II - Jonah against the myth

In his commentary on Jonah, published in 1952, the great Jacques Ellul wrote this about the episode of Jonah's prayer in the belly of the "big fish" (chapter 2):

And Jonah cries at this abandonment. In death, he finally understood what that means. He who left precisely to abandon God, he who sought other gods and who thought death preferable to obedience, now he understands what abandonment by God truly is. As long as it was he who was abandoning God, Jonah accepted it very well, but here he is full of misery, now that it is God who did so. He really knows what death is, he understands that anything is better than being abandoned by God.

That the biblical text is committed at this moment to promote the presence of God in a relationship of trust, of faith - and even "blind" faith - seems obvious to us. But the little book of Jonah is never short of discordant voices. Let’s take two examples out of many:

• If Jonah's prayer seems, at this moment of the story, to match his suffering in relation to death and distance from God, Jonah's personality is much more twisted and complex: until the end of the story, he balances between spoiled child (accompanied by a paternal God who is quite rightly educational), profoundly depressive (accompanied by a powerless and disarmed God), and authentic biblical hero (fallible therefore, and accompanied by a God to whom he resists, in a manner as courageous, with the poor means at his disposal, as Ecclesiastes or Job)1. These "faces" of Jonah singularly blur and densify the direction of a book which could be unilaterally seen as initiation story, a bildungsroman. The book is not focused on the maturation of Jonah and the pacification of his relationship with God, but on the nature of the relationship itself. Jonah seems to refuse the role of spokesperson that God intends to impose on him. His lamentation in the belly of the whale may be that of a lost child, but who are we to judge him: he was ready to die for his people Israel and finds himself in a limbo of torture, perpetually digested, a fate worse than that of Sisyphus, equivalent to that of Prometheus. And all this because he refused to betray his Nation. Where is the Divine Mercy in that? Where is divine Justice in this?

• Being abandoned by God does not seem to be fun for Jonah, but God seems to have abandoned himself on several occasions, notably during the episode of the storm, which precedes that of the "big fish": he makes himself known to pagan sailors... like a pagan god, like the Poseidon of the Odyssey, he triggers and calms a storm, as in Sophocles' Oedipus, an investigation is led to find out the supposed culprit of a crime, and like everywhere in Greek tragedy, the “guilty” (Phaedra) or the innocent (Iphigenia) is equally a scapegoat, aTragos: he must publicly confess the necessity and the personal responsibility of his sacrifice for the pleasure of the gods and the good of the City. God is, at this point in Jonah's story, a god who demands a human sacrifice to appease His anger. And this is very disturbing. Because this is perhaps why “foreign” (non-Israeli) sailors convert to this god: because he represents a sort of champion of the gods that they each frequent in their country. We are far from the God of ethical monotheism, the One who orders the end of human sacrifices and the fundamental fight against idolatry2. Seen from this angle, Jonah can appear at this moment in the story as resisting a divine power which is not yet the God of the pedagogy of kikayon in chapter 4, the God who manifests himself to Elijah in the mountain or, of course, the crucified God who agrees to take upon himself the sacrifice He imposed on humanity.

Ellul’s judgment seems well-founded to us, obviously. But we can also refuse the dominant path of the text3, which resembles that of a victorious god in the great Greek stories. The latter rubs out the traces of his errors by overwhelming poor Jonas4 because he refuses to submit to an order which consists of making the destruction of his own nation probable (effective destruction by Assyria, in 722 BC., of the kingdom of Israel, not so long after the life, real or not, of the prophet Jonah). From the beginning of the story, Jonah read perfectly the intentions of God: He did actually want to apply His Justice to Israel and His Mercy to Nineveh.

In the belly of the big fish, Jonah is indeed a broken man, but he is the broken man who refuses to admit any sin or any error big enough to be plunged into the בֶּטֶן שְׁאוֹל, the belly of hell, as in many Psalms where the call for a defender goes with a proclamation of innocence.5

Over the course of the book, Jonas shows some kind of promethean dimension; his hubris consists of forcing God into a personal relationship or even, dare we say the word, a relationship of filial affection. From this point of view, far from representing an error in the casting for the role of prophet, he could be the agent of a descent of God among men.

According to this reading, Jonas would be a book that deals with the maturation of divine pedagogy. Less Muthos, more Logos.6

Notes:

(1) The latter are critiques, from the human perspective, of the foundations of divine justice. In a happier way, Abraham is one of the models of constructive opposition to God, when he becomes defender, paraclete of Sodom.

(2) Jonas relativizes the universalist scope of the book, which is often attributed to it: the sailors do not really encounter God (they paradoxically show themselves to be more human than God himself, who forces them to execute Jonas against their will).

(3) This is indeed chapter 2. Because in the fourth and last chapter, God already shows himself to be much more humanly paternal. The subject of this short book seems to be more the evolution of the figure of God rather than the conversion of Jonah.

(4) We refer here to the mechanism of the scapegoat in the work of René Girard. Our reading is also influenced by the approach of Carl Gustav Jung (the figure of God in the Bible is not God Himself), and obviously that of classical rabbinic commentaries (the articulation of textual polyphony), as well as recent conversations with Dainius Šileika.

(5) Compare Jonah’s psalm and, say Psalm 42 or Psalm 130. They show the same colors.

(6) If we know well that "The ways of God are inscrutable" (Epistle to the Romans 11, 33), the book of Jonah seems to call for a more open cooperation between God and man. Why doesn't God start by explaining his plan to Jonah?