[Tom O'Loughlin] With me today is Dr
Marian Kelsey and she's going to talk to us
about what she sees as the significance of
the book of Jonah. Marian, why study it?
[Dr Marian Kelsey] It's a nice short book.
It's written in very clear Hebrew. And it's
got a lovely bizarre little story in it, which is always good.
Something to grab your interest, there are
big fish that swallow people.
And when you start to dig into the book of Jonah and see
what on earth is going on here,
a lot of people know the kind of general story:
Man gets swallowed by fish,
gets spat out at Nineveh and tells Nineveh to behave itself
and so it does.
But when you look at the kind of detail, the,
the, the way that the story is constructed,
the way it's all written and woven together,
you have a very significant part
of the story where Joan describes God.
And he says ... he's actually complaining about God.
And he's complaining about God because God is so
gracious and compassionate and isn't that awful?
And he's a god who relents of
evil, relents of punishing people when they have done wrong.
And so that's, that's,
it looks like it's kind of the high point of the text
in some ways. We've got this wonderful description of God,
as a lovely, compassionate, relenting God.
But throughout the whole text,
there are an awful lot of allusions to other parts of the Bible.
And so lots of hints and
reminiscences of other biblical stories.
And what you begin to notice once you're
tracking all of these illusions is that most of
those are just stories in
biblical history in which God was very much not a relenting
God. He was not gracious and compassionate in that instant.
He did punish people.
And so there are allusions to
the flood narrative where God got so fed up with everybody,
he wiped out almost the entire world.
And there are allusions to
the Sodom and Gomorrah narrative, where Got
got fed up with the bad behaviour of
a couple of cities and wiped them out entirely.
And there are allusions to when Moses was on
Sinai with God, and all of the Israelites down
below the mountain started worshipping the golden calf and God
got very, very angry and threatened to destroy everybody
and Moses managed to pull God back from the brink,
pull God back and make God promise not to destroy everybody,
but God still plagued everybody and there
was still punishment for that sin.
And then as well, there are allusions to the book of Jeremiah,
and Jeremiah talks about the possibility of God
relenting from punishment if people repent
and start behaving themselves, but they don't.
And so Jerusalem is destroyed.
And so God grows weary of relenting in the book of Jeremiah.
And these are all the illusions that the book
of Jonah is pulling into its narrative.
And so we have a description of God ias a God
who relents of evil,
and then lots of stories about God,
where God is not relenting from punishing people.
And these two things kind of stand in
tension in the book of Jonah,
and you're left wondering what to do with them.
What does the book of Jonah
want you to make of this tension in the narrative?
And another very significant thing to know about
the book of Jonah is that it talks about in the text,
the city of Nineveh being spared punishment.
God deciding not to wipe out the city of Nineveh.
But it was written as
a text long after Nineveh has been destroyed.
When Nineveh was completely wiped out,
nobody lived there anymore and
the city was in ruins.
And so you've got a story about the saving of a city
but every single person who reads
that book knows that Nineveh is destroyed.
Nineveh doesn't exist anymore.
And so again, a tension between whether Ninevah
was spared or destroyed.
And I think what's going on in introducing these tensions into
the text and forcing the reader to try and work at them
is that the book is showing
its readers that God does
have the freedom to punish or to spare,
but also has the freedom to reverse a judgement.
And so Nineveh was spared in one instance in the book of Jonah,
but later on it was destroyed.
It was punished.
And so God had reversed this judgement with respect to Nineveh.
And that sounds like quite a grim message for the book,
but actually for everyone reading the book, Nineveh is gone.
It's out of the picture, it's destroyed
and so nobody really worries about Nineveh anymore,
but the city that they do care about is Jerusalem,
which has been destroyed as punishment for wrongdoing,
as we see in the book of Jeremiah,
and it lies in ruins
but the people who are reading the book of Jonah,
are wondering what's going to happen to Jerusalem
in the long term?
Will God have mercy on us
and restore Jerusalem? And the book of Jonah
is saying yes, there's a chance that he will,
because God can reverse judgement.
He can spare and destroy,
and then he can reverse this judgement and restore as well.
[Tom] So it's a it's a very complex story to speak to
the situation of the people
who are wondering about their own future?
[Marian] Yes, exactly.
It's a bit like a kind of thought experiment. It's
taking this long-dead city of Nineveh,
and using that as an example to walk through some
of the ideas about God's character.
Whether he will spare or destroy,
whether he is a relenting God,
and God's actions in the world and
what the consequences of that are for the people
reading it. [Tom] Marian, thank you very much.