Reading Jonah

I’ve always felt a special connection to the Book of Jonah, which is read in its entirety during the Afternoon Service on Yom Kippur. Partially, that must have to do with the fact that I have been honored every single year of my service to Shelter Rock by being asked to chant the book aloud to the congregation. And partially it has to do with my life-long affinity for the books of Herman Melville, and particularly Moby Dick, the greatest of all whale stories in all literature. (I’m even a fan of Ron Howard’s underrated 2015 movie about the incident that Melville fictionalized in his novel, In the Heart of the Sea. Underrated in my personal opinion, that is.) But it’s not just about the honor, which I have always accepted gratefully—it’s also about the story itself, which is surely one of the most misunderstood of all biblical tales. And it’s specifically the whale’s role that’s the least often gotten right.

First of all, it’s not exactly a whale that swallows Jonah down alive. The text does indeed reference Jonah being swallowed down and then puked out by a sea creature, but the swallower-down or the puker-out is referenced merely as “a fish” or, once, as a “big fish.” Far more interesting, although ultimately inexplicable to me, is that the (big) fish appears to be a gender-fluid creature, called a dag (that is, a male fish) three times and a dagah (that is, a female fish) once. What that’s all about, if it is about anything at all, I have no idea. But my point is that it’s always just a fish, never a whale. Plus, whales are mammals, not fish at all! Of course, it seems highly unlikely the ancients were sufficiently sophisticated ichthyologists to have seized the difference between sea creatures who are technically fish and those who aren’t. And there are denizens of the deep popularly called whales that actually are fish, for example, the so-called “whale shark” that has a mouth more than huge enough to swallow a normal size prophet.

But Jonah’s fish was definitely not a whale shark. For one thing, the esophagus of the whale shark is only a few inches in diameter—so even if Jonah somehow ended up in a whale shark’s mouth, he could never have made it all the way down to its stomach. And the book specifically says that Jonah was “in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.”

The blue whale, which can weigh in at 200 tons and the adults of which species can grow to more than 100 feet in length, is a true behemoth. And it actually does have an esophagus that is wide enough, barely, for a man to slither down through. But there are no blue whales in the Mediterranean Sea and the author of Jonah was certainly not enough of a mariner to have explored the oceans and seas of the world other than the Mediterranean. The fin whale, on the other hand, actually does inhabit the Mediterranean and is a species with which people in ancient Israel could surely have been familiar. But they too have a narrow esophagus, too narrow to swallow someone down. And so we are left with the biggest, baddest whale of them all: the sperm whale, of which Moby Dick himself is the most famous literary example. To read a clever on-line essay by Christopher Eames, a New Zealander who blogs for the Times of Israel, that details all of these possibilities and ends up focused on the sperm whale as the most likely candidate to be Jonah’s “great fish,” click here.

But the whale isn’t the point, not really. For one thing, when Jonah composes his great psalm that is the 2^nd chapter of the Book of Jonah, the prophet perceives his near-death experience as one of nearly drowning in the sea, not of being eaten by a monster: “You cast me into the depths, / Into the heart of the sea, / The floods engulfed me; / All Your breakers and billows / Swept over me.” And a few lines later, he says even more clearly that he almost drowned: “The waters closed in over me, / The deep engulfed me. / Weeds twined around my head.”

And now we get to the point: God didn’t send the great fish to terrify the prophet, let alone to eat him, but to save him. And specifically to save him from death by drowning, which he/she did by swallowing Jonah down, then, upon divine command, by puking him up onto the dry land. The whole point, therefore, was the experience of nearly drowning and then of being saved at the very last moment and in the least expected way possible (which in this case is really to say the very least). That is the salvation that inspires the prophet actually to do what he was supposed to do in the first place: to fulfill his personal destiny by going to Nineveh to proclaim God’s message to the people there.  And that trope of coming to know God first by almost drowning and then by being miraculously and unexpectedly saved, that trope appears in lots of different places in the Hebrew Bible.

Does Scripture skip over Moses’s adolescence and almost all of his first eighty years of life because it wants to move quickly enough from his experience of almost drowning in the river as a baby to his experience of hearing God speak at the Burning Bush? For that matter, does the Torah move the Israelites from the Sea of Reeds to Mount Sinai with just a few details provided about the journey because it wishes in that too to stress the connection between the nation risking death by drowning (i.e., by crossing on the seabed without knowing if or when the walls of water on either side of their path would collapse) and its arrival at Sinai where God spoke to them directly and personally from atop the mountain?

Any number of psalms feature the same progression: yearning for communion with God, the sense of drowning in that sea of overwhelming desire, then salvation.

The sixty-ninth psalm, a favorite, would be an excellent example: the poet feels himself to be drowning (“Save me, O God, for the water level is rising to the point of mortal danger. / I am drowning in mud so deep I cannot stand up in it / I am in the deepest water and a strong current is threatening to wash me away”) and feels death to be almost upon him (“Save me from the mud that I not drown / that I be saved both from those who hate me and from the depths of the waters. Let not the swift currents wash me away nor let the depths swallow me up. / Let not the well close up its mouth over me”).  But then the poet has a remarkable insight—that what he is really experiencing is not imminent death but the presence of God.

Other examples would include the eighteenth psalm (which also appears in the Bible as the twenty-second chapter of 2 Samuel) and the sixty-ninth. There are others too. But Jonah’s story is the famous one, the one everybody knows.

Let me tell the story when reading through the lens of the larger biblical narrative. The prophet is too terrified to accept the mission thrust upon him by God. Does he lack self-confidence? Is he worried that he is just another crazy person who hears voices in his head? Or is he just afraid of what might happen if he dares to proclaim God’s word in Nineveh?  We can’t know, but then we see him fleeing from God by jumping on a boat heading north. Things do not go well. A storm terrifies the sailors on the ship, who soon realize that Jonah is fleeing from God (and that it is therefore he who is the source of their misfortune) and so they pitch him overboard, expecting him to drown in the sea. That is not what happens, however and, instead, a gigantic sea creature is summoned by God—the same God who was trying to get Jonah’s attention in the first place—and instructed to swallow the prophet down whole so he can gather his wits and catch his breath in a safe underwater refuge. And that is when his eyes are opened and he composes the famous psalm that we know as the second chapter of the Book of Jonah. He realizes that he has survived, that he was rescued from death by drowning—and in the most unexpected, miraculous way imaginable. And then, chastened and ready, God speaks to him directly and, instead of fleeing or dying, he listens and obeys.

The lesson the Book of Jonah teaches, then, is that is natural, even normal, to fear the word of God and to flee when we feel ourselves called to action in God’s name or on God’s behalf. None of us wants to be told what to do, where to go, how to behave! And even less do we wish to risk anything, let alone everything, to submit to God’s will…and least of all when that will expresses itself not vaguely but specifically by sending us off in a specific direction to accomplish some specific thing. So Jonah is an everyperson, a regular guy who hates risk and avoids danger. But he is also a figure of growth who finds the courage to submit to do God’s will once he learns to face his own mortality. And in so doing he steps into history as one of the dozen or so best known personalities from Jewish antiquity.

The moral for latter-day readers such as ourselves should be clear. The first step to knowing God, to feeling God’s presence in the context of daily life, is facing our own mortality, in accepting that we have no way of knowing what the very next moment might bring. The next has to do with coming to terms with our fragility, with our brittleness, with our innate tenuousness: we can pretend otherwise to be the case, but sailors we’ve never met and whose language we don’t speak and whose names we don’t know could show up at any moment to pitch us overboard into the sea. And then we come to the real point: until we feel ourselves fully in God’s care, we cannot expect to hear God speak. And that is what the Book of Jonah means to me and why I feel so honored year after year when I am asked to chant it aloud to the congregation.