Jon D. Levenson on Strangeness of Jonah

"I cried to the Lord out of my distress, and he heard me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried and Thou didst hear my voice. For Thou didst cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas; and the floods compassed me about: all Thy billows and Thy waves passed over me." This is from the book of Jonah, and in these verses from its second chapter we find the prophet from the Galilee praying from inside a great fish that had swallowed him in the ocean. "The waters compassed me about, to the point of death;" Jonah said, "the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head. I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars closed on me forever: yet hast Thou brought up my life from the pit."

Jonah is a short book, four chapters, and one of the most unusual in the prophetic corpus. A prophet is commanded to go and warn a great and hostile city, and instead of arguing with God, the way Moses and Jeremiah do when they are summoned to prophesy, Jonah flees in the opposite direction. He ends up in the belly of a fish, offering words of thanksgiving for a rescue that has not yet happened. When God does save him, and Jonah finally delivers his warning, the city repents completely, expressing contrition and donning sackcloth. But Jonah is disappointed that his prophecy of destruction did not come true. The book ends with God asking Jonah a question that he doesn't answer.

To try to make sense of this puzzling book, Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver spoke with Jon D. Levenson, the Albert A. List Professor of Jewish Studies at Harvard Divinity School.

This conversation airs just before the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, when the book of Jonah is typically recited. Levenson and Silver discuss the pagan sailors on Jonah's ship who behave, by any ordinary measure, more piously than the prophet does; what it means that Jonah identifies himself to those sailors as a Hebrew, and what that word signified to them. They also address the book's satirical qualities, and look closely at this biblical portrait of a man whose perception of the world is so markedly limited, so at odds with what God wants from him. In short, they seek to uncover the strangeness of Jonah son of Amittai.