Jonah is saved from drowning
Chapter Four
Looking into Jonah 2
Without describing Jonah’s sinking under the waves (Jonah himself will soon do so), the book of Jonah first tells us of his deliverance. This, we know, came as a great surprise to Jonah, perhaps even as a disappointment if he was hoping to escape his commission. It probably also created a theological conundrum for him given his apparent preference for immediate retribution – his sin merited death (or so he thought) and he had expected God to mete out the sentence immediately. This makes Jonah’s response to God’s deliverance by means of the fish a gripping element in his voyage.
Yahweh prepares a fish
It is significant that the first thing we are told of Jonah after he is thrown into the waves (1:15) is that Yahweh has already prepared a fish to save him from drowning. As when he impeded Jonah’s flight by hurling a storm onto the sea in 1:4, so again God is a step ahead of Jonah and acts in such a way as to eventually get the reluctant prophet to Nineveh with his message of warning. The verb translated ‘appointed’ or ‘arranged for’ in Jonah 1:17 occurs three other times in Jonah (4:6–8), and always indicates that God is directing affairs so as to both accomplish his own will and teach Jonah something. An important detail of this verb’s use concerns which divine name is made its subject. When ‘Yahweh’ is named as the one doing this (here and in 4:6), the action serves Jonah’s deliverance, while when ‘God’ is used his action is disciplinary or didactic (4:7–8).
Thanks to God’s merciful intervention, Jonah escapes drowning and begins a sojourn in the fish. The expression ‘three days and three nights’ attracts readers’ attention due to its use in the NT as a description of Jesus’ time in the grave and the ‘sign’ that the Ninevites and Jesus’ audience both witnessed (Matt. 12:40; 16:4; Luke 11:29–30, 32). We will leave that issue aside for the moment, and ask simply what the phrase would have meant to Jonah’s readers.
There is only one reference elsewhere in the OT that uses ‘three days and three nights’. In 1 Samuel 30:12–13, a sick Egyptian, left for dead by his Amalekite master after having raided Ziklag, is too weak to speak after having been without food and water for three days and three nights.
Outside Scripture the phrase occurs in a Sumerian text entitled ‘The Descent of Inanna’, a text often cited in this connection because it too deals with death or a near-death experience. The text, which occurs in two versions and features Inanna in one and Ishtar in the other (they are essentially two manifestations of the same goddess), shows the goddess performing what is apparently an act of mourning for Dumuzi, her consort who spent half of the year in the underworld. While he was there, predictably dire consequences for fertility in the world of men followed; hence her mourning.
In the version we will examine here, Dumuzi is already in the underworld, so Inanna ‘sets her mind toward the “great below”’. She prepares for her voyage by taking seven articles of clothing and talismans, then instructs her messenger Ninshubur as follows as she prepares for her descent:
I am now descending to the nether world.
When I shall have come to the nether world,
Fill heaven with complaints for me,
In the assembly shrine cry out for me,
In the house of the gods rush about for me. . .
Weep before Enlil. . .
If Enlil stands not by thee in this matter, go to Ur. . .
Weep before Nanna. . .
If Nanna stands not by thee in this matter, go to Eridu. . ..
Weep before Enki. . .
Father Enki, the lord of wisdom,
Who knows the food of life, who knows the water of life,
He will surely bring me to life.
Inanna next descends to the underworld, and falls prey there to the forces of death. Then, ‘After three days and three nights had passed, Her messenger Ninshubur. . . Fills the heaven with complaints for her.’ As Inanna had suggested, he petitions Enlil, Nanna and Enki to come to Inanna’s aid, and Enki agrees to do so (Enlil and Nanna having declined). Enki’s emissaries sprinkle the food of life and the water of life upon Inanna’s corpse (currently in the underworld) sixty times, and thus succeed in freeing her from the realm of the dead.
So much for the relevant content of this fertility myth. What can be said of the ‘three days and three nights’ that it mentions? Ought we to see in Jonah the same brush with death on the basis of a shared phrase? Responsible use of ancient Near Eastern materials for biblical interpretation requires that we keep in mind several factors. Most important is the need to attend both to the similarities and the differences that the two texts exhibit with respect to one another, the fundamental element in the compare-and-contrast method we will use here. When questions of literary dependence or influence arise, things become more complicated, requiring the reader to investigate the texts’ respective ‘proximity in time and place, the priority of inner biblical parallels, correspondence of social function, and the holistic approach to texts and comparisons’.
Inanna’s instruction to Ninshubur to leap into action ‘when I shall have come to the underworld’ seems to imply that the three days and nights are the time it will take her to descend to the realm of the dead. But at least two points of evidence favour seeing that period of time as the anticipated duration of a round trip to the underworld and back. First, Ninshubur begins asking the other gods named to rescue Inanna from the underworld after three days and nights, but rescue would only be necessary if Inanna had not already succeeded in coming back to the world of the living. Secondly, the Akkadian version (which we are not otherwise taking into account here) recounts that upon her arrival Ishtar had sixty deadly torments inflicted upon her by her sister Ereshkigal, the goddess of the underworld. Only once this becomes known to Ishtar’s messenger does he conclude that ‘Ishtar has gone down to the Earth and has not come up again’, suggesting that the messenger himself had been hoping that the goddess would return safe and sound (Dalley 2003: 382). For these reasons it seems more likely that in the Descent of Inanna a voyage of three days and nights does not establish the limits of one’s descent to the underworld, but of a round-trip to the netherworld and back.
This is an important difference with respect to Jonah’s experience, which saw three days and nights elapse in order for him simply to return from (almost) the underworld or the lowest parts of the earth (his prayer seems to equate these things). Since it seems that the same duration is applied to a one-way trip in Jonah and a round-trip in the Sumerian text, any inferences drawn from this rough similarity should be drawn very cautiously, especially because Jonah never enters the underworld, merely brushing up against its gates, as it were. Furthermore, Jonah 2 emphasizes the prophet’s proximity to the underworld independent of any connotation that may attach to the phrase ‘three days and three nights’. All things considered, it is therefore quite unlikely (but not impossible) that the book’s author intended any connotation based on the Inanna text when he employed the phrase ‘three days and three nights’.
Following the element of the comparative method that gives priority to inner-biblical parallels, we can conclude that the expression stands for the longest period of time one can reasonably be expected to survive in a situation like Jonah’s or like that of the abandoned slave of 1 Samuel 30. The sequence of encourages us to take a straightforward reading of the phrase when it moves directly on to Jonah’s prayer – Jonah’s time in the fish was, in a word, sufficiently long for him to reflect on his situation and to respond.
Jonah prays
Before asking ‘Why did God prepare a fish?’ we should consider why Jonah did not stick with his intention to die for his sin. Why does Jonah even pray to be delivered, something he tells us he did over and over as he sank beneath the waves? After all, he thought Yahweh wanted him dead, and he asked the sailors to facilitate the execution of divine justice by throwing him into the sea.
It seems that Jonah’s desire to escape what he thought to be God’s sentence of judgment against him betrays a personal penchant for grace when his life is on the line. And Jonah’s own life is very important to him, as his prayer shows. Still, the prayer also shows Jonah to be very thankful for God’s intervention, so key to his survival. To put these disparate pieces together, we have to look closely at what Jonah says and how he says it in the prayer of Jonah 2.
Genre and structure
Jonah’s surprised (and possibly breathless) song of praise is a typical psalm of thanksgiving, with (1) an introduction that attests that his prayer for deliverance was answered (v. 3), (2) a recounting of the crisis and of his deliverance from it (vv. 4–8), and (3) a subsequent vow to worship God for that deliverance (vv. 9–10).
One might note, first of all, that in psalms of this type the author who has been delivered from difficulties that were not (at least as far as he knew) punishments for sin puts a great deal of emphasis on Yahweh’s grace in saving him from danger (e.g. see Pss 18 and 116). Conversely, in psalms when sin is recognized as the cause of the writer’s duress, he makes that element primary and seeks deliverance from sin before anything else (as in Ps. 32), and of course again emphasizes God as his only deliverer. Jonah, however, although he is unquestionably in dire straits because of his own disobedience, does not even recognize his sin and so utters not a word of confession. What is more, he limits his description of God’s merciful deliverance to two poetic lines (in the second half of v. 7, italicized below) out of about twenty-five!
The following translation divides the poem into its main sections and highlights some of the structural elements that contribute to its meaning. The repetition of ‘surrounded me’ and ‘holy temple’ at the beginning and end of the two middle stanzas (vv. 4 and 5; 6 and 8, underlined below) and the repetition of ‘voice’ in the initial summary and conclusion reinforce the symmetry of the psalm:
(Introduction)
3 I called in my distress
To Yahweh and he answered me
From the belly of Sheol I called for help He heard my voice.
(Crisis and Deliverance)
4 You threw me into the deeps,
Into the heart of the seas
And the rivers surrounded me.
All your breakers and waves passed over me
5 Then I said,
‘I have been driven out of your presence,
Nevertheless I will again look toward your holy temple.’
6 The waters enclosed me to my neck,
The deeps surrounded me,
Weeds wrapped around my head.
7 To the roots of the mountains I went down,
The earth with her bars was around me forever,
But you brought my life up from the pit,
Yahweh my God!
8 When my life was fainting away,
I remembered Yahweh,
And my prayer came to your holy temple.
(Vow to Worship)
9 Those who hold to worthless gods abandon their own mercy,
10 But I, with the voice of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you,
What I have vowed I will render.
Deliverance belongs to Yahweh!
A closer look at Jonah’s prayer
Jonah’s prayer summarizes and interprets this part of his adventure as follows. Yahweh threw him into the deep, and before the fish arrived Jonah recognized that he had been cast out of God’s sight. Still, he looked toward God’s holy temple in prayer. As time wore on he sank as low as possible before finally being rescued by the fish. Jonah then contrasts himself with ‘those who regard worthless idols’, and contrasts Yahweh with those same idols, expressing his confidence that only those who hold faithfully to Yahweh will be delivered. Finally, he resolves to demonstrate his permanent fidelity to Yahweh, and summarizes the whole episode in one brilliant line: deliverance comes from Yahweh. A closer look at these elements will bring into sharper focus the beliefs and condition of the wayward prophet.
The first section of the psalm describes Jonah’s being thrown overboard as his ‘distress’, and locates it, so to speak, in the very heart of Sheol (2:3). Sheol is consistently, though not absolutely, the OT’s term for the place of the dead under judgment (cf. Ps. 86:13; Prov. 15:24), and the sea carries further connotations of the underworld, since it constitutes the earth’s depths. Here it is difficult to decide whether Jonah sees Sheol as connected with judgment or simply as the place of the dead. Given his unwillingness to mention his sin or to repent of it, it is perhaps more likely that he simply mentions Sheol, the pit and the deep as images of death without drawing on their possible connotation of judgment. To the extent that he expected death by drowning as punishment for his sin, however, it held (at least initially) such negative connotations.
In typical Hebrew fashion, the prayer makes use of parallelism to reinforce and enrich its message, so we need to see the restatement of an initial element in the following line(s) as more than simple repetition. The initial emphasis falls on Jonah’s ‘call’, ‘cry’ and ‘voice’, which are ‘responded to’ and ‘heard’ by Yahweh (v. 3). The focus of this section is decidedly on Jonah’s need for deliverance, to the exclusion of any element of condemnation. This is a sharp shift in focus from the narrator’s focus on his disobedience and antipathy for God’s call to go to Nineveh. As Jonah’s prayer continues, we will see that this tendency to ignore his sin dominates his interpretation of his deliverance.
While the affirmation in 2:4 that God threw Jonah ‘into the depths, into the heart of the seas’ might seem to be an orthodox confession of God’s sovereignty, there is probably more to it than that. True, God was active in directing Jonah’s suggestion that he go overboard and in arranging the sailor’s reluctant compliance with that wish, but the sailors recognize God’s ultimate agency only after having tried courageously and circumspectly to avoid exposing Jonah to drowning (1:13–14). In contrast to the sailors, Jonah simply accepts the fate he imagines is appropriate for him. As we saw earlier, he is even at pains to distance himself from its realization by instructing the sailors to throw him overboard. He could just as easily have informed them of his guilt and of his understanding of divine justice as requiring immediate punishment, and then jumped in himself!
Similarly, here Jonah emphasizes God’s role in that event, telling God that ‘you threw me’ in verse 4 and ‘I have been driven out’ in verse 5. It is also important to note what Jonah does not say: he makes no mention of his own role in the events that brought him here, especially his flight from the divine commission and his failure to repent while onboard. Fretheim suggests that Jonah is far from God simply ‘because death is so near’, but this probably overlooks the very important subjective effects of his past and present sins, of which he has yet to repent (Fretheim 1977: 102). Jonah is far from God in the sense that God is life, but fails to connect the theological dots between sin and death.
These points rightly lead Trible to conclude of Jonah that ‘either his memory is faulty or his interpretation skewed’, and in the light of the complex consequences of sin upon a human being’s mind and thought, both are possible (Trible 1994: 167–168). Especially if Jonah’s assumption that God was out to kill him was mistaken (as I suggested in the ), here Jonah is glossing over any personal responsibility for his brush with death by affirming the agency of everyone but himself.
Having made clear that he holds God responsible for his distress, Jonah goes on to show how completely he is affected by God’s actions: the current ‘surrounds’ him and all God’s breakers and billows ‘pass over’ him. Once again, Jonah associates God very closely with these threats to his life by adding possessive pronouns to them: they are ‘your billows and your waves’ (2:3). Still Jonah seems to equate God’s presence with life, something that the temple and its strict rules for access into God’s presence made abundantly clear to Israelites (even though Jonah hailed from the north). These contrasting threads suggest that Jonah’s views of life and death are quite knotty, and we must not expect easy resolution of this aspect of his world view.
In the midst of this terrifying and oppressive situation, Jonah finds his own behaviour worthy of extended comment. Far from being daunted by God’s apparently careless or dangerous actions, his faith holds firm: ‘regardless, I once again look toward your holy temple’. This is surely not the first time in his life that Jonah has prayed, but in the context of the book we are justified in asking why he has not prayed until now. If God’s commission was puzzling, would obedience in the face of incomplete comprehension not have had Abraham’s example as a precedent (Gen. 12:4)? And once Jonah’s sinful course of behaviour began in earnest, would not a prayer of confession and a request for forgiveness have been fitting, and perhaps even enough to spare those on board from danger?
Before concluding, Jonah begins another stanza that revisits his ordeal (Jon. 2:6–8). Hebrew poetry exhibits parallelism not only between individual lines in a poem, but also between sections of a poem. We see this structural parallelism in the next few verses, which echo, amplify and develop the initial description of Jonah’s sorry condition in 2:4–5. In this second look, however, the connection between Yahweh and the threatening waters has disappeared. Now the waters themselves ‘enclose’ Jonah to the point of death, the deep ‘surrounds’ him, and weeds are ‘wrapped’ around his head. These images are almost a depiction of a burial at sea, and clearly show the life-threatening aspect of Jonah’s time in the sea: will he escape? His chances of doing so are reduced even further by the depth of his descent: he sinks to the very ‘roots of the mountains’, coming to the bottom of the sea, and the seafloor seems to wrap him up in its cold and unbreakable embrace. Far from Yahweh, Jonah sees nothing but death.
At this lowest of all possible points, however, God breaks in. Jonah has sunk, but Yahweh brings his life up from the pit, from the very jaws of death. Jonah’s worst fear (at least until 3:10) has been averted, and he has only God to thank for it. This he does, but is surprisingly brief, and this is the only explicit mention of Yahweh’s deliverance in the whole book. If we note that this lone description of Yahweh’s rescue is sandwiched in the middle of the second description of his ordeal, and that it is followed by yet another reminder that Jonah’s prayer had a role in this deliverance in verse 7, our suspicion that Jonah’s perspective is warped is reinforced. The one praying for deliverance is more prominent in Jonah’s prayer than God the deliverer.
Jonah’s recollection of his actions while under the waves concludes with his recall of Yahweh at the very moment that his consciousness is slipping away. While this may mean that he waited until the last minute to pray, drowning is not a terribly drawn-out process, so the emphasis probably falls on his heroic, apparently unbreakable, attachment to Yahweh even as death lays hold of him.
The fact that Jonah refers to the temple at the end of both descriptions of his ordeal (2:4b, 7b) adds an interesting theological facet to his prayer. So close to Sheol, and so far from God, Jonah’s prayer nonetheless meets with deliverance that extracts him from the jaws of death, even if it does not usher him into the temple straightaway. This same temple, of course, was open to Gentiles (Solomon foresaw that some would come to Jerusalem and pray, 1 Kgs 8:41–43). All the same, the story of Jonah reminds us that the Jerusalem paradigm was not absolute: by showing that the prayers of the sailors and of Jonah alike were heard when they were at the furthest possible remove from that site, so that the God who truly ‘resides’ in Jerusalem in the eighth century bc can still give life and deliverance far beyond Israel’s borders. While that fact stands in tension with the centralized nature of Israel’s worship, it cannot be eliminated simply because inconvenient, and it will eventually allow (theologically speaking) for the expansion of divine presence beyond Jerusalem and even beyond the land of Israel. It also prompts us to reflect on why other Israelites occasionally found themselves far from the temple: while the author of Psalms 42, 43 was driven from it by his enemies, Jonah has none (though his emphasis on God’s role in his dilemma makes us wonder).
Jonah ends his prayer with a flattering comparison of himself with idol worshippers. The same phrase appears in Psalm 31:7, where it also refers to those who worship idols and where the author also contrasts himself and his trust in Yahweh with them. Since the heathen sailors are prominent in the prior context and the Ninevites in the subsequent context, it is difficult to see how those who ‘forsake the covenant faithfulness which would otherwise be theirs’ could refer to Israelites. That being so, Jonah sees himself as a faithful worshipper who enjoys Yahweh’s covenant faithfulness (essentially the same thing as Yahweh himself in the light of Ps. 144:2), while those who worship false gods have no hope of experiencing this divine response.
Considered abstractly, the theology of Jonah’s prayer is orthodox. But when seen in the context of the book, a very different picture emerges. Jonah has assumed that his relationship with God is healthy while that of the (idol-worshipping) sailors is non-existent, while the narrator has shown that the truth is almost the opposite. Fretheim (1977: 103) notes this contrast in a striking way when he says that Jonah’s desire to prevent Nineveh’s deliverance caused him to flee from God ’for the idolatry of a particular belief. . . by seeking to limit God’, while the Gentile sailors have abandoned their gods and put their trust in Yahweh! This invective against Gentiles, therefore, condemns Jonah with delicious irony while reminding us that God has in fact delivered the Gentile sailors in more senses than one. The irony only increases when Jonah promises that he will sacrifice to Yahweh with a thankful voice and pay his vows, the very same two actions that have already demonstrated the sailors’ reverence for Yahweh in 1:16.
Jonah’s last words from inside the fish are, we know from the surrounding narrative, even more true than Jonah knew, since he was ignorant of the sailors’ deliverance. Psalm 50, which was already drawn upon in Jonah 1 because of its distinction between true and false Israelites, is a particularly interesting text to read alongside Jonah 2 as well, since its treatment of God’s justice makes it relevant to Jonah’s deliverance. When God comes to deliver his people through judgment, only those who have a genuine relationship with him (Ps. 50:5) will survive (these are known as his ‘faithful ones’). At first we might be inclined to apply this to Jonah, since he falls under God’s judgment only to escape at the last minute. But while this may be a fair description of God’s preliminary punishment of Jonah’s sin, the outlook of the psalm is much more ominous for Israelites who ‘talk the talk but don’t walk the walk’ (50:16–20). Psalm 50 recognizes the propriety of vows and sacrifices provided that the worshipper’s life is likewise in accord with God’s revealed will; but that is something we cannot yet attribute to Jonah.
Deliverance by the God of Israel will become more prominent in Jonah 3, when it is extended to Nineveh. In that case, however, we see Jonah approach this same reality of God’s deliverance from a radically different angle, one that brings upon him a divine rebuke and gives us much food for thought.
Jonah is saved from drowning
The interpretation of Jonah’s prayer given above goes against many Christians’ natural tendency to take all true biblical prophets as pious men of God who served him faithfully and whose hearts were in accord with his will. But from the very beginning of the book we have seen that Jonah is not a typical prophet, beginning with the string of verbs showing his resolution to disobey Yahweh’s commission and even make its fulfilment impossible. Further, as will make clear, Jonah’s deepest convictions are squarely opposed to Yahweh’s gracious character (Brenner 1993: 192). It should not surprise us, then, that we see this prophet pray to God in a way consistent with all his other behaviour. After all, how could a consistently disobedient prophet’s prayer life be on the level when his every action is completely out of kilter?
As to why Jonah sees things so strangely in this psalm, the theological explanation is the consequences of sin on our beliefs, perceptions and wills. Jonah views Yahweh as unconditionally committed to Israel, and especially to himself, despite (even regardless of) their sin. But when it comes to Nineveh, Jonah wants God to exercise immediate retribution, and when that hope is dashed his reaction is nothing short of a personal meltdown. It is hardly surprising that an individual so mistaken about his own and God’s character would have a world view quite at odds with reality as Yahweh knows it to be.
But this is to get ahead of ourselves. At the end of , Jonah is once again safely back on land, where he began, and we must read on to discover how his deliverance might have affected him.