressed at the beginning of section IV in bĕqôl tôdâ (v 10a). The poem begins with YHWH appointing the Great Fish to swallow Jonah (v 1a) and ends with YHWH talking to the fish, which then vomited Jonah onto the dry land (v 11)—a most fitting inclusion.
The chiastic structure of the poem may be outlined as follows:
| 2:1–2 | A YHWH appointed a Great Fish to swallow Jonah. |
| 2:3 | B Jonah’s prayer from Sheol: a lament |
| 2:4–5 | C Though driven from YHWH’s presence, |
| Jonah continued to look to his holy Temple. | |
| 2:6–7b | D Jonah’s descent “to the roots of the mountains” |
| 2:7c | D′ Jonah’s ascent “from the Pit” |
| 2:8 | C′ Though his “soul-life had expired,” |
| Jonah continued to turn to YHWH in his holy “Temple.” | |
| 2:9–10 | B′ Jonah’s prayer in YHWH’s “Temple”: a thanksgiving |
| 2:11 | A′ At YHWH’s word the fish vomited Jonah. |
The (C) elements of the chiastic structural design of Jonah 2 focus on the repetition of the phrase ’el hêkal qodšek(a), but one should notice how differently the two phrases are to be understood. On the one hand, Jonah is wistfully looking to a specific Temple as he experiences the absence of YHWH; for that Temple is the symbol of God’s presence (2:5). But in the second instance YHWH himself has just appeared and the “House of the Fish” has thus become a surrogate “Temple” of YHWH (2:8). This is why the prayer of lament out of distress (2:3) has now become a prayer of thanksgiving (bĕqôl tôdâ, 2:9). Early Christian artists, who uniformly portrayed Jonah entering the sea monster head first, intuited the decisive change within the “House of the Fish” when they always portrayed him being expelled head first.27 It was inside the fish that Jonah was turned around, or “born again,” as some would choose to put it. The fish itself was not an agent of destruction so much as a vehicle of redemptive change. The fish which YHWH had appointed to swallow Jonah (2:1) also responded to YHWH’s word by vomiting him onto the dry land (2:11). Once Jonah left the vessel at the hands of the sailors in 1:15, the sea (yām) ceased its “raging” and the term never appears again in the story. The fish protected Jonah from the ravages of the sea, and that same fish restored him to dry land and to a resumption of his commission to enter another “House of the Fish” (Nineveh), beyond the realm of the sea.28
The chiastic structure of the psalm in relation to its content is suggested also by another line of evidence. Magonet has studied the relation of Jonah’s psalm to the Psalter in terms of what he sees to be specific quotations.29 He locates sixteen such allusions (involving some thirty possible sources), nine of which appear in vv 3–6a and seven in vv 7b–10—but none in the center.30 Jonah leaves the familiar world of the Psalter in vv 6b–7a:
The Abyss swirled about me.
Weeds tangled about my head.
To the roots of the mountains I went down.
The netherworld with its bars closed upon me forever.
In these lines there are no allusions to the Psalter. At the very point where Jonah makes his final descent to hell itself, all contact with the familiar world of the psalms ceases, at least for the moment. As Magonet put it, “In parallel to the situation he describes, the sudden change from familiar to unfamiliar language takes one into the depths of a frightening new world, far from God, where only the sudden intervention of God Himself can restore the lost soul.”31 As soon as God enters the picture to bring Jonah’s “soul-life up from the Pit” (2:7c), the reader once again enters the familiar world of the Psalter with increasingly frequent allusions. Walsh described this same phenomenon in terms of what he calls “distancing” in the sense of spatial movement away from the presence of YHWH.32 But Magonet’s analysis shows the concentric design of this movement, which is conveyed in the very distribution of allusions to the Psalter. It is a bit like a technique used by Shakespeare in Othello where he reproduced almost perfect Greek iambic pentameter until the point at which Othello goes insane. And at that precise moment the meter dissolves and the reader (or hearer) is left with an uneasy feeling that something is wrong, even if he or she knows nothing about the intricate world of Greek metrical structures.33 Here in the narrative of Jonah, the reader (or hearer) who is familiar with Israel’s lyric tradition is made aware that Jonah has slipped beyond the pale in his flight from YHWH’s presence (cf. 1:3 where the phrase “away from YHWH” appears as the outer elements of a chiastic structure at the outset of Jonah’s flight). The stages of Jonah’s descent in chap. 2 are actually unique. As Magonet put it:
Every other such description in the Psalter consists only of a series of synonymous phrases, any of which are interchangeable, but no other consecutive descent is described. The significance of this is two-fold. Once again it demonstrates the uniqueness of this “psalm” and the unlikelihood of it being taken from a standard collection of such material. Secondly it displays essentially a narrative technique that has organised the symbolic terminology of the “underworld” into a coherent pattern of the continuing descent, and is thus stylistically the same as the form chosen by the author for the book as a whole.34
At two other points the content of Jonah’s psalm suggests verbal awareness of the narrative in chap. 1. In 2:10 the terms ’ezbĕḥâ (“let me sacrifice”) and nādartî (“I have vowed”) echo the content of 1:16b, where the sailors offered sacrifice (wayyizbĕḥû zebaḥ) and made vows (wayyiddĕrû nĕdārîm). And the prosodic structure of 2:3 suggests the possibility of the so-called pivot pattern, or perhaps an even more complex instance of paronomasia involving two different meanings of the roots ‘nh and qr’:
| qārā’ tî miṣṣārâ lî ’ el YHWH | I called in my distress to YHWH, |
| wayya‘ănēnî | And he answered/afflicted me. |
| mibbeṭen šĕ’ ôl šiwwa‘ tî | From the womb of Sheol I cried for help. |
| s̆āma‘tā qôlî | You heard my voice. |
Still further evidence of the integrity of chap. 2 is the close relation to chap. 3. As Magonet has noted, chaps. 2 and 3 of the book of Jonah “are constructed to be mirror images of each other. The general relationship between them can be clearly expressed in the general formula that whereas Jonah (in chapter 2) descends in a step-wise manner into the depths (both geographical and spiritual), the people of Nineveh rise in a step-wise manner to the heights.”36 The relation between these two chapters is perhaps even more intricately developed than Magonet realized. For a prosodic analysis of chap. 3 reveals a rather similar chiastic structure to that observed in chap. 2 with the renewal of Jonah’s commission to enter Nineveh, that Great City (3:1–2), and Jonah’s “repentance” (3:3–4) falling between the two parallel structures. Chap. 3:5–10 may be outlined as follows:
| 3:5 | A | Nineveh’s repentance |
| 3:6 | B | The king’s repentance |
| 3:7–8 | C | The king’s decree: “Do not be evil (’l yr‘ w)!” |
| 3:9 | B´ | The king’s hope that God may repent |
| 3:10 | A´ | God’s repentance: he did not do the “evil” (hārā‘ â) he intended. |
| hā’ādām wĕhabbĕhēmâ | Human beings and beasts, |
| habbāqār wĕhaṣṣō’ n | Cattle and sheep— |
| ’al yiṭ‘ămû mĕ’ûmâ | They shall not taste anything. |
| ’al yir‘û | They shall not graze/be evil! |
| ûmayim ’al yištû | And water they shall not drink. |
| wĕyitkassû śaqqîm | And they shall don sackcloth, |
| hā’ ādām wĭhabbĕhēmâ | Human beings and beasts. |
3:8 wĕyašūbû ’iš middarkô hārā‘âr
3:10 šābû middarkam hārā‘â wayyinnāḥem hā’ĕlōhîm ‘al hārā‘â
4:1 wayyēra‘ ’el yônâ rā‘â gĕdôlâ
4:2 wĕniḥām ‘al hārā‘â
Both chaps. 2 and 3 portray curious theological reversals. In chap. 2 Jonah is an anti-Moses figure of sorts. Whereas Moses ascended to the top of the mountain to encounter God, Jonah descended to the roots of the mountains for an unexpected theophany. In chap. 4 still further motifs are picked up which tie Jonah to Elijah and the story of his theophany on Mount Horeb. Like Elijah, Jonah too asks God that he might die (cf. 1 Kgs 19:4 and Jonah 4:3, 8). Both prophets sit down (wayyēšeb) beneath a desert plant after a journey of a day (1 Kgs 19:4 and Jonah 3:4 and 4:6), to receive an unexpected message from God. And both individuals had lain down and had gone to sleep (wayyiškab wayyîšan/wayyērādam—cf. 1 Kgs 19:5 and Jonah 1:5) before receiving that message. Elijah was told a second time by the “angel of YHWH” to journey forty days to encounter God on the holy mountain (1 Kgs 19:8). Jonah encountered YHWH at the “roots of the mountains” and, after his theophany, was told a second time to enter Nineveh, where his message was focused on forty days (Jonah 3:4). Thus it might be better, perhaps, to describe Jonah as an anti-Elijah figure, Elijah in turn being a Moses figure.
The king of Nineveh, on the other hand, becomes a proclaimer of “Torah” of sorts when he urges the people (and perhaps Jonah as well) to turn from evil (3:7–8). Nineveh repented (3:5–7a) in hopes that God would “repent” as well (3:9). Their hopes were well founded for God did change his mind and did not do the “evil” he had intended to do to Nineveh (3:10). But now a Great Evil came upon Jonah (4:1), who stood in need of much greater repentance than he had shown in 3:3–4. The nature of this repentance on the part of Jonah is the subject of the concluding chapter of the book. It is Jonah’s anger that is evil, and herein lies a profound message to any sensitive reader of this delightful narrative poem.
There are limits to anger. Beyond a certain point anger becomes a Great Evil, and Jonah had crossed that line. Anger is permissible only insofar as it can also include compassion. This is indeed a difficult lesson to learn. For we all know how hard it is truly to hear the words of that One who personified such compassion and who was also described as someone “greater than Jonah,” when he said:
Love your enemies.
Do good to those who hate you.
Bless those who curse you.
Pray for those who treat you badly.
(Luke 6:27–28 JB)
And is that not at least one of the primary messages of the narrative poem we call the book of Jonah?[1]
* A preliminary draft of this paper was presented in the Biblical Hebrew Poetry Section of the SBL meetings in New York on 21 December 1982. The final draft was written while in residence at the École biblique in Jerusalem and was presented on 26 January 1983 in the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for a seminar on the Bible as literature under the direction of Shemaryahu Talmon and Menahem Haran. I am grateful to the members of this seminar for their criticism and suggestions and especially to Jack Sasson for sharing so generously his present research on the Hebrew text of the book of Jonah.
1 W. M. L. DeWette, Lehrbuch der historisch-kritischen Einleitung in kanonischen und apocryphischen Bücher des A. T. (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1817) 298, cited by G. Landes in Int 21 (1967) 3.
2 H. W. Wolff, Jonah: Church in Revolt (St. Louis: Clayton, 1978).
3 J. S. Ackerman, “Satire and Symbolism in the Song of Jonah,” in Traditions in Transformation: Turning Points in Biblical Faith (ed. B. Halpern and J. Levenson; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1981) 213–46; L. C. Allen, The Books of Joel, Obadiah, Jonah and Micah (NICOT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976) 175–235; G. C. Cohn, Das Buch Jona im Lichte der biblischen Erzählkunst (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1969); T. E. Fretheim, The Message of Jonah (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1977); A. Jepsen, “Anmerkung zum Buche Jona,” Wort-Gebot-Glaube: Walter Eichrodt Zum 80. Geburtstag (ATANT 59; Zurich: Zwingli, 1970) 297–305; O. Kaiser, “Wirklichkeit, Möglichkeit und Vorurteil: ein Beitrag zum Verständnis des Buches Jonas,” EvT 30 (1967) 91–103; G. M. Landes, “The Kerygma of the Book of Jonah,” Int 21 (1967) 3–31; J. Magonet, Form and Meaning: Studies in Literary Techniques in the Book of Jonah (BEvT 2; Bern and Frankfort/M.: Lang, 1976); J. Rosenberg, “Jonah and the Prophetic Vocation,” Response 22 (1974) 23–26; T. S. Warshaw, “The Book of Jonah,” in Literary Interpretations of Biblical Narratives (Nashville: Abingdon, 1974) 191–207.
4 J. Magonet, Form and Meaning.
5 Kenneth Muir, Introduction to Macbeth (London: Methuen, 1951) xxiii–xxiv.
6 J. Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and Its History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981).
7 J. T. Walsh, “Jonah 2,3–10: A Rhetorical Critical Study,” Bib 63 (1982) 219–29.
8 Ibid., 219.
9 E. Sievers, Metrische Studien, (Leipzig: Teubner, 1901) 1. 482–85.
10 W. Erbt, Elia, Elisa, Jona: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des IX. und VIII. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig: E. Pfeiffer, 1907).
11 H. W. Wolff, Jonah: Church in Revolt, 40.
12 For a survey of this particular approach see W. H. Cobb, A Criticism of Systems of Hebrew Metre: An Elementary Treatise (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905), esp. chap. IV, “Ley and Budde,” 83–107; and chap. VIII, “Sievers and the Anapaest,” 169–84. Sievers built on the earlier work of Julius Ley, hence the familiar designation, “the Ley-Sievers method.”
13 J. Kurylowicz, Studies in Semitic Grammar and Metrics (London: Curzon, 1973); and Metrik und Sprachgeschichte (Wroclaw: Z. Narodowy, 1975). For a convenient summary and illustration of this approach see T. Longman, “A Critique of Two Recent Metrical Systems,” Bib 63 (1982) 230–54.
14 J. Kurylowicz, Studies in Semitic Grammar and Metrics, 176.
15 The term used here is that of T. Longman, Bib 63 (1982) 238.
16 See T. Longman, “Critique,” 232–38, for a convenient summary of this approach, which has been associated with F. M. Cross, D. N. Freedman, and their students.
17 The most common objection to this method of scansion remains that of the frequent emendation of the text practiced by most adherents. Though continuing to count syllables, D. N. Freedman has taken a stand against such emendation and has turned to statistical approaches to explore structural patterns with minimal alteration of the MT. See in particular “The Poetic Structure of the Framework of Deuteronomy 33,” in The Bible World: Essays in Honor of Cyrus H. Gordon (New York: Ktav, 1980) 25–46 and my response in Bib 65 (1984) 382–89.
18 For a brief discussion of this period see B. Pick, “Hebrew Study among Jews and Christians,” BSac 42 (1885) 490–93, where the following works are cited: Joh. Alting, Fundamenta punctationis linguae sanctae (1654), which introduced the systema morarum; and Joh. Andr. Danz, Compendium gramm. hebraeo-chald. (Frankfurt: Brönner, 1699), which presents the systema trium morarum. I am grateful to Walter Bodine for this reference.
19 B. Spinoza, Compend. grammat. hebr. (Amsterdam, 1677); H. B. Starke, Lux grammat. ebr. (Bremen, 1701); Johann Werner Meiner, Die wahren Eigenschaften der Hebräischen Sprache (Leipzig; Breitkopf, 1748); and Auflösung der vornehmsten Schwierigkeiten der hebr. Sprache (Leipzig, 1757); Johann Friedrich Hirt, Syntagma observationum philologico-criticarum ad linguam sacram Veteris testamenti pertinentium (Jena: Cröker, 1771).
20 J. J. Bellermann, Versuch über die Metrik der Hebräer (Berlin: Maurer, 1813); J. L. Saalschütz, Von der Form der hebr. Poesie (Königsberg, 1825); H. Grimme, “Abriss der biblisch-hebräischen Metrik,” ZDMG 50 (1896) 529–84; 51 (1897) 683–712; and “Gedanken über hebräische Metrik,” Vierteljahrsschrift für Bibelkunde, 1 (1903) 1–14.
21 See V. P. Vauk, “Poetics and Genre-typology in Indian Folklore,” in Studies in Indian Folk Traditions (New Delhi: Ramesh Jain, 1979) 38–47. I am grateful to Sue Clark, one of my students, for this reference.
22 I plan to publish shortly two related studies, “The Book of Jonah as a Narrative Poem,” and “Chiastic Structures in the Book of Jonah,” which will present the metrical and structural analysis of the entire book of Jonah in detail.
23 In this particular study I have chosen to accept the MT as it stands without emendation, including the major disjunctive marks of the Masoretic accentual system. The only exception is the pausal form ‘ābārû at the end of vs 4, which is read ‘ābarû since the term falls at the end of the first, and not the final, element in a four-part structure in terms of mora count. There is a major problem regarding second person masculine singular pronominal suffixes, since the use of the final kaph in the MT suggests that the Masoretes normalized the longer-kā for what may have been a dialectical variant. E. Sievers rejected the longer form and read instead *-ak after singular nouns and *-êk after plural nouns (Metrische Studien, 1. 316–17). P. Kahle amassed an enormous amount of evidence to support a similar conclusion in The Cairo Geniza (London: Oxford University Press), 95–102. F. M. Cross and D. N. Freedman presented still further arguments for the same conclusion in Early Hebrew Orthography: A Study of the Epigraphic Evidence (AOS 36; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952) 55, 65–66. For this study I have chosen to vocalize such forms -ek(a) when a yodh does not appear with the suffix and -êk(a) when the yodh is present. In both cases the final syllable, indicated by the parentheses, is not counted on the mora count.
24 Walsh, “Jonah 2, 3–10,” 220.
25 J. Ackerman, “Satire and Symbolism,” 229–35.
26 Note the repetition of this unusual root in 1:6 (nirdām), where it is apparently used in a vocative sense, “O sleeper,” as suggested by Jack Sasson (private communication).
27 On portrayals of Jonah in early Christian art, see J. Fink, Bildfrömmigkeit und Bekenntnis (Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau, 1978) 71–73; O. Mitius, Jonas auf den Denkmälern des christlichen Altertums (Freiburg: Mohr, 1897); J. Speigl, “Das Bildprogramm des Jonasmotivs in der Malerei der römischen Katakomben,” RQ 73 (1978) 1–15; W. Wischmeyer, “Die vorkonstantinische christliche Kunst in Neuen Lichte: Die Cleveland-Statuetten,” VC 35 (1981) 253–87.
28 F. C. Baur (“Der prophet Jonas, ein assyrisch-babylonisches Symbol,” Zeitschrift für die historische Theologie 7 [1837] 88–114) argued that the name Nineveh means “Fischstadt.” More recently E. A. Speiser has pointed out that the cuneiform texts sometimes use a pseudo-logographic form Ninā for the term Nineveh (“Nineveh,” IDB 3. 551–53). The sign NINA (AB+ḪA) combines two signs, that of an enclosure (AB) with a fish (ḪA) inside it. As Speiser put it, “This particular variant must have given rise to considerable popular tradition, which in turn left its mark on more than one subsequent tradition” (p. 552). It is hence possible to interpret the term Nineveh as meaning “enclosure/house of (the) fish.”
29 J. Magonet, Form and Meaning, 44–50.
30 Ibid., 49–50.
31 Ibid., 49.
32 J. Walsh, “Jonah 2, 3–10,” 226.
33 I owe this observation to Harold Ridlon of Bridgewater State College in Bridge water, Massachusetts.
34 J. Magonet, Form and Meaning, 40–41.
35 The author has provided other signals to cause the reader/hearer to become more attentive to details at this particular point, for the syntax is somewhat peculiar. Not only does the poet shift abruptly from third to second person; he also shifts from a converted imperfect form to the perfect and immediately back to a converted imperfect in the following word (wattašlîkēnî, 2:4).
36 J. Magonet, Form and Meaning, 60.
37 For a more detailed discussion of this passage see my article “Anticipatory Paronomasia in Jonah 3:7–8 and Genesis 37:2,” RB (1983) 261–63.
[1] Duane L. Christensen, "The Song of Jonah: A Metrical Analysis", Journal of Biblical Literature 104 (1985): 217-31 ( ed. Victor Paul Furnish;Decatur, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 1985), 217-31.
See: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3260964
See: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3260964
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