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Courtesy Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund.

ON THE COVER: Jonah, arms raised triumphantly, slithers free of a serpentine beast in this third-century A.D. marble sculpture from Asia Minor. The prophet—who fled from his mission to Nineveh, was devoured by a great fish and then vomited out after three days—has been a favorite subject of artists down through the centuries. James Limburg, in “Jonah and the Whale:Through the Eyes of Artists,” surveys a variety of works, each a distinctive and insightful representation of events in the Book of Jonah. On the same subject, David Noel Freedman, in “Did God Play a Dirty Trick on Jonah at the End?” explains his new view of Jonah’s conflict with God over repentance leading to forgiveness.