Did God Play a Dirty Trick on Jonah at the End? - The BAS Library
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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > August 1990
Jonah and the Whale

Did God Play a Dirty Trick on Jonah at the End?

By David Noel Freedman

To the modern critical scholar, the Book of Jonah may be a romance, a short fictional delight with a moral. But that’s not what the author—whoever he or she was—intended. According to the author, our hero was an actual historical person, Jonah ben Amittai. Jonah not only has a named father but, as we learn in 2 Kings 14:25, he came from a particular place called Gath-hepher. According to the allotment of the tribes in Joshua 19:13, Gath-hepher is in Galilee. Nobody really knows when the Book of Jonah was composed. That is with all due respect to […]

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Footnotes

1.

B.C.E. (Before the common Era) and C.E. (Common Era) are the scholarly alternate designations corresponding to B.C. and A.D.

2.

In fact, as we learn later, in Jonah 4:2, Jonah did in fact argue; he there says to the Lord: “O Lord: Is this not what I said when I was still in my own country? That is why I fled beforehand to Tarshish.”

3.

See my earlier article, “Who Asks (or Tells) God to Repent?” BR 01:04.

Endnotes

1.

Jerusalem Talmud, Sukkah 5.1 (55a); Pirkei DiRabbi Eliezer, ch. 33.

2.

The Phrase appears in Jonah 4:2 and in Joel 2:13