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Jonah 2 interrupts the narrative progress of the book with a three-stanza poem delivered by an undigested Jonah from inside the belly of the whale, making the book three-fourths prose and one-fourth poem.
A fictional character in Moby Dick, Father Mapple, delivered the most historically famous sermon on Jonah’s prayer from the whale. Moby Dick, by Herman Melville, is the story of Captain Ahab’s revenge on a white whale. Before Ahab sets out on his risky whaling mission, one of his sailors attends a church service with Father Mapple, who preaches from a lectern in the shape of a ship’s prow. The former whaler turned preacher naturally was keen on the book of Jonah and the “weighty lesson” derived from Jonah’s supplication. This is an excerpt from Father Mapple’s sermon:
For sinful as he is, Jonah does not weep and wail for direct deliverance. He feels that his dreadful punishment is just. He leaves all his deliverance to God, contenting himself with this, that spite of all his pains and pangs, he will still look towards his holy temple. And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance, not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment. And how pleasing to God was this conduct in Jonah, is shown in the eventual deliverance of him from the sea and the whale. Shipmates, I do not place Jonah before you to be copied for his sin but I do place him before you as a model for repentance. Sin not; but if you do, take heed to repent of it like Jonah.
By many accounts, Moby Dick was Melville’s retelling of the Book of Jonah, and an articulation of his own theological grappling with the attributes of God. Melville grew up in a family where his mother’s relatives were staunch Calvinists and his father’s relatives were liberal Unitarians. Melville had to reconcile God’s abundant mercy with his divine wrath. Jonah is the prophetic book that best gives human voice to the struggle over the mystery of God’s nature, his will, and his system of justice.
Jonah spent three days and three nights inside the belly of the fish. Nowhere does the book of Jonah name the fish specifically as a whale. The proper translation of Jonah’s dag gadol is the general description: “large fish” or “great fish.” Jonah’s distress was not from the trauma of the fish having swallowed him; the fish saved him from drowning. Jonah’s prayer was a thanksgiving for his deliverance from the seafloor. He rightly understood that God appointed the fish as the instrument of his rescue. Unlike the prophet, the fish immediately responded to God’s command, both in snatching Jonah off the seafloor and conveying him to Nineveh.
The death wish that Jonah had during the storm had passed. Now the prophet cried out to God. In the first portion of the poem, Jonah dramatically retells the ordeal of his near drowning. He recounts, in the past tense, his pleas to Yahweh in his last moments of consciousness. Jonah had descended to the bottom of the sea (2:6). According to the text, he cried out to God “from the belly of Sheol.” Ancient Israelites perceived Sheol as the underworld of the dead, a place far removed from God. The Psalmist wrote, “For in death there is no remembrance of you; in Sheol who can give you praise?” (Ps. 6:5). Jonah fulfilled his aim to flee from Yahweh’s presence as far as possible, and the reality terrified him.
Jonah’s prayer borrowed language from the Psalms. He praised God for delivering him from drowning: “I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever; yet you brought up my life from the pit” (2:6). Psalm 30:3 contains the same exaltation: “You, Lord, brought me up from the realm of the dead; you spared me from going down to the pit.” God delivered Jonah from the bottom of the seafloor; weeds were wrapped around his head (2:5). One Psalm praises God for lifting the writer “out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire” (Ps. 40:2). Another Psalm praises God for drawing him out of deep waters (Ps. 18:16). Jonah repurposed the language of those Psalms. In his case, the deep waters were his punishment, and they were not metaphorical (2:3). Jonah’s prayer even directly quotes a Psalm: “All your waves and your billows passed over me” (Jon. 2:3; Ps. 42:7). Once again, what the psalmist had stated metaphorically, Jonah meant literally.
Despite the beauty of Jonah’s prayer, a closer look at his speech shows he was not right of heart yet. He paid tribute to Yahweh for his deliverance, but his prayer is noticeably absent of any type of confession or repentance. Jonah cried out to God, “I have been driven away from your sight” (2:4). Yet Jonah was the one who had banished himself from God’s presence in the first scene. At one point he strikes a self-righteous tone, saying, “Those who worship vain idols forsake their true loyalty” (2:8). While other prophets of Jonah’s time condemned idol worship, such as Hosea (4:12), Jonah needed to do more internal reflection before he began naming others’ wrongdoing. Recall that Jonah’s rebellion mortified the Phoenician sailors who certainly must have been idol worshipers.
After dwelling on God’s providential salvation, Jonah felt compelled to sacrifice to God. When the storm ended, the sailors had also felt the same compulsion to sacrifice. God answered Jonah’s plea by commanding the fish to spit him out, an undignified deliverance for Jonah and an awkward end to the chapter. However, the prophet’s revival was short-lived. He completed his commission to prophesy to the Ninevites, but he kept the same blind spots regarding the full expanse of God’s grace.
Greater than Jonah
The Minor Prophets often point to the grand mission of the coming Messiah. Christians best understand the messianic prophecies in the light of their fulfillment by Jesus, our Savior. Jonah is missing big-picture prophecies like Jeremiah’s, which foretell of a coming covenant written on our hearts (Jer. 31), or Amos’s prophecy of restoring the Tent of David (Amos 9). Jonah played a different role in the foreshadowing of Jesus. His encounter with death and three days inside the fish are a symbol of the death and resurrection of Jesus. Admittedly, Christians often interpret the Hebrew scriptures as analogies for the life and mission of Christ, and sometimes that inhibits them from reading the Old Testament on its own merit. However, the Jonah analogy is different. Twice in the gospels, Jesus directly pointed to the “sign of Jonah” as prophetic of his own death, burial, and resurrection. Jesus said, “For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matt. 12:39-40).
Jesus added, “something greater than Jonah is here.” Jonah had delivered a message of repentance to the Ninevites, and their hearts had been ripe for hearing the truth of Yahweh, but salvation came only to those few and only for that short amount of time, as the prophet Nahum would make clear in his prophecy against Ninevah just 100 years later. By contrast, Jesus’s death and resurrection signaled the disciples to go forth into the world and preach the good news to all nations and for every coming generation. That is what Jesus meant by saying that “something greater than Jonah is here.” God has always been doing big things, but this was much bigger!
Jonah deserved his punishment. His rescue was strictly the result of God’s mercy. Jesus did not deserve the grave. Therefore, he conquered it. Jonah promised Yahweh he would offer a sacrifice in gratitude for his deliverance. Jesus sacrificed himself as the deliverance for us all.
Father Mapple summarized the importance of Jonah to his congregation of shipmates: “This book, containing only four chapters—four yarns—is one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of Scriptures.” He continued, “Yet what depths of the soul does Jonah’s deep sea-line sound!”