Jonah's Story, Our Challenge

Karl Möller

Description

Jonah’s radical and enigmatic nature calls for deeper exploration and engagement. Given its brevity, it is also an ideal text for multiple readings from a range of perspectives that complement, build upon, or challenge and critique each other. In Jonah’s Story, Our Challenge, each chapter brings a different hermeneutical tool to the text, to demonstrate the wealth of fresh readings and new vistas which can open up, and the rich resources for ministry which can come from these multiple readings.

Sujets

• Biblical Interpretation
• Biblical Criticism
• Philosophie et théologie
• Old Testament
• Religion

Informations

• Publié par: Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd
• Date de parution: 28 février 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780334061373
• Langue: English

Extrait

Jonah’s Story, Our Challenge
Reading a Biblical Narrative in Today’s Church and World
Karl Möller






© Karl Möller 2023
Published in 2023 by SCM Press
Editorial office
3rd Floor, Invicta House,
108–114 Golden Lane,
London EC1Y 0TG, UK
www.scmpress.co.uk
SCM Press is an imprint of Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd (a registered charity)

Hymns Ancient & Modern® is a registered trademark of Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd
13A Hellesdon Park Road, Norwich,
Norfolk NR6 5DR, UK
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, SCM Press.
The Author has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the Author of this Work
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized Edition, copyright © 1989, 1995 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-0-334-06135-9
Typeset by Regent Typesetting
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd




Contents
Preface

1. Jonah’s Readers: Perspectives on Interpretation
Jonah probed and tickled
The author, the text and the reader
2. Jonah’s World: Historical and Social-Science Perspectives
From historical to social-scientific criticism
The book of Jonah as read by Jerusalemite literati in Persian Yehud
Social science and the reading of prophetic story
3. Jonah’s Art and Reception: The Poetics of a Biblical Narrative
Narrative criticism and biblical poetics
The building blocks of narrative
Narrative criticism and the biblical story as art
The politics of genre
Reader-response criticism and the contribution of the reader
4. Jonah’s Challenge: Contextual, Liberationist and Postcolonial Interpretation
Contextual biblical hermeneutics
Liberationist readings
Postcolonial biblical interpretation
5. Jonah’s Depths: Psychological Biblical Criticism
Psychoanalytical (Jungian) textual interpretation
Psychological approaches to the book of Jonah
6. Jonah’s ‘Otherkind’: Ecological Readings
Initial responses to a radical challenge
Developing ecological-critical approaches to the Bible

Bibliography
Notes




Preface
This book grew out of a module on biblical interpretation, which I taught at the now closed All Saints Centre for Mission and Ministry, sadly cut short before it could implement its new, exciting and now regrettably untried vision for ministerial education. The module provided an opportunity to explore a range of approaches to biblical interpretation in connection with reading the book of Jonah from different perspectives. The material has since been significantly expanded, and some new chapters had to be written as the original module covered texts from both the Old and the New Testaments. Here we focus only on the book of Jonah, allowing for even more angles to be explored in this rich and fascinating text.
As with so many things in recent years, the origins of the book have been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, which prevented classroom teaching, thus making it necessary for the entire module to be delivered online. The notes that ultimately grew into the book were originally written as a basis for discussion. Students would read them in advance of our sessions, which were devoted entirely to further reflection and conversation, thus allowing for many voices to be heard. The questions that are interspersed throughout the book were designed to facilitate deeper reflection and discussion of the issues raised in the material, and I hope that they may still fulfil that purpose in the form in which they are presented here.
Teaching a whole module online was a new experience for me, and I owe a great debt of gratitude to the students who made the sessions so fascinating and enjoyable. It was not least the quality of their engagement with these materials that sparked my enthusiasm to make them available to others. Further votes of thanks are due to my daughter-in-law Holly Möller and my friend and former colleague John Applegate, who read drafts of the book and provided highly insightful feedback and many helpful suggestions for improving it. Finally, I would like to say a big thank you to my wife Maja who, during a very challenging year, was a massive encouragement with her visionary approach to the continuance of my vocation to teaching and writing.



1. Jonah’s Readers: Perspectives on Interpretation
Jonah and the ‘whale’ are among the Bible’s best-known figures. It has even been suggested that ‘Jonah is not a story you merely read or hear, but one into which you are born, as into a family … Jonah … is the story known in the bones, the story you can’t remember ever not knowing’ (Hampl, p. 291). But what are we to make of the book of Jonah and its ‘accumulation of hair-raising and eye-popping phenomena’ (Allen, p. 176), including a man-swallowing fish, a city of 120,000 people and their animals fasting and crying mightily to God, a tiny worm with alarmingly destructive powers, and some other curiosities thrown in for good measure? What are we to make of this book whose protagonist flees from God because of God’s grace and mercy, who ends up becoming the most successful prophet in the history of ancient Israel and yet is so frustrated that he repeatedly wishes to die? What kind of book is this, and how might we read it in today’s church and world?
The book of Jonah, a mere 48 verses long, has raised countless interpretive questions and occasioned an astonishing array of readings. Adele Berlin reckons (1976, p. 230) there are ‘almost as many interpretations as there are commentators’, while Andreas Kunz-Lübcke (p. 63), not unfittingly considering the role played by the sea, speaks of an ‘ocean of possible interpretations’. Yvonne Sherwood (2000, p. 195) explains this with what she calls the ‘infinite plasticity of this little text’ and the book’s ‘capacity to reinvent itself’. But that capacity has, as we shall see, been stimulated or even demanded by the countless questions and perspectives brought to it by a multifarious readership that has read the book in different locations and over the course of more than two millennia.
This is not a commentary on Jonah. No attempt will be made to look at every verse, nor am I going to offer a linear explanation that proceeds from section to section until everything has been covered. My main conversation partners accordingly are not the commentaries. 1 Given the above questions – what kind of book is Jonah, and how are we to read it? – we are instead going to consider a range of approaches that have been adopted in the reading of this rich but also challenging text. These include historical and social-science approaches, narrative criticism or poetics, contextual, liberationist and postcolonial perspectives, psychological interpretations and ecological readings. They fall into different categories, depending on whether they focus on the book’s author(s) and their context, on the text and its features or on the readers and their interests and meaning-generating powers. I have made no attempt to be exhaustive in my coverage of reading strategies, which, given the plethora of approaches – the 2004 volume Methods of Biblical Interpretation , edited by John Hayes, features well over 50 entries – would scarcely have been possible anyway. My main aims instead are: To cover author-, text- and reader-centred approaches, with the emphasis being on the latter. To introduce readers to the most inspiring readings of the book of Jonah I have encountered. To give much space to contextual, liberationist and postcolonial readings that afford us fresh and often challenging perspectives from around the world that are important for us to hear. To include psychological readings, which are often ignored but have contributed some intriguing observations to the study of Jonah. To embrace ecological interpretation and its insights into the reading of Jonah and encourage an ecological reading of the Bible more generally. To let different – and at times entirely contradictory – readings stand next to one another and thus allow for multiple voices to be heard. To encourage reflection on the range of interpretations showcased here by the inclusion of questions designed for deliberation and discussion.
Having said that no attempt has been made to be exhaustive in the coverage of interpretive approaches, I should flag up two further limitations. First, my focus is entirely on current readings. As Sherwood has shown in her masterful study A Biblical Text and Its Afterlives , the interpretation of Jonah has varied greatly over the course of the book’s reception history. This is shown, for instance, in early Christological readings that saw Jonah as prefiguring Christ having been almost completely abandoned and replaced by readings of Jonah as a nationalistic, religiously ethnocentric, bigoted Jew (more about that later). Readers interested in premodern and early Enlightenment readings will have to consult Sherwood’s work, as these cannot be covered here. Second, the same is true for current Jewish and Muslim readings, as my focus here is on Christian interpretation. Jewish approaches are, again, well covered by Sherwood, while Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer’s recent work,