There's been a recent resurgence of scholarly publications on Jonah. What I find intriguing and heartening is the growing number of such publications by women biblical scholars.
One of the first major contributions on Jonah was Phyllis Trible, whose Rhetorical Criticism: Context, Method and the Book of Jonah was published in 1995. This dual purpose work was and remains a substantial contribution to rhetorical criticism as a key hermeneutical approach to the biblical text. Literary critical, and rhetorical analysis, open new avenues to understanding the author's care and craft in composition, and how such skill becomes a vehicle for the art of persuasion. Jonah is then used by Trible as an example to test drive many of her proposals. As the publishers explained to prospective readers:
"In this book Trible's formulated guidelines are applied to a detailed study of the book of Jonah. A close reading with respect to structure, syntax, style, and substance elicits a host of meanings embedded in the text, enabling the relationship between artistry and theology to emerge with clarity."
The result is an enlightening and innovative approach to Jonah that is multi-disciplinary, and avoids a far too swift foreclosing on the text with settled conclusions as to what it means, and what the writer is trying to persuade the reader to think, or do.
A couple of years later Trible followed up with a commentary on Jonah for the New Interpreter's Bible. Like several first class commentaries in this series, it is embedded in a composite volume that contains the full Book of the Twelve Prophets and Daniel, which makes it expensive and hard to source. That seriously limits the audience for her commentary - and that's a shame, because Trible on Jonah is one of the most stimulating treatments available. Find it in a library if you can.
A Biblical Text and Its Afterlives. The Survival of Jonah in Western Culture, (Cambridge 2000), by Yvonne Sherwood, is a tour de force, a definitive example of listening to a text by listening to how others have heard it. The result is a book packed with information about how Jonah has been represented in painting, sculpture, stained glass, novels, poetry, film, music, slave songs, sermons and so many other human cultural and linguistic ways of telling the story, and sadly, not always telling it well.
Sherwood illumines several major issues, including anti-Judaism in biblical studies (itself now a major field of both study and required redress), and the secularisation of the Bible whose stories are now popularly divorced from the numinous and transcendent as understood in the Bible itself. This book is hard to describe adequately as to its range and importance; it is required reading for any and all serious study of Jonah that post dates its publication. It's that good.
By far the most substantial commentary on Jonah so far is now Amy Erickson's magnum opus, the Illuminations Commentary on Jonah, published by Eerdmans in 2021. This is a major critical commentary but written to be read as well as consulted. This series of commentaries has two main sections for each volume, giving them a particular niche as exegetical resources.
Part One is 'A History of Consequences', and this accounts for around 170 pages. Not unlike Sherwood, Erickson has carefully excavated the history of interpretation but used that information to examine the consequences, impact and after effects of certain interpretations. Like Sherwood, Erickson unearths surprising, at times shocking ways the text of Jonah has been preached, received, interpreted and shaped (at times misshaped), cultural norms and theological conclusions, for good or ill.
Part Two is the Interpretation section, of around 200 pages. This is in the more traditional form of a commentary. I intend to write a full review of this commentary later - for now, with Trible, Sherwood and Erickson, Jonah scholars are well set up for future studies. Of which there are even more in the pipeline, and also by leading women scholars!
A third major study of reception history, or history of interpretation has just been published by Blackwell, Jonah Through the Centuries, by Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer. The approach is different in this series, however. The commentary works through the text verse by verse, and brings the history of interpretation to bear on the meaning of each passage. This is done chronologically through early Jewish and Rabbinic, to Christian Fathers, Medieval and Reformation periods, Enlightenment and into the contemporary era. Film and art, fiction and poetry, music and theatre are quoted alongside sermons, commentary and other literary studies.
This is the most user friendly format of the three volumes that major on the after-life of the story of Jonah; and Tiemeyer knows the field as thoroughly as Sherwood and Erickson. The format of this series is much more accessible for those who will be teaching and preaching the Jonah text. But Sherwood and Erickson add so much more, so that for those specially interested in reception history and history of consequences, all three are required reading.
April will see the publication of yet another premier league commentary, this time in the Hermeneia Series, by Susan Niditch, a veteran scholar of the Hebrew Bible.
I think the publishers description gives an indication of the approach and value of this commentary which brings yet another perspective on the puzzles of Jonah:
"Jonah's story is treated as a complex reflection upon the heavy matters of life and death, good and evil, and human and divine relations. The narrative probes an individual's relationship with a demanding deity, considers vexing cultural issues of "us versus them," and examines the role of Israel's God in a universal and international context. The author examines the ways in which Jonah prods readers to contemplate these fundamental issues concerning group- and self-definition."
And to complete the set, Elaine Philips has just published a composite volume in yet another series, this time on Obadiah, Jonah and Micah. This is a more conservative series than those reviewed above, but it is conservative scholarship at its best. Evidenced argument, consideration of alternative viewpoints, careful exegetical study in conversation with critical scholarship, and in most of the volumes I have used, readable commentary that seeks to understand original meaning and contemporary interpretation for the church.
The publisher's description is understandably positive, but Phillips' previous work suggests this is a worthwhile option for plunging with Jonah into the depths of what God is about.
"Comprehensive and compelling, Elaine Phillips' commentary on Obadiah, Jonah and Micah is a thorough study that will give you an appreciation of the struggles these prophets faced as they answered God's call to speak into difficult geo-political contexts, and the lessons that they can teach Christians today."
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