The expectation would now be that Jonah would be jubilant. After all, he had been God’s instrument of salvation for the Ninevites. They had responded to his words and were saved. The author humorously and ironically disappoints this expectation by having Jonah react in just the opposite way. Jonah is furious because he wanted the Ninevites to be destroyed. After all, they are the Israelites’ enemies. Jonah cries out in anger to Yahweh and says, “…I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love…” One would expect such words to be a song of praise, but our author has ironically made them an accusation. Jonah is angry that God has these characteristics, for they are the very characteristics that have resulted in God’s not destroying the Ninevites.
I think this expectation is only there to the degree being claimed if the reader is carrying out the same type of literary analysis as your sources have done. Again, there is plausibility to this construction, and once one has adopted the position, she begins to see the things that you mention. But if we sit back and think about what we’ve already read in Jonah, we know that he did not want to go and preach to the Ninevites. We do not yet know his reasons for this, but they were strong enough so that he tried to flee “from the presence of the LORD” (Jonah 1:3). So I’m not convinced, from a literary perspective, that we’d expect the expected at this point. We’re left wondering, I think, why it is that Jonah refused the call of God in the first chapter? The reason I am reluctant to adopt the irony view, is that it seems linked in your presentation to both humor and fiction. Reality requires that neither of these things follow from irony; nor does it require that humor implies fiction. The ESV Study Bible that I quoted from earlier has this to say about its literary features (and I think you’ll appreciate their analysis):
The book of Jonah is a literary masterpiece. While the story line is so simple that children follow it readily, the story is marked by as high a degree of literary sophistication as any book in the Hebrew Bible. The author employs structure, humor, hyperbole, irony, double entendre, and literary figures like merism to communicate his message with great rhetorical power. The first example of this sophistication is seen in the outline of the book.
The main category for the book is satire—the exposure of human vice or folly. The four elements of satire take the following form in the book of Jonah: (1) the
object of attack is Jonah and what he represents—a bigotry and ethnocentrism that regarded God as the exclusive property of the believing community (in the OT, the nation of Israel); (2) the
satiric vehicle is narrative or story; (3) the
satiric norm or standard by which Jonah’s bad attitudes are judged is the character of God, who is portrayed as a God of universal mercy, whose mercy is not limited by national boundaries; (4) the
satiric tone is laughing, with Jonah emerging as a laughable figure—someone who runs away from God and is caught by a fish, and as a childish and pouting prophet who prefers death over life without his shade tree.
Three stylistic techniques are especially important. (1) The
giantesque motif—the motif of the unexpectedly large (e.g., the magnitude of the task assigned to Jonah, of the fish that swallows him, and of the repentance that Jonah’s eight-word sermon accomplishes). (2) A
pervasive irony (e.g., the ironic discrepancy between Jonah’s prophetic vocation and his ignominious behavior, and the ironic impossibility of fleeing from the presence of God). (3)
Humor, as Jonah’s behavior is not only ignominious but also ridiculous.
The point to make here is that these scholars nevertheless defend the historical nature of the narrative.
The main reason I am reluctant to embrace these Jonah caricatures is because this imagined literary figure does not seem to coincide with the estimation of Jonah as held by Jesus and which He expects His hearers to share: “Behold, something greater than Jonah is here” (Matt 12:41 and Luke 11:32). His few words seem to do away with all of this otherwise impressively sophisticated analysis. Consider St. Ambrose’s Jonah:
On the following day the Book of Jonah was read according to custom, after the completion of which I began this discourse. A book has been read, brethren, in which it is foretold that sinners shall be converted. Their acceptance takes place because that which is to happen is looked forward to at present. I added that the just man had been willing even to incur blame, in order not to see or denounce the destruction of the city. And because the sentence was mournful he was also saddened that the gourd had withered up. God too said to the prophet: Are you sad because of the gourd? and Jonah answered: I am sad. Jonah 4:9 And the Lord then said, that if he grieved that the gourd was withered, how much should He Himself care for the salvation of so many people. And therefore that He had put away the destruction which had been prepared for the whole city. (
Letter 20, 25)
Ironically
, St. Ambrose seems to have erred to the other side of our modern day scholars!!! So that, although his interpretation makes sense of what Jesus said of Jonah, I think it creates irresolvable dissonance within the book of Jonah itself. Even still, I think we can benefit from both of these analyses and we should take away from them what we can, attempting to create a balanced figure and interpretation.
