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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."

We all meet God in our own way. There are moments of recognition that, brief as they are, touch those deepest longings we find it hard to name. In the encounter with God it is seldom clear whether we meet God, or God meets us, and in any case, to make such a distinction risks missing the mystery that challenges all such certainties.

Vintage John le Carré in his last book. A Christmas gift, a story well told, – a good read, if you like John le Carré, who I think is an acquired taste.

It's quite a short novel, but the plot is intricately woven, written with a gentle humour that teases the reader, and slowly reveals the lives and motivations of the characters. The plot is only gradually disentangled, as we come to know, begin to like, or start to suspect, the various characters whose story this is.

Readers of Le Carré will recognise his precise examination and exploration of secrets, subterfuge, betrayal, hidden loyalties and other nefarious human failings that are the working tools of espionage, and the shadowy worlds inhabited by those for whom mistrust is a way of life. I found the conclusion deeply satisfying, entirely plausible, and a more hopeful view of human emotion, motivation and what the existentialists would call authentic commitments.

The Observer review describes it as "crisp prose, a precision-tooled plot." Exactly so.

It was 7.30 in the morning when Dorothy rang my doorbell. She was dressed as always, immaculate hair, mohair cardigan, blue chiffon scarf and her favourite brightly coloured long skirt. She tugged my arm, urged me to come outside and look up.

And there flying over the West End of Aberdeen, against a frost blue sky, a long skein of geese, honking their way north. “Would it not be fine to be able to do that” she asked, her eyes bright with the thought of such wild freedom. I hope I’m as alive as her when I start pushing eighty!

The wild goose is a Celtic symbol of the Holy Spirit, expressing the freedom and urgency of God, and the homing instinct of the human heart. “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they rest in You”, said Saint Augustine. His words, a millennium and half later, still speak to the restlessness and God embarrassment of people not sure what we want, but full of wanting.

The American poet, Mary Oliver understood the frustration and desire that give our hearts colour, edge and the rich texture of emotional and spiritual longing.  

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

About that restlessness, Jesus said, “I have come that you might have life, life in all its fullness.” Two thousand years later Jesus still dares us to take flight, and fly, and live, and find our home in God.

Six prophets in just under 500 pages of commentary, only forty of them on Jonah. But this is vintage Goldingay. It may be history told as a parable, or a parable linked with history and memory – either way for Goldingay it's the theological message that matters, and the freight that the narrative is created to carry.

The interactions between a violent city, a resistant prophet and a merciful God enable the storyteller to set up powerful tensions in the narrative and plot. The narrator then develops larger than life characters of city, prophet and God, and then pushes the story towards a conclusion which is intentionally inconclusive. Like a good post-modern novel the reader is left with unanswered questions about what happens to the protagonist Jonah.

Goldingay's take on Jonah is that of a conflicted prophet who expects mercy for himself, but punishment for Nineveh; Jonah who believes in a predictable God who brings judgement on evil and injustice, and shows mercy to the penitent; Jonah, whose expectations are conflicted when he encounters a city of pagans whose repentance forces a theological collision between who Jonah believes God to be (righteous punisher of sin), and who God chooses to be (gracious in mercy and pardon), and to a city overwhelmingly guilty of great evil. 

All of this is worked out in a commentary that combines first class exegesis with sympathetic, even compassionate reflection on the inner psychological and theological worlds of Jonah. It's clear that Goldingay likes conflicted prophets! Yet on the other hand, as a commentator he refuses to jump to safe conclusions about who God is and what God is about. "God's election is not for the sake of the chosen, but for the sake of God's purpose." And that purpose is formed out of who God is – "a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity."

But what exactly is God's purpose in this frustratingly inconclusive story? It is justice…and mercy! It is to bring about repentance of the so far impenitent. It is to use Jonah to give the violent city a chance, but a chance Jonah doesn't want them to be offered. But which Nineveh takes and God honours.

Goldingay's commentary is readable and engaged with the text and its commentators. His tone is both playful and serious, as is the book of Jonah itself. His theological reflections are profound and uncomfortably searching for those who think they have God sussed. The commentary exploits the playfulness of the story, pointing out the ironies, the practical jokes and the serious questions posed throughout this intriguing text. His own comments are, as he believes the text to be, theologically subversive of the lazy certainties of those who have become complacent of grace, and grudging to the point of jealousy of God's abounding steadfast love. Jonah is, quite literally, a wake-up call to its readers, then and now, to see the world as God sees it – all those people, and many cattle.

Throughout Goldingay is in conversation with the best exegetical literature, and with other important conversation partners, including: Leslie Allen, Karl Barth, Jacques Ellul, Ann Lamott, Martin Luther, Elie Wiesel, and H W Wolff. The commentary is also strong on intertextual references, the exegesis constantly linked to the wider biblical witness either for comparison or contrast. The Subject Index and Scripture Index are thorough, user-friendly, and enable the reader to follow up such inter-connections within and beyond Jonah. 

The commentary on Jonah represents only 10% of this volume. I bought it because I know Goldingay's work, and have profited constantly from his fresh, at times provocative, but always thorough and reverent treatment of the biblical text. I'm happy to have this composite volume. I think it's worth the investment, dealing as it does with three of the "major minor prophets", along with Joel, Obadiah and the recalcitrant Jonah. 

You only understand Jonah if you’ve learned to hate, if life experience has educated you in heartfelt, instinctive, focused and justified hostility.

And so you only understand Jonah’s God if you are prepared to unlearn hatred, and by a painful inner re-orientation, accept that God is not in the hate business. Jonah hated Nineveh – ‘the great city’ famed for terrorist atrocities, centre of a brutal, organised, military machine – merciless, meticulous, arrogant, conqueror and oppressor of Israel.

The equivalent today is hard to imagine – but where there is religious hatred, ancient tribal enmities, and people whose suffering and oppression have educated them into hatred, there we come near to the same mindset – that wants to obliterate the enemy. The combination of terror and anger, of hatred and hopelessness, produces that lethal cocktail we call terrorism – and it flourishes in a world sold on consumerism, militarism and the polarisation of extremes, two poles arcing in violence

Jonah stands for those who want to see power get what it deserves; those who pray that cruelty and violence will get its payback. So you’d think that a word from the Lord to preach against the wickedness of the great city would have Jonah book a first class overnight camel to be the first to tell Nineveh “You’ve had it!” God’s call could be understood as permission to hate, time to ridicule and gloat, and celebrate the anguish of the enemy.

So why did Jonah run in the exact opposite direction? Why miss out on the vengeance he’d prayed for? Why not takes his hate and use it to make him an eloquent herald of doom? Instead, “But Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish. He went down to Joppa, where he found a ship bound for that port. After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the Lord. (1.)

Jonah’s bizarre behaviour only makes sense when you come to Jonah’s angry and exasperated prayer once Nineveh repents and the Lord relents! “Jonah prayed to the Lord, “Isn’t this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.”

 Jonah isn’t disobedient – he’s in denial. It isn’t that he doesn’t believe enough in God – he believes too much. He knows too well, his theology of God is so true it’s a liability. He runs in the opposite direction because he senses God is going to do the opposite of what Jonah wants. There’s a million to one chance that Nineveh will repent – and if that happens, there isn’t one chance in a million that God won’t be merciful. It’s an absolute certainty that God would be slow to anger and abounding in love.

And that isn’t fair. That is theologically unacceptable. Abounding in love, slow to anger, with Nineveh? That is absolutely scandalous! That a vast city built on the blood and tears of the conquered should turn from their wickedness and find mercy shows there is no justice in the universe. Jonah prays his anger. The very thing he believes most about God (compassion) is getting in the way of the very thing he wants most from God (punishment). His faith, The God he believes in, is frustrating his sense of justice. So Jonah won’t take that million to one chance. God, of course, has other plans.

And as the story unfolds it isn’t that Jonah will, learn a new theology of God – he will learn the hard way that a theology of grace and mercy forces a re-think about the deepest, hardest, most heart-breaking, experiences of his life.

He’ll learn about God’s generosity and legitimate human grievances; he’ll learn that mercy is greater than murder; that compassion not cruelty is God’s way; all that and more he’ll learn. As we read this story today it also touches on some of the most important things we will ever need to know – about ourselves, about God, about all those different others, human and animal, planetary and elemental, who share this planet with us – and about whom we should be concerned.

The story about Jonah doesn't set out to give us the right answers to our questions; it does something far more subversive. It givers us new questions that show us how little we understand the scandal of grace, how hard it is to have sympathy with the creative strategies of divine mercy, and how outrageously different is God's compassion from our expectations.

One further thought. When you have time, read the whole story – then these verses from a much longer hymn by F. W. Faber.

There’s a wideness in God’s mercy,
Like the wideness of the sea;
There’s a kindness in His justice,
Which is more than liberty.

There is grace enough for thousands
Of new worlds as great as this;
There is room for fresh creations
In that upper home of bliss.

For the love of God is broader
Than the measure of our mind;
And the heart of the Eternal
Is most wonderfully kind.

It is God: His love looks mighty,
But is mightier than it seems;
’Tis our Father: and His fondness
Goes far out beyond our dreams.

But we make His love too narrow
By false limits of our own;
And we magnify His strictness
With a zeal He will not own.