describes Nineveh’s historical destruction in 612 bce. It gains further momentum by the references to the fasting animals in Jonah 3:7: according to many rabbis, the Ninevites’ decision to withhold water from innocent animals demonstrated their inherent cruelty (e.g. y.Tan. 2:1).
Islamic Interpretations
Jonah, or Yunus as he is called in Arabic, is remembered in Islamic traditions as a prophet who was faithful to God and delivered his message. He is often also named Dhul-Nun (Arabic: ذو النون, meaning ‘The One of the Whale’) and Sahib al-hut (Arabic: صاحب الحوت, meaning ‘The Man of the Whale’). Most of the material about Jonah in the Qur’an serves to support Muhammad: it provides insight into and a precedent for the initial opposition that Muhammad faced from the people of Mecca.
Jonah appears six times in the Qur’an (Sura 4:163; 6:86; 10:98 [Yunus]; 21:87–88; 37:139–48; 68:48–50). These references are opaque and difficult to forge together into a coherent and cohesive narrative. It is likely that the original readers were familiar with the Book of Jonah, along with the references in the NT, and thus able to interpret the extant elusive Qur’anic references in their light.
As time went by, however, the biblical narrative faded from memory, and the Qur’anic fragments became the building blocks for creating new and alternative Jonah narratives with a sequence of events that differs drastically from the biblical original. A common outline runs as follows: God sends Jonah to Nineveh to preach a message. The people of Nineveh refuse to listen to Jonah. As a result, Jonah leaves Nineveh and boards a ship. Because of the storm, the sailors cast lots and realize that Jonah is the cause of the storm, whereupon they throw him into the sea. A gigantic fish swallows Jonah. Inside the fish, Jonah repents and glorifies God, and the fish spits him out. As Jonah is very sore from having been inside a fish, God provides a gourd plant to offer shade, and the archangel Gabriel gives him clothes (a scene often portrayed in Islamic art). In this manner, Islamic traditions transformed the biblical Book of Jonah into a new narrative with a new theme: God sends messengers, the people reject their message, and God sends punishment. They also give it a new climax: Jonah’s prayer and glorification of God inside the fish.
This modified narrative was subsequently interpreted by Islamic traditions (hadīth) and Qur’anic exegesis (tafsīr). These interpretations caused the Islamic Jonah traditions to evolve even further as they germinated new narrative details and prompted new theological questions. Two key intertwined issues came to dominate the exegetical discussions: (1) the specific character of Jonah’s sin and (2) the specific occasion when he sinned. The prevalent understanding among Islamic interpreters (e.g. Al-Qummī, Zamakhsharī, Ibn Kathīr) was that Jonah’s sin was anger and that he committed it when he ran away in wrath after his mission to Nineveh. Many Islamic scholars accordingly sought to elucidate with whom Jonah was angry (e.g. God, the Israelites, the Ninevites) or flatly maintained that, in fact, he was not angry (as prophets were infallible and thus could not be angry). Ultimately, Muhammad was compared with Jonah (Sura 68). Both prophets felt rejected by the people to whom they were sent to preach. Jonah’s enraged departure should not, however, be emulated by Muhammad; rather, Muhammad should be patient and see that God would sort things out. In parallel, other later traditions, such as the ones found in Al-Kisā’ī’s Tales of the Prophets, elaborated further, and included folkloristic motifs known from other, non-Islamic traditions.
Modern Literary Interpretations
The biblical Book of Jonah has been the subject of multiple literary retellings, ranging from individual poems to whole novels and theatrical dramas. In addition, a huge number of literary works contain allusions to the Jonah narrative. In these retellings, Jonah often becomes a representative of humanity: haunted by God, persecuted, and exiled. Jonah is turned into our alter ego as he embodies our own struggles with God. There are three prevalent tropes in these modern retellings: Jonah who runs away from his calling, Jonah the refugee, and Jonah who questions God’s justice.
Jonah Running Away from His Calling
Many scholars have pondered the issue of Jonah’s flight from God’s command in Jonah 1:3. In literature, Jonah’s flight is often used to explore the futility of fleeing from God and his calling. A good example is the Swedish novel Guldspiken (The Golden Nail) by Peter Nilson. Using the motif of a lay preacher seeking to escape his calling, the novel dialogues with the Book of Jonah in order to explore a person’s feeling of despondency when faced with the inability of avoiding their God-ordained fate.
Jonah’s flight and his ensuing time inside the fish is sometimes more widely understood to represent the human struggle with God and our sense of alienation from God and the world. Paul Auster, for example, employs the motifs of ‘being inside the whale’ as a leitmotif throughout his book The Invention of Solitude to designate the estrangement that characterizes much of post-holocaust Jewry. Jonah’s struggle with God is also the topic of several poems. Gabriel Preil compares himself to Jonah, as he describes an existence torn between faith and a desire to flee from it. Enrique Lihn likewise expresses his own sense of unease with the fickleness of his existence through the lens of the Book of Jonah.
A subset of these retellings deals with the Jewish experience of never being able to run away from being chosen by God. The notion of the Jewish people carrying a burden and having a responsibility towards God and towards the Gentile world is expressed poignantly by Kadia Molodowsky in her poem ‘Jonah’. It expresses in a heart-breaking manner the Jewish experience through the lens of Jonah’s calling. Jonah the Jew can never escape from being part of God’s chosen people.
Jonah the Refugee
Other, related retellings turn the trope of ‘the fleeing Jonah’ into ‘Jonah the refugee’: Jonah is a man whom God abandoned. These retellings stem from Jonah 2:5 [Eng. 2:4], where Jonah expresses how he is cast out from God’s presence. They gain further inspiration from the affinity between the dialogue of God and Jonah in Jonah 4 and that of God and Cain in Gen 4. The comparison is triggered by the shared use of the Hebrew verb ḥarah = ‘to be angry’, as well as by the shared rare expression milifne Adonai = ‘from before the Lord’ (Jonah 1 and Gen 4). This intertextuality fashions Jonah as a type for the ‘wandering Jew’. This notion comes to the forefront in the novel The Strange Nation of Rafael Mendes by Moacyr Scliar, where the Jonah narrative lends structure to the novel.
Jonah and God’s Justice
In the biblical narrative, Jonah’s flight from God is explained in Jonah 4:2 – Jonah knew that God is prone to showing compassion. The question then becomes: why did Jonah not wish God to show compassion on Nineveh? Many modern retellings of the Book of Jonah maintain that the key problem is God’s failure to uphold justice and the concomitant failure to withhold mercy. The pivotal issue is the balance between mercy and justice: can true mercy exist in the absence of true justice? Put aptly by the literary theorist Terry Eagleton, Jonah refused to obey God because there did not seem to be any point in obeying him. This issue forms the central question in a range of modern literary interactions with the Book of Jonah, among them Robert Frost’s play A Masque of Mercy, where the central figure Jonah Dove argues that God is obliged to punish the wicked; he must do so in his role as supreme and just deity. God, however, has failed to carry out this task. Taking a more explicit stand, Harald Tandrup envisages Jonah as ultimately rejecting God’s perspective. What is the point when God does not punish the guilty? Other retellings lament Jonah’s failure to be compassionate. The musical rendering by Samuel Adler, Der Mann ohne Toleranz, for instance, mourns Jonah’s inability to accept God’s decision to pardon Nineveh.
