Jonah: Introduction and Commentary

By Amy Erickson

The dominant reading of the book of Jonah—that the hapless prophet Jonah is a lesson in not trying to run away from God—oversimplifies a profoundly literary biblical text, argues Amy Erickson. Likewise, the more recent understanding of Jonah as satire is problematic in its own right, laden as it is with anti-Jewish undertones and the superimposition of a Christian worldview onto a Jewish text. How can we move away from these stale interpretations to recover the richness of meaning that belongs to this short but noteworthy book of the Bible? 

This Illuminations commentary delves into Jonah’s reception history in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic contexts while also exploring its representations in visual arts, music, literature, and pop culture. After this thorough contextualization, Erickson provides a fresh translation and exegesis, paving the way for pastors and scholars to read and utilize the book of Jonah as the provocative, richly allusive, and theologically robust text that it is.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: May 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781467461306

Amy Erickson

Amy Erickson is associate professor of Hebrew Bible and the director of the Masters of Theological Studies program at the Iliff School of Theology.

Book preview

Introduction

In the modern era, the dominant interpretation of the book of Jonah has gone something like this: Jonah is an obstinate, disobedient prophet of the Lord who does not want to proclaim a message of salvation to non-Jews, especially his enemies. Over the course of the book, God pushes Jonah to see the light—namely, that God’s love and mercy extend to everyone, not only to the Jews. The gentiles in Nineveh are incredibly spiritually enlightened and repent of their evil ways after five words from Jonah. Or, alternatively, they repent in an over-the-top way to show up—in fantastic relief—Jonah’s obstinacy, in particular his failure to repent and submit to God. Either way, these gentiles get God (the true God) in a way that Jonah does not. The anger Jonah expresses in the final chapter of the book reveals that Jonah has ultimately failed to accept that God could go so far as to forgive Israel’s enemies.

In the 1980s and 1990s, many commentators, attentive to the book’s apparent comedic elements, saw the book as a satire. They argued the book lampooned the character Jonah in order to poke fun at xenophobic Israelites, who did not like the idea of sharing God’s favor with the nations (gentiles). The assumption behind these readings is that if the text is a satire, it must be rejecting something, showing some position to be funny, as in funny ludicrous: what is rejected is Jonah and all that he seems to stand for (e.g., xenophobia, election, particularity, prophecy, old ideas about YHWH).

The dominant interpretation, along with its satirical spin-off, has had real appeal—especially to Christians who like the idea of a universally loving God who is slow to punish and anger and are a bit uncomfortable with the theological implications of Israel’s election as well as with certain depictions of Israel’s god (as violent, angry, judging).

However, as some scholars, in particular Yvonne Sherwood, have recently pointed out, this dominant interpretation has some disturbing implications. First, casting Jonah as the sole target of the book’s critique plays into and exacerbates a deep-seated and long-felt Christian anxiety about the presence of the Jew. Indeed, as Sherwood has persuasively and disturbingly shown, a rhetoric of anti-Judaism pervades Christian critiques of the character Jonah, who is consistently indicted for being too narrow-minded, too stubborn, too disobedient—in fact, too much like a Christian anti-Judaic stereotype. The dominant reading encourages readers—Christian readers in particular—to chuckle knowingly, perhaps with some pity, at the selfish, obstinate Jonah who must learn a lesson that they (we, really) already know. In this way, Christian identity is shored up over against Jewish identity (Sherwood, 185).

Second, this reading takes the Ninevites and, without the slightest bit of irony, turns them into the gentiles whom God is determined to save, despite the protests of the small-minded Jew, Jonah. Inherent in this interpretation is a suspicious consistency between the Protestant worldview and God’s message in Jonah (it just so happens that the God of Israel espouses the most cherished of mainline Christian values). This is an interpretation that grows up from a secure readerly position, undergirded by the assumption that these readers already know what the book wants to teach—there is an answer at the back of the book that Protestants knew all along. This reinforces a Christian tendency to feel confident that it is God’s will for Christians, at least, to be saved.

Third, the prevalence of the dominant reading has the effect of marginalizing other possible interpretations. In the book’s long history of interpretation, quite different readings of the book arose and were nurtured on the margins, away from the power centers of Europe. Unlike mainstream readers, whose interpretations typically confirm and reinforce the status quo, readers from marginalized communities have tended to celebrate the ambiguous and the unsettled (which mirrors their own ambiguous and unsettled existences). Rather than use the text to reinforce the validity and rightness of the current situation, marginal readers have used the text as a forum to air their fears and raise troubling questions, which—not unlike their lives—get played out without resolution. Readers who are politically or economically marginalized cannot so easily assume that God is on their side. Such readings look at God’s salvation of Nineveh, the capital of the empire that destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel, and ask: Is God siding with our enemies against us? Can we trust God to act in our interests? Is God a good god? Where the dominant reading takes the difficult, raw theological questions raised by Jonah and answers them quickly, coherently, and firmly, marginal interpretations tend to take anxieties about God’s protection and the waywardness of human life and stage them so that readers can wrestle with them (Sherwood 185–88).

Finally, the dominant interpretation is simply stale and flat. It takes all of the power, pathos, and subtlety that is characteristic of great literature and processes it down to an easily digested, gluten-free kernel. It takes a theologically robust, richly allusive, and provocative biblical book and pitches it as a children’s story designed to deliver a saccharine moral of the story (e.g., you can’t run away from God! or, even sweeter, God loves everyone!). What I hope to offer in this commentary is a reading that is a bit meatier and more savory.

1.0 TEXTS AND VERSIONS

In the third century CE, Origen’s monumental project known as the Hexapla marks the beginning of textual criticism of the book of Jonah. The conviction that the establishment of a correct text was a necessary precursor to exegesis motivated Origen to produce the Hexapla. Such a correct text was elusive in Origen’s time because there were a number of rival Greek translations competing with the Septuagint; the variants, along with the many Greek divergences from the Hebrew text, created confusion in the church where leaders wanted to undergird and bolster their authority with the single, true text of Scripture.

To determine that true text, Origen constructed a system designed to help him adjudicate among the available variants. Although Origen’s Hexapla is not extant, it likely consisted of six columns containing (1) the Hebrew text in Hebrew square script, (2) a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew, (3) Aquila’s Greek translation, (4) Symmachus’s Greek translation, (5) the so-called Septuagint, which consisted of OG supplemented with material from Theodotion, marked with asterisks, and (6) Theodotion’s translation. Although convinced of the Septuagint’s spiritual and ecclesiastical authority, Origen was partial to the Hebrew because it represented the Old Testament in its original form (Paget 1996, 507).

The creation of Polyglots, or multilingual Bibles, marks the next significant moment in text-critical study. Eveline van Staalduine-Sulman compares the intellectual practice that fueled the creation of Polyglots to that of the study of flowers in the seventeenth century: collection, observation, and comparison. Versions were collected and presented side by side on the same page so that scholars and religious leaders could observe the differences and similarities among them and then study them in comparison to one another (230).

The Polyglots reflect the values of the scholars and printers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, who believed that there is more to the original text than meets the eye and no translation would ever manage to comprehend the entire meaning of the original text (Staalduine-Sulman 2017, 230). Because these Polyglot makers also believed that those who lived in closer proximity to the time and culture of the Bible had more accurate and even more intimate information about God, Polyglots accumulated more versions over time. The burgeoning grandeur of these projects has been likened to cathedral building in that the Polyglot was a material and visual expression of devotion that also brought glory to the men and the nations that produced them.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros was dismayed by the state of biblical scholarship in Spain. To ameliorate the situation, he established a university and enlisted a host of experts in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin to collaborate on the Complutensian Polyglot (Alcalá de Henares, Spain, 1514–1517). This aesthetically striking Bible presented the Hebrew, Greek (the ecclesiastical text known as the Septuagint, supplemented with the asterisked material), and Latin (Vulgate) of the book of Jonah on a single page. In the next century, the Antwerp (1569–1572) and Paris (1645) Polyglots followed, adding the text of the Targum at the bottom of each page.

The London Polyglot (1655–1657) emerged in the wake of the English Civil War. Its lead creator, Brian Walton, was convinced that an ambitious new Polyglot would be an important way to bring order and unity to the divided nation. In Walton’s Polyglot, the text of Jonah appears in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Syriac, Arabic, and Aramaic. While the sought-after order and unity in England remained elusive, the availability of Polyglots and other philological and grammatical resources produced during the same period enabled modern textual criticism on Jonah to develop through the work of scholars including Louis Cappel (1585–1658), Albert Schultens (1686–1750), Charles François Houbigant (1684–1783), and Georg Beer (1865–1946). Major text-critical and philological contributions in the twentieth century were produced by Julius Bewer (1912), Phyllis Trible (1963), and Jack Sasson (1990).

1.1 HEBREW

1.1.1 Masoretic Text

The primary Hebrew source for my translation of the biblical book of Jonah is the Masoretic Text (MT). The most readily and widely available witness to MT-Jonah is B19A, Codex Leningrad (MTL), which dates to ca. 1009 CE and is housed in St. Petersburg. MTL is the basis of Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS), the fourth edition of which was edited by K. Elliger (1967–1968). While Biblia Hebraica Leningradensia (BHL), edited by Aron Dotan (2001), corrects some of the errors in BHS, it does not contain a critical apparatus. For the fifth edition of BHS, Biblia Hebraica Quinta (BHQ), Anthony Gelston prepared the fascicle for the Twelve Prophets (2010). A facsimile edition of MTL, edited by David Noel Freedman, Astrid Beck, and James Sanders, was published in 1997.

While Codex Aleppo (MTA) represents the most accurate source for MT, unfortunately the pages containing the book of Jonah are (presumably) among the three pages from the Twelve Prophets (Amos 8:13 to Mic 5:1, including the books of Obadiah and Jonah) that have been lost.

The Cairo Codex of the Prophets (Codex Prophetarum Cairensis) contains the complete text of the Nevi’im, including the book of Jonah. While the colophon indicates that the text was pointed in 895 CE by Moses ben Asher in Tiberias, L. Lipschütz observed that the codex is more similar to the Ben Naphtali tradition than that of Ben Asher (1962). M. H. Goshen-Gottstein explained the discrepancy by arguing that Ben Naphtali followed the Ben Asher tradition more scrupulously than Moses ben Asher’s own son (1963, 107). U. Cassutto published the book of Jonah from this manuscript in 1946 (print ed. 1953), and D. Lyons edited a facsimile critical edition of the codex’s Masora (1999).

The Petersburg Codex of the Prophets (VP) contains the Major and Minor Prophets, including Jonah. The manuscript was discovered in a synagogue in the Crimea in 1839 and is significant because of its age (it dates to 916 CE) as well as for its preservation of the Babylonian pointing system.

Variants: Benjamin Kennicott (1776) published a collection of variants from more than six hundred manuscripts and fifty-two editions of the Hebrew text. Giovanni De Rossi supplemented and corrected Kennicott’s edition some ten years later (1788). In 1926, C. D. Ginsburg prepared a new edition of the Later Prophets. The text was based on Jacob ben Chayyim’s Second Rabbinic Bible (1524/25) and included variants from more than seventy manuscripts. The majority of these variants show divergence only on minor grammatical points; few produce potential differences in meaning.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

De Rossi, G., ed. 1788. Variae lectiones Veteris Testamenti ex Immensa Mss. 4 vols. Parma: Ex Regio Typographeo.

Dotan, A., ed. 2001. Biblia Hebraica Leningradensia. Peabody, MA: Hendrikson.

Freedman, D. N., et al., eds. 1998. The Leningrad Codex: A Facsimile Edition. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

Gelston, A. 2010. Biblia Hebraica Quinta: The Twelve Minor Prophets. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson.

Ginsburg, C. D., ed. 1926. The Old Testament, Diligently Revised According to the Masorah and the Early Editions with Various Readings. 4 vols. London: British Foreign Society.

Goshen-Gottstein, M. H. 1963. Pages 79–122 in The Rise of the Tiberian Bible Text. In Biblical and Other Studies. Edited by A. Altmann. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Kennicott, B., ed. 1776. Vetus Testamentum Hebraicum cum Variis Lectionibus. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon.

Lipschütz, L. 1964. Kitāb Al-Khilaf: Mishael Ben Uzziel’s Treatise on the Differences between Ben Asher and Ben Naphtali. Textus 4:1–29.

Lyons, D., ed. 1999. The Cumulative Masora: Text, Form and Transmission with a Facsimile Critical Edition of the Cumulative Masora in the Cairo Prophets Codex; Heb. title: ha-Masorah ha-metsarefet—derakheha ve-sugeha: al pi ketav-yad Kahir shel ha-Neviim. Beer-Sheva: Ben-Gurion University.

Paget, J. N. B. C. 1996. The Christian Exegesis of the Old Testament in the Alexandrian Tradition. Pages 478–542 in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation, vol. I/1, Antiquity. Edited by M. Sæbø. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Staalduine-Sulman, E. van. 2017. Justifying Christian Aramaism: Editions and Latin Translations of the Targums from the Complutensian to the London Polyglot Bible. Jewish and Christian Perspectives Series, vol. 33. Leiden: Brill.

Strack, H. L., ed. 1876. The Hebrew Bible, Latter Prophets; The Babylonian Codex of Petrograd. New York: Ktav, 1971. Translation of Prophetarum posteriorum codex Babylonicus Petropolitanus. Petropoli: Editio Bibliothecae Publicae Imperialis.

1.1.2 Qumran Hebrew Texts

Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are five early manuscripts containing Jonah. In the Masoretic category, by which I mean that they are close to later texts that conform to the Masoretic tradition, are 4Q76 (XIIa), 4Q81 (XIIf ), 4Q82 (XIIg), Mur 88 (XII), and 8Ḥev 1 LXX (8ḤevXII gr; see 1.2).

Of the witnesses to the Minor Prophets, and to Jonah in particular, 4Q76 (XIIa) is one of the oldest, dating to the second century BCE (Guillaume 2007). It contains Jonah 1:1–5, 7–8; 1:9–2:1; 2:7; and 3:2 (Fuller 1997, 229–32). Wadi Murabbaʿat (Mur 88/MurXII) is the most complete, covering the entire book of Jonah with only a few lacunae. The differences between MT and the consonantal texts from Qumran are minimal and largely insignificant.

Until recently, the scholarly consensus was that the Book of the Twelve existed as a largely completed collection by the first half of the second century BCE. This view is primarily based on the reference to the Twelve in Ben Sira (May the bones of the Twelve Prophets send forth new life from where they lie, for they comforted the people of Jacob and delivered them with confident hope [Sir 49:10 NRSV]), which suggests that the Twelve was understood as a collection (Nogalski 1993a, 2–3), and perhaps copied as a unit (Wöhrle 2006), as early as the second century BCE. Thus there was no independent book of Jonah or Jonah scroll; Jonah was always part of the Twelve.

Ben Sira (in Sir 48:10) also alludes to the final verses of Malachi (Mal 3:23–24 [Eng. 4:5–6]), which, some scholars have argued, were composed late to serve as a conclusion to the Book of the Twelve (Mal 3:22 [Eng. 4:4]; Mal 3:23–24). That Ben Sira knows this material in the context of the Twelve suggests that the collection was complete by the time he referred to it (Nogalski 1993b, 185–86).

While Sir 49:10 suggests that the author of Ben Sira conceived of the Twelve as a unit in the second century BCE, that text does not tell us anything about the order of the books; nor does it suggest that the order was stable; nor does it mean Ben Sira’s view was representative. There is also scant evidence to support the view that the books were consistently copied together on a single scroll, rather than as individual books (Weissenberg 2012).

Despite early suggestions to the contrary (Fuller 1995), the evidence from Qumran is inconclusive. Lists of preserved copies are not as straightforward as they may appear, in part because the precise number of manuscripts is difficult to determine (Weissenberg 2012). DJD 39 (Tov 2002, 165–83) indicates that the Twelve is preserved in eight or nine manuscripts. The seven manuscripts from Cave 4 are labeled 4QXIIa–g or 4Q76–82. 4QXIIg and a fragmentary manuscript of Amos (5QAmos) were found in Cave 5. The possible ninth manuscript (4Q168) is extremely fragmentary, and while some scholars have suggested it is a copy of Micah or an exegetical interpretation of Micah (a pesher), there is no consensus on the matter. Further, although Fuller has reconstructed a physical join between the end of Malachi and the beginning of Jonah in 4QXIIa and posited a manuscript that contains a unique sequence in which Jonah follows Malachi, the reconstruction is not certain and should not be treated as factual (Brooke 2006, 22). Indeed, it is not at all certain which of the other twelve books, aside from Jonah and Malachi, were represented on 4QXIIa (formerly 4Q76) (Guillaume 2007). The existence of other fragments, some of which remain unpublished, makes it difficult to catalog accurately all the evidence and to determine the order of the books in the earliest collections (Weissenberg 2012).

Current assessments of the data indicate that the most complete manuscripts of the Twelve, which date prior to the turn of the millennium (4QXIIg and 8ḤevXII gr), contain only seven or eight of the books. This challenges Fuller’s early claim (1988, 151–52) that the six scrolls containing the Minor Prophets contained all twelve books (Jones 1995, 6). With the evidence from Qumran, Philippe Guillaume argues, Before the turn of the era, the Twelve constituted no more than an anthology gathered in a somewhat flexible order, which later on became fixed (2007, 15; see also Ben Zvi 1996; Beck 2006).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beck, M. 2006. Das Dodekapropheton als Anthologie. ZAW 118:558–83.

Ben Zvi, E. 1996. Pages 125–56 in Twelve Prophetic Books or ‘The Twelve’? A Few Preliminary Considerations. In Forming Prophetic Literature. Edited by J. W. Watts and P. R. House. JSOTSup 235. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic.

Benoit, P., ed. 1961. Les grottes de Muraba‘ât. DJD 2. Oxford: Clarendon.

Brooke, G. J. 2006. Pages 19–44 in The Twelve Minor Prophets and the Dead Sea Scrolls. In Congress Volume Leiden 2004. Edited by A. Lemaire. Leiden: Brill.

De Troyer, K., A. Lange, and L. L. Schulte, eds. 2009. Prophecy after the Prophets? The Contribution of the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Understanding of Biblical and Extra-Biblical Prophecy. Leuven: Peeters.

Ego, B., A. Lange, H. Lichtenberger, and K. De Troyer, eds. 2005. Biblia Qumranica. Vol. 3B. Leiden: Brill. Jonah: 104–13.

Fuller, R. E. 1988. The Minor Prophets Manuscripts from Qumran, Cave IV. PhD diss., Harvard University.

———. 1996. The Form and Formation of the Book of the Twelve. Pages 86–101 in Forming Prophetic Literature. Edited by J. W. Watts and P. R. House. JSOTSup 235. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic.

———. 1997. The Twelve. Pages 221–318 and plates XL–XLIII in Qumran Cave 4. Edited by E. Ulrich, F. M. Cross, R. E. Fuller, J. E. Sanderson, P. W. Skehan, and E. Tov. DJD 15. Oxford: Clarendon.

Guillaume, P. 2007. The Unlikely Malachi-Jonah Sequence (4QXIIa). JHebS 7:1–10.

Jones, B. A. 1995. The Formation of the Book of the Twelve: A Study in Text and Canon. Atlanta: Scholars Press.

Lange, A. 2009. The Genre of the Book of Jonah in Light of Paratextual Literature from the Qumran Library. Pages 193–202 in Prophecy after the Prophets? The Contribution of the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Understanding of Biblical and Extra-Biblical Prophecy. Edited by K. de Troyer and A. Lange with L. L. Schulte. Leuven: Peeters.

Lange, A., and M. Weigold. 2011. Biblical Quotations and Allusions in Second Temple Jewish Literature. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Martínez, G. 2004. The Text of the XII Prophets at Qumran. OTE 17:103–19.

Milik, J. 1961. 88. Rouleau des Douze Prophètes. Pages 181–205 in Les grottes de Murabba‘ât. Edited by P. Benoit, J. T. Milik, and R. de Vaux. DJD 2.1. Oxford: Clarendon.

———. 1962. 4. Amos. Pages 173–74 in Les ‘petites grottes’ de Qumran: Exploration de la falaise, Les grottes 2Q, 3Q, 5Q, 6Q, 7Q à 10Q, Le rouleau de cuivre. Edited by M. Baillet, J. T. Milik, and R. de Vaux. DJD 3. Oxford: Clarendon.

Nogalski, J. A. 1993a. Literary Precursors to the Book of the Twelve. BZAW 217. Berlin: de Gruyter.

———. 1993b. Redactional Processes in the Book of the Twelve. BZAW 218. Berlin: de Gruyter.

———. 1996. Intertextuality and the Twelve. Pages 102–24 in Forming Prophetic Literature. Edited by J. W. Watts and P. R. House. JSOTSup 235. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic.

Steck, O. H. 1996. Zur Abfolge Maleachi-Jona in 4Q76 (4QXIIa). ZAW 108:249–53.

Tov, E., ed. 2002. The Texts from the Judaean Desert: Indices and an Introduction to the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert Series. DJD 39. Oxford: Clarendon. Jonah: 165–83.

Tov, E., and S. J. Pfann, eds. 1997. The Dead Sea Scrolls on Microfiche. Leiden: Brill.

Ulrich, E., et al., eds. 1997. Qumran Cave 4, X: The Prophets. DJD 15. Oxford: Clarendon.

Washburn, D. L. 2003. A Catalog of Biblical Passages in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature.

Weissenberg, H. von. 2012. The Twelve Minor Prophets at Qumran and the Canonical Process: Amos as a ‘Case Study.’ Pages 357–77 in The Hebrew Bible in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Edited by N. Dávid, A. Lange, K. De Troyer, and S. Tzoref. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Wöhrle, J. 2006. Die Frühen Sammlungen des Zwölfprophetenbuches: Entstehung und Komposition. BZAW 360. Berlin: de Gruyter.

1.2 GREEK

1.2.1 Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Naḥal Ḥever

The earliest copy of Jonah in Greek is found in the Greek Minor Prophets scroll from Naḥal Ḥever (8ḤevXII gr), which contains fragments of all the Minor Prophets with the exception of Haggai. Two different scribes copied the scroll, indicating that it might be two separate scrolls (Martínez 2004, 105). Tov raises the possibility that the original scroll contained fifty-five columns (Tov 1990).

The Naḥal Ḥever scroll from Qumran is generally thought to be a revision of the OG from the early first century CE (Barthélemy 1963), intended to bring OG into closer conformity with MT. Brock and Jellicoe have argued that the purpose of the Letter of Aristeas was to polemicize against this kind of revision of the OG (Brock 1972, 11–36; Jellicoe 1968, 29–58).

1.2.2 The Greek Book of Jonah

The Old Greek (OG) translation of Jonah is regarded by some as the oldest Greek translation of the book, though both the precise form and date of it are difficult to determine.

Although there are palimpsests from the Cairo Geniza that provide a witness to Aquila’s translation, the Greek translations of Jonah from the Hebrew by Aquila (ca. 130 CE), Symmachus (ca. 170 CE), and Theodotion (traditionally dated to 190 CE, but now thought to have been carried out by the kaige-group at the end of the first century BCE or the beginning of the first century CE; Jobes and Silva 2000, 284–87) are known to us, for the most part, from Origen’s Hexapla (third century CE). The resulting composite text is commonly referred to as LXX-Jonah, which likely reflects the work of the same single translator responsible for all of LXX-Twelve—a theory first advanced by Henry St. John Thackeray (1920) and later defended by Joseph Ziegler ([1934] 1971). While George Howard (1970) and C. R. Harrison (1988) questioned the theory, Takamitsu Muraoka’s convincing defense of the unitary hypothesis has led to renewed consensus (1970, 1989).

The lack of extensive minuses (deletions) and pluses (additions) in LXX-Twelve suggests that the Greek translator of the Book of the Twelve, whom some have argued is the kaige-group (Theodotion) (Barthélemy 1963, 253–60), likely worked from an MT-type text, a Vorlage very similar to the consonantal text of MT. Also in support of this view is the Murabbaʿat scroll (Mur 88), which suggests that a text similar to the MT existed from the late first century BCE. Tov judges that while there are many minor divergences between the two, only a very small proportion of these differences are the result of a disparity between the MT and the translation’s Vorlage (1992, 123; see 1993, 117).

Jan Joosten characterizes the translation technique of the Greek Twelve as creatively faithful (2005, 217; see also Barr 1979, 281). While LXX-Twelve’s frequent replication of Hebrew word order gives the impression of a very literal translation, at times the translator intentionally diverges from this practice (Glenny 2009, 44–46). In general, while deeply concerned with maintaining the original of the parent text, the translation is not slavish, as Origen and others pejoratively claimed (Palmer 2006, 317–20). A host of studies on LXX-Amos indicates that the translator exercised freedom within the boundaries of a faithful word order in an effort to clarify the sense of the parent text (Jones 1995, 83–91). In general, when he perceives his parent text to be ambiguous, the translator tends to supply explicit subjects and objects, insert words and phrases, and give double translations of a single Hebrew word (Arieti 1972, 30; Waard 1978)

With regard to Jonah specifically, OG-Jonah reveals that, in spite of a literal translation strategy, minor interpretive insertions and changes result in a different understanding of certain narrative and generic features of the book. In general, the result is that in the Greek Old Testament, Jonah’s character is somewhat enhanced, reflecting a desire to have Jonah act in a manner more appropriate to the prophetic office, and the story is rendered more internally consistent (Perkins 1987, 52). In ch. 2, for example, the translator lessens the apparent incompatibility between the poem’s form (a psalm of thanksgiving) and the narrative context (a situation of distress) in MT by construing the psalm more in a mode of lament than thanksgiving. The translator transforms four assertions in the psalm into questions, wishes, vows, or requests. In this way, he integrates the psalm into the plot, by turning the poem into an expression of Jonah’s personal experience in the fish’s belly. As a result, the readerly disorientation occasioned by Jonah’s speaking of a psalm of thanksgiving from a place of distress is minimized (Perkins 1987, 48). The translator also strengthens the symmetry of the chapter. For example, in 2:11, instead of translating literally, And YHWH spoke to the fish, he matches the verb of 2:1, "And the fish was appointed (prosetaxen)."

OG’s concern for enhancing the propriety of the Hebrew is perhaps evident in the way it renders the Hebrew rʿʿ (evil). Different Greek words are used to describe the evil of Nineveh versus the evil of which God repents. The word ponēros (evil), which is applied to the Ninevites, has a connotation of immorality (3:8, 10; but cf. 1:2), while the more morally neutral kakos (disaster, calamity) is used to refer to God’s actions (1:7, 8; 3:10; 4:2) and even to Jonah’s feelings (4:6).

While the majority of scholars view OG-Jonah as a fairly literal transition of the Hebrew Vorlage, Sasson argues that the grammatical and philological disparities between MT and LXX in Jonah 3 are the result of significantly different interpretations of the Hebrew Vorlage. Sasson concludes that these two readings reflect the fact that in the ancient world, two separate accounts of what happened in Nineveh were in circulation (10, 264–68).

Another important Greek translation of Jonah comes from the Freer Minor Prophets codex from the third century CE. De Troyer has recently done a thorough analysis of Jonah in the Freer codex, comparing it to 8ḤevXII gr, OG (Ziegler), and MT. The nature of the twenty-four variants in Jonah (reflecting the corrections of two different scribes) has led her to conclude that the manuscript stands in the tradition of the Old Greek, generally correcting toward OG as opposed to the existing Hebrew texts (De Troyer 2006).

1.2.3 Old Latin

Old Latin (OL) or Vetus Latina (VL) refers to a plurality of Latin translations of the Septuagint that were in circulation prior to the completion of Jerome’s Latin translation of the Greek (abbreviated as Hier) in 388 CE. There is, then, no single text for OL. Thus, manuscripts have been assembled from various fragments, liturgies, and quotations from early Latin interpreters. Fragments of Jonah exist in the Constance Old Latin fragments of the Prophets (MS 175; Dold 1923), likely written in fifth-century Northern France; Codex Veronensis (MS 300), a Greek and Old Latin Psalter from the sixth century, which contains Jonah 2:3–10; and Codex Wirceburgiensis (MS 177; Ranke 1871), which dates to ca. 700 CE.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arieti, J. A. 1972. A Study in the Septuagint of Amos. PhD diss., Stanford University.

Baars, W. 1968. New Syro-Hexaplaric Texts: Edited, Commented upon, Compared with the Septuagint. Leiden: Brill.

Barr, J. 1979. The Typology of Literalism in Ancient Biblical Translations. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Barthélemy, D. 1963. Les devanciers d’Aquila. VTSup 10. Leiden: Brill.

Brock, S. P. 1972. The Phenomenon of the Septuagint. Oudtestamentische Studiën 17:11–36.

De Troyer, K. 2006. The Freer Twelve Minor Prophets Codex. Pages 75–85 in The Freer Biblical Manuscripts: Fresh Studies of an American Treasure Trove. Edited by L. W. Hurtado. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature.

Dold, A. 1923. Konstanzer altlateinische Propheten- und Evangelienbruchstücke mit Glossen. Leipzig: Harrassowitz.

Field, F., ed. 1871–75. Pages 4–83 in vol. 2 of Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt: sive, Veterum interpretum graecorum in totum Vetus Testamentum fragmenta. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon.

Glenny, W. E. 2009. Finding Meaning in the Text: Translation Technique and Theology in the Septuagint of Amos. VTSup 126. Leiden: Brill.

Harrison, C. R. 1988. The Unity of the Minor Prophets in the LXX: A Reexamination of the Question. BIOSCS 21:55–72.

Holladay, C. R. 1983. Fragments from Hellenistic Jewish Authors. Society of Biblical Literature Texts and Translations. Chico, CA: Scholars Press.

Howard, G. 1970. Some Notes on the Septuagint of Amos. VT 20:108–12.

Jellicoe, S. 1968. The Septuagint and Modern Study. Oxford: Clarendon.

Jobes, K., and M. Silva. 2000. Invitation to the Septuagint. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic.

Jones, B. A. 1995. The Formation of the Book of the Twelve: A Study in Text and Canon. Society of Biblical Literature Dissertation Series 149. Atlanta: Scholars Press.

Joosten, J. 2005. A Septuagintal Translation Technique in the Minor Prophets: The Elimination of Verbal Repetitions. Pages 217–23 in Interpreting Translation: Studies on the LXX and Ezekiel (FS J. Lust). Edited by G. Martínez and M. Vervenne. Leuven: Peeters.

Kahle, P. 1959. The Cairo Geniza. 2nd ed. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Martínez, F. G. 2004. The Text of the XII Prophets at Qumran. OTE 17:103–19.

Muraoka, T. 1970. Is the Septuagint Amos viii 12 – ix 10 a Separate Unit? VT 20:496–500.

———. 1989. In Defence of the Unity of the Septuagint Minor Prophets. AJBI 15:25–36.

———. 2002. Introduction aux Douze Petits Prophetes. Pages 1–23 in La Bible d’Alexandrie. 23, 1. Edited by E. Bons, J. Joosten, S. Kessler, and P. Le Moigne. Paris: Cerf.

Palmer, J. K. 2006. ‘Not Made with Tracing Paper’: Studies in The Septuagint of Zechariah. TynBul 57.2:317–20.

Perkins, L. 1987. "The Septuagint of Jonah: Aspects of Literary Analysis Applied to Biblical Translation." BIOSCS 20:43–53.

Sanders, H. A., ed. 1927. The Minor Prophets in the Freer Collection. University of Michigan Studies, Humanistic Series 21. New York: Macmillan.

Thackeray, H. J. 1920. The Septuagint and Jewish Worship. London: British Academy.

Tov, E., ed. 1990. The Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Nahal Hever (8HevXllgr). DJD 8. Oxford: Clarendon.

———. 1992. Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible. Minneapolis: Fortress.

———. 1993. Some Reflections on the Hebrew Texts from Which the Septuagint Was Translated. JNSL 19:107–22.

Waard, J. de. 1978. Translation Techniques Used by the Greek Translators of the Book of Amos. Bib 59:339–50.

Ziegler, J. [1934] 1971. Die Einheit der Septuaginta zum Zwölfprophetenbuch. Pages 29–42 in Sylloge: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Septuaginta. Mitteilungen des Septuaginta-Unternehmens 10. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Originally published as Die Einheit der LXX zum Zwölfprophetenbuch. In Beilage zum Vorlesungsverzeichnis der Staatlichen Akademie zu Braunsberg im WS 1934/35. Braunsberg.

———. 1967. Septuaginta. Vetus Testamentum Graecum Auctoritate Academiae Scientiarum Gottingensis editum: Duodecim Prophetae. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Jonah: 244–53.

1.3 VULGATE

In 382 CE, Pope Damasus commissioned Jerome to revise the existing Latin versions of the Gospels. That work led Jerome to undertake a more radical translation project of the OT. Instead of working exclusively from the Greek Old Testament, which was regarded as the authoritative text by most of his Christian contemporaries, Jerome decided to use the Hebrew as the basis for his Latin translation, which came to be known as the Vulgate (common edition).

Jerome’s decision to translate the Hebrew instead of the Greek was controversial in part because, in the late fourth century, the Christian church was actively trying to distinguish and distance itself from Judaism. Jerome gained notoriety for prioritizing the Hebrew version of the Old Testament over the Greek as well as for his decision to consult Jewish teachers. Not all were pleased; one Christian opponent declared Jerome’s translations to be tainted with Judaism (Apol. 2.32–34). Jerome’s running feud with Augustine, often centered on Jerome’s translational activities, reached vitriolic levels. One letter from Augustine to Jerome told the story of a riot breaking out in Tripoli after the bishop read Jerome’s translation of Jonah (Augustine, Epistles 71.5). For Augustine, altering the translation of the seventy was both a theological and pastoral issue. The church had long held that the Old Latin, based on the Greek Old Testament, was inspired by the Holy Spirit, and so the claim that Jerome’s new translation was based on (what amounted to) a different Bible was potentially destabilizing. Jerome himself recognized the issue and often used the OL when he preached.

One of the most controversial changes Jerome made in the Vulgate was in Jonah 4:6. Other Latin translations of the Hebrew qyqywn were based on the Old Greek kolokynthē and so rendered with Latin cucurbita (gourd), a word chosen perhaps for its phonetic similarity to qiqayon. Jerome, however, consulted the Hebrew and determined that the underlying Greek of cucurbita was a mistake, so he decided to provide the translation haedera (ivy). He made another change to OL in v. 6; instead of translating hṣyl as to shelter (obumbrare), Jerome renders it to protect (protegere). In this same verse, Jerome uncharacteristically inserts a gloss at the end of the line: for Jonah was very distressed (laboraverat enim). All this suggests that in his translation of ch. 4, Jerome was more explicitly engaged in interpretation than elsewhere in the book of Jonah.

Jerome depended heavily on the work of his Greek predecessors, especially Origen and Eusebius. His somewhat limited facility with Hebrew prompted him to look to Origen’s Hexapla, which catalogs the recentiores (the new translations of Aq, Symm, and Theod) for help in understanding his text. To reconcile this move with his stated commitment to Hebraica veritas, instead of acknowledging his debt to Origen’s Hexapla, he characterized the Three as Jews and semi-Jewish heretics (Williams 2006, 94). There is debate among scholars as to whether Jerome’s translation is essentially a rendition of the recentiores, relying primarily on Symm (Estin 1984), or a translation of the Hebrew that uses the recentiores to clarify difficult passages (Kedar 1988). In Kamesar’s study of Jerome’s Hebrew Questions on Genesis, he characterizes Jerome’s approach to the text as a "rabbinic-recentiores philology" and concludes that he primarily makes independent use of the recentiores, as well as Jewish exegesis, to support his close study of the Hebrew text (1993, 176–91). In the case of Jonah, for the most part, Jerome’s translation is more similar to MT than LXX-Vorlage (see also Sasson, 11).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Estin, C. 1984. Les psautiers de Jérôme à la lumière des traductions juives antérieures. Rome: San Girolamo.

Fischer, B., et al., eds. 1994. Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam versionem. 3rd ed. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft.

Kamesar, A. 1993. Jerome, Greek Scholarship, and the Hebrew Bible: A Study of the Quaestiones Hebraicae in Genesim. Oxford: Clarendon.

Kedar, B. 1988. The Latin Translators. Pages 299–338 in Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading, and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity. Edited by M. J. Mulder and H. Sysling. Assen: Van Gorcum; Philadelphia: Fortress.

Sabatier, O., ed. 1943. Bibliorum sacrorum latinae versiones antiquae: seu vetus italica, et caeterae quaecunque in codicibus mss. et antiquorum libris reperiri potuerunt: quae cum vulgata latina, et cum textu graeco comparantur. 3 vols. Reims: Reginaldum Florentain.

Williams, M. H. 2006. The Monk and the Book: Jerome and the Making of Christian Scholarship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

1.4 ARAMAIC

The Targums are interpretive translations of the Hebrew version. As the Jewish population transitioned from speaking Hebrew to speaking Aramaic just prior to the turn of the millennium, the need for a version of the Bible in the vernacular arose, in particular for use in the synagogues. The practice of translating the Scripture readings began as an oral practice, with the translator (turgeman) paraphrasing two or three verses of Hebrew into Aramaic for the benefit of the Aramaic-speaking congregation.

Although multiple versions of the Targums existed in antiquity, only a small number of those have survived: the two primary manuscript traditions are the early Palestinian Targum (MS Neofiti 1) and the Babylonian Targum (the Pentateuch in Onkelos and the Prophets in Jonathan), and they are quite distinct from each other.

Goshen-Gottstein has compiled an edition of the fragments from the Palestinian Targum, and it includes the book of Jonah (1983, 101–4). The basic Aramaic text of Targum Jonathan in Sperber’s volume (1962) is based on MS Or. 2211 of the British Museum (Codex Reuchlinianus) and includes an extensive critical apparatus. A manuscript from the Vatican (with Tiberian pointing) serves as the basis of Levine’s (1981) translation of and commentary on the Aramaic version of Jonah.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cathcart, K. J., and R. P. Gordon. 1989. The Targum of the Minor Prophets. Wilmington, DE: Glazier.

Dirksen, P. B., and A. van der Kooij, eds. 1995. The Peshitta as a Translation. Leiden: Brill.

Gordon, R. P. 1994. Studies in the Targum to the Twelve Prophets, from Nahum to Malachi. VTSup 51. Leiden: Brill.

———. 2006. Hebrew Bible and Ancient Versions: Selected Essays of Robert P. Gordon. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.

Goshen-Gottstein, M. 1983. Fragments of Lost Targumim. Ramat Gan, Israel: Bar Ilan University Press. Jonah: 101–4.

Koster, M. D. 1993. Peshitta Revisited: A Reassessment of Its Value as a Version. Journal of Semitic Studies 38:235–68.

Levine, É. 1981. The Aramaic Version of Jonah. New York: Sepher Hermon Press.

Sperber, A., ed. 1962. The Bible in Aramaic. Vol. 3, The Latter Prophets according to Targum Jonathan. Leiden: Brill. Jonah: 436–39.

1.5 SYRIAC

The Peshitta (Pesh) is a Syriac translation of a Hebrew consonantal text that likely originated in 150–200 CE. The earliest manuscript of the Peshitta is the Paris Polyglot of 1645 (updated in 1657). The diplomatic edition compiled by L. G. Rignell (1982) is based on Codex Ambrosianus, dating to the seventh century. That edition’s limitations—namely, that its exemplar contains a fair numbers of readings that are unique to itself—has prompted scholars at the Peshitta Institute at the University of Leiden to publish a new critical text. The volume that contains Jonah, The Peshitta of the Twelve Prophets, was published by Anthony Gelston in 1987.

Because the Peshitta of the Twelve Prophets diverges from MT at many points, it is doubtful that the Vorlage is identical to MT’s. That said, because the Syriac translators exercise a good deal of freedom in their idiomatic rendition of the Hebrew and do so inconsistently, there is no way to reconstruct Pesh’s Hebrew Vorlage with any degree of precision or certainty (Gelston 1987, 111–30). Moreover, while Gelston finds that even though the Peshitta of the Twelve has been influenced by Targum Jonathan or those familiar with it, it is closer to MT than to either Targ or LXX (156–57).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dirksen, P. 1988. "The Old Testament Peshitta." Pages 255–97 in Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading, and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity. Edited by M. J. Mulder and H. Sysling. Assen: Van Gorcum; Philadelphia: Fortress.

Gelston, A. 1987. The Peshitta of the Twelve Prophets. New York: Oxford University Press.

Szpek, H. 1998. On the Influences of the Septuagint on the Peshitta. CBQ 60:251–66.

Walter, D. M, G. Greenberg, and G. A. Kiraz. 2012. The Book of the Twelve Minor Prophets According to the Syriac Peshitta Version with English Translation. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias.

Weitzman, M. P. 1996. The Interpretative Character of the Syriac Old Testament. Pages 587–611 in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation, vol. I/1, Antiquity. Edited by M. Sæbø. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

2.0 LANGUAGE

2.1 VOCABULARY AND FORMS

On its surface the story of Jonah, particularly in chs. 1 and 3, appears to be simple, even artless. The language and style are plain, marked by basic vocabulary and repetition.

Key thematic roots include gdl (to be large or to be great), which appears fifteen times over the course of the book and in each chapter, and rʿh (to be evil or to be aggrieved), which appears nine times and in every chapter but one (ch. 2).

In each chapter, there is a verb for crying out to God (zʿq, qrʾ) or praying (pll). Non-Israelite characters cry out to their gods/God (1:5, 14; 3:7; cf. 1:6 [the captain tells Jonah to call (qrʾ) on his god]), and Jonah cries out (qrʾ) his message (1:2; 3:2, 4), but only Jonah prays to God in chs. 2 and 4 (2:2, 7; 4:2; cf. 2:3, I cried out [qrʾ]).

Words that link chs. 1 and 2 are yrd (three times in ch. 1 and once in ch. 2), zbḥ (one occurrence in each chapter), and ndr (one occurrence in each chapter). Several key words are repeated across the two final chapters, including nḥm (twice in ch. 3 and once in ch. 4), ḥrh (once in ch. 3 and four times in ch. 4), and yšb (once in ch. 3 and twice in ch. 4; this word also appears in ch. 2).

The first and final chapters each have a high density of repeated words that appear only within those chapters. In ch. 1 four verbs appear more than twice (yrʾ [6×], yrd [3× plus once in 2:1], ṭwl [4×], sʿr [4×], npl [3×]), and in ch. 4 there are more than two appearances of three verbs (ṭwb [5×], mwt [4×], qdm [3×]). The key word ḥws (to be concerned about [the loss of] or to pity, 4:10, 11) appears twice and only in the final chapter (Magonet, 14–15).

Repetition is also evident as a structuring device at a thematic level. For example, repeated or parallel actions are used to link chs. 1 and 3, which together form a diptych (Spronk 2009, 8).

YHWH commissions Jonah (1:1–2; 3:1–2).

Jonah stands up and goes (1:3; 3:3).

Jonah speaks to the sailors / the people of Nineveh (1:9; 3:4).

Jonah’s audience, who have not known YHWH, place their faith in YHWH/God (1:14; 3:5–9).

YHWH calms the sea / God refuses to destroy the city (1:15; 3:10).

The book’s structure is also evident at the thematic level. Non-Israelites appear in chs. 1 and 3, while in chs. 2 and 4 the focus is on the relationship between Jonah and God.

Upon closer reading, however, it quickly becomes apparent that the book is neither simple nor artless; rather, it is riddled with ambiguity, irony, wordplays, double meanings, and contradictory perspectives. The repeated key thematic words have different shades of meaning, and the simple narrative structure belies a puzzling set of pieces that can be joined and interlocked in a number of ways, yielding an array of meanings. David Clines, who characterizes the prose tale of the book of Job as pseudo-naive, explains that false naivety exploits the appearance of artlessness to convey a subtle message (1985, 127). Similarly, the apparently simplistic style of the book of Jonah functions as an inviting, layered site to which readers can return again and again to consider increasingly complex theological and anthropological questions.

2.2 LATE BIBLICAL HEBREW

The vast majority of scholars date the book of Jonah to the postmonarchical period (see Ben Zvi, 7n19). Jonah’s linguistic features—its lexemes and syntax—are similar to those found in demonstrably late texts such as Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles (Polzin 1976). That said, the prose of Jonah has a relatively lower density of Late Bibical Hebrew (LBH) features than Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles; its mixture of Standard Biblical Hebrew (SBH) and LBH syntax and vocabulary is comparable to Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi (Muldoon, 62).

Some scholars have attempted to date the linguistic features of Jonah more precisely. Muldoon, for example, dates the book to early Persian period (mid-sixth through early fifth century) on account of several elements better described as transitional (between SBH and LBH) than definitively late (48–63). However, dating a text, especially a book containing so few lexemes, within the range of decades or even half centuries on the basis of distinctions in language usage and syntax is a problematic enterprise (Simon, xli).

2.2.1 Semantic Change Indicative of Lateness

mnh. In Jonah (2:1; 4:6, 7, 8), the verb mnh in the Piel (wayəman) means to designate, appoint, assign, ordain. While the root is common in Hebrew, as in other Semitic languages, this meaning is attested in Hebrew exclusively in late texts (Job 7:3; Dan 1:5, 10, 11 [in the Piel]; 1 Chr 9:29 [in the Pual]) and in postbiblical Hebrew (5Q10, 5; for use in Rabbinic Hebrew, see Jastrow, 800; note, however, that in Akk. the G form, manû, means to assign, appoint). This meaning also appears in Imperial and later Aramaic (where the Pael is to appoint, versus the Peal, to count), including Biblical Aramaic (Ezra 7:26; Dan 2:24, 49; 3:12) (Landes 1982, 149). The evidence, therefore, suggests that this usage of mnh—in the Piel and once in the Pual—which occurs exclusively in LBH, is an Aramaism (Wagner 1966, 78–79).

zʿq ("to cry out," 1:5; 3:7). The verb zʿq appears twice in Jonah. There is a strong preference for zʿq over ṣʿq (which dominates in SBH) in late texts beginning with Ezekiel. Because there is no late trend in which ṣ shifts to z, Mark Rooker describes the shift as lexical rather than phonetic (1990, 134).

yitʿaššēt ("give us a thought," 1:6). The verb yitʿaššēt derives from the Aramaic root ʿšt, which means, to think, consider. The phrase yitʿaššēt l- is roughly synonymous with hšb l- (Ps 40:18) and zkr l- (Neh 13:14, 22) and means to have a favorable thought towards someone; to be gracious to someone (Landes 1982, 155–56). This is the only occurrence of the verb in the Hithpael in the Bible. While the word appears in the Sefire inscription IIB5, the positive sense of the verb is attested only in texts dated after the fifth century, as in the Elephantine papyri (Landes 1982, 155). As an Aramaism with a meaning evident only in late texts (see also ʿeštōnâ [Ps 146:4]; ʿaštût [Job 12:5]; Wagner 1966, 93), this verb provides a point of evidence in favor of the book’s Persian-period date. That an Aramaic loanword appears in the speech of the sailors also suggests that the word choice was intended to give their speech a foreign flavor (Rendsburg 1995, 177–90).

ʾlhy hšmym ("the god of heaven," 1:9). The divine epithet ʾlhy hšmym is likely related to the Aramaic phrase ʾlh šmyʾ. The title appears in Hebrew in Ezra 1:2 and Neh 1:5 and in Aramaic in Ezra 5:11, 6:9, and 7:12 (Landes 1982, 155) as well as in the Elephantine papyri (Cowley 1923, e.g., 30:2, 28 [= TAD A4.7]; 31:27 [= TAD A4.8]; Wolff, 115). Although the epithet does not appear exclusively in late texts (e.g., Gen 24:3), its distribution is denser in late texts.

kʾšr ḥpṣt ʿśyt ("you do what you please," 1:14). The formulation in Jonah, kʾšr ḥpṣt ʿśyt, reflects the phrase’s late shift (post-500 BCE) from SBH lʿśwt hṭwb bʿyny (to do what is good in one’s own eyes) (Hurvitz 1982, 267).

mahălāk (journey, 3:3, 4). In earlier texts, there is a preference for derek to refer to a journey (Gen 31:23; Exod 3:18; 5:3; Num 10:33). As a term for journey, mahălāk appears only in later texts (Ezek 42:4; Zech 3:7; Neh 2:6). Further, postbiblical Hebrew interprets derek, when it means journey, as mhlk (Rooker 1990, 167–69).

ṭaʿam (decree, 3:7). In Biblical Hebrew, ṭaʿam typically refers to judgment (Ps 119:66), discernment (Job 12:20; cf. Prov 31:18), or discretion (Prov 11:12; cf. 26:16). However, the sense of the word in Jonah is consistent with Aramaic usage, where ṭaʿam refers to a written decree or edict in the Aramaic portions of Ezra (4:19, 21; 5:3) and Daniel (3:10, 29; 4:3). This particular word choice may have appealed to the author on account of the potential for bilingual wordplay with the phrase (do not taste, 3:7), resulting in a pun between edict (ṭaʿam, Aramaic) and taste (ṭʿm, Hebrew) (Rendsburg 1988, 355).

2.2.2 Syntactic Features Indicative of Lateness

Muldoon does a syntactic analysis of the book based on Polzin’s criteria for lateness (57–63). Although the majority of those findings are inconsequential or moderately suggestive because there is only a single example or an absence of evidence, at least two notable syntactic features of Jonah are relatively suggestive of a late date. First, LBH shows a preference for the verbal direct object suffix over the direct object marker ʾet with a pronominal suffix. In Jonah, a verb with a pronominal suffix appears four times, and there are no instances of a pronominal suffix attached to ʾet. Although the sample size is too small to conclude anything definitive, the reduced use of the direct object marker with a suffix is consistent with late texts (Polzin 1976, 28–31; Landes 1982, 162). Second, in LBH there is a reduced usage of the infinitive absolute with finite verbs. There is not a single appearance of the infinitive absolute in the book of Jonah (Polzin 1976, 43; Muldoon, 59).

In sum, although the data set is quite small (the book consists of only forty-eight verses), the evidence points strongly to a date that is later rather than earlier. The presence of several lexical and syntactical features characteristic of LBH suggests that the Hebrew of the book of Jonah is more consistent with LBH than with SBH or Early Biblical Hebrew.

2.3 FOREIGNIZING OR ARCHAIZING TERMS

Some features are simply not diagnostic for the date as they are used for literary effect. In particular, the speech of non-Israelites is peppered with Aramaisms, and when Jonah speaks to the sailors, he deploys language seemingly designed to facilitate communication with non-Israelites.

bəšelləmî (more lit., on whose account, 1:7). The phrase bəšelləmî is a combination of four words (b- + š- + l- + mî) and is a calque from Aramaic (bədîl man; Almbladh, 20–21). As such, it may be a foreign-sounding word, appropriate for rendering the speech of non-Israelite sailors. When the sailors speak with one another, the particle š, as opposed to the relative pronoun ʾăšer, appears in their direct speech, which accords with the constructed identity of the sailors as foreigners (Holmstedt 2006, 16–18). The variation may also be the result of diglossia, with š reflecting vernacular usage and ʾăšer belonging to a higher register of communication (Muraoka, 2012). Although š comes to replace ʾăšer in Mishnaic Hebrew (MH), š is also used in SBH and so does not constitute evidence for the book’s late date (contra Rudolph, 340).

baʾăšer ləmî (1:8). Although the phrases bəšelləmî in 1:7 and baʾăšer ləmî in 1:8 have complementary meanings, from a literary perspective, the shift to baʾăšer ləmî is consistent with the story’s depiction of the sailors as foreign. When the sailors speak among themselves, they do so in their own tongue and use š- (v. 7), but when they address Jonah, they use his language and use ʾăšer (in comparable fashion, Jonah uses š- when he addresses the sailors in 1:12) (cf. 2 Kgs 6:11; Holmstedt 2006, 16–17).

The use of š- as relative particle with compound forms mostly occurs in later texts. However, in Jonah 1 it is more likely a stylistic decision.

yištōq (quiet, 1:11). Although the verb štq is widely attested in Aramaic, this does not mean it is late or that it is even an Aramaism (loanword) (Sasson, 122). It is just as likely that it was chosen for stylistic reasons consistent with the Aramaic verb attributed to the sailors in v. 6. The atypical grammatical construction of the sentence may also attempt to achieve the effect of coloring the sailors’ direct speech with foreign-sounding language.

ʿibrî ("I am a Hebrew," 1:9). The identifier ʿibrî is typically, though not exclusively, used by non-Israelites to refer to Israelites (e.g., Gen 39:14, 17; 41:12; Exod 2:11, 13; 1 Sam 4:6, 9; 13:19). The term, which appears in the Pentateuch and 1 Samuel, is used primarily as an archaic designation for the people of Judah and Israel (cf. Judean, Israelite). As an anachronism, it adds to the impression that the events the book narrates took place in a former time. The term ʿibrî refers backward historically to the Abraham story and its emphasis on identity through both genealogical and theological lines and distinguishes Jonah from the sailors along religious-ethnic lines rather than geographical or national lines (Handy, 66–67).

To summarize, the book uses a number of Hebrew constructs and terms to evoke a sense of foreignness about the people and the places Jonah encounters on his journeys outside the land of Israel.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Clines, D. J. A. 1985. False Naivety in the Prologue to Job. HAR 9:127–36.

Cowley, A. 1923. The Aramaic Papyri of the Fifth Century. Oxford: Clarendon.

Holmstedt, R. 2006. Issues in the Linguistic Analysis of a Dead Language, with Particular Reference to Ancient Hebrew. JHebS 6:1–21.

Hurvitz, A. 1982. "The History of a Legal Formula: kōl ʾ ašer-ḥāpēṣ ʿāśāh (Psalms Cxv 3, Cxxxv 6)." VT 32:257–67.

———. 2004. Hebrew and Aramaic in the Biblical Period: The Problem of ‘Aramaisms’ in Linguistic Research on the Hebrew Bible. Pages 24–37 in Biblical Hebrew: Studies in Chronology and Typology. Edited by I. Young. New York: T&T Clark.

Landes, G. M. 1982. Linguistic Criteria and the Date of the Book of Jonah. ErIsr 16:147*–70*.

———. 1999. A Case for the Sixth-Century BCE Dating of the Book of Jonah. Pages 100–116 in Realia Dei: Essays in Archaeology and Biblical Interpretation in Honor of Edward F. Campbell, Jr. at His Retirement. Edited by T. Hiebert and P. Williams. Atlanta: Scholars Press.

Polzin, R. 1976. Late Biblical Hebrew: Toward a Historic Typology of Biblical Hebrew Prose. HSM 12. Missoula, MT: Scholars Press.

Rendsburg, G. 1988. Bilingual Wordplay in the Bible. VT 38:354–62.

———. 1995. Linguistic Variation and the ‘Foreign’ Factor. IOS 15:177–90.

Rooker, M. 1990. Biblical Hebrew in Transition: The Language of the Book of Ezekiel. JSOTSup 90. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic.

Spronk, K. 2009. Jonah, Nahum and the Book of the Twelve: A Response to Jakob Wöhrle. JHebS 9:1–9.

Wagner, M. 1966. Die lexikalischen und grammatikalischen Aramaismen im alttestamentlichen Hebräisch. BZAW 96. Berlin: Topelmann.

Young, I. 2008. Late Biblical Hebrew and the Qumran Pesher Habakkuk. JHebS 8:1–38.

Young, I., R. Rezetko, and M. Ehrensvärd. 2008. Linguistic Dating of Biblical Texts. 2 vols.