In the OT people were naturally afraid of God. Jonah did his best to outrun him but lost in the end, was thrown off a boat and swallowed by a fish. It is a great story about not shirking your responsibilities.
The whole point of Jonah was not about God’s ability to conjure up man-swallowing fish; it was that Yahweh loves even the depraved folk of Nineveh (and their cattle). The 6th century BC scribe who wrote Jonah used the name of a prophet mentioned in 2 Kings to make a point about the worthiness of evangelising to the heathen. He has his reluctant hero sail from Joppa and encounter a storm. Cast overboard somewhere out at sea, the big fish is a literary device to get Jonah back to Joppa, from where, more enthusiastically, he can set out again for the big, bad city of Nineveh.
The theological point could be made simply – ‘our god loves all who repent, don’t be reluctant, go and tell it to the heathen’ – but would that entertain the crowd? Simple folk of course would start to take the entertaining story as a literal truth. Then, several generations later, when the story falls into the hands of the author of Matthew – who may well believe that the Jonah story is ‘true’ – he has his own fictional Christ figure quote Jonah to give authority to a different theological point: ‘death can be conquered.’ |
