At the far end of the beach at Banff, in Scotland, a small river finally reaches its destination. I walked here today and stood for a while enjoying the mid-afternoon light, the blue skies, the sound of waves as the tide turned, and the almost inaudible murmuring of the river as it emerged from the grass and met the cobbled slope, where it rushed towards the sea.
It's a favourite beach, but this part of the walk is less familiar. "All rivers run to the sea, and the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they will return." (Ecclesiastes 1.7) I've often pondered these words, in the way you do when well written words don't immediately give up all of their meaning. Like many other sentences in Ecclesiastes, there are hidden depths in this image, suggesting constant motion, journey's culmination, and the cycle of rain, river and sea.
I stood for a few minutes gazing and listening, half thinking and half praying, the scene so obviously recollecting words that are meant to induce pondering and wondering. I knew why I had paused. The words of Ecclesiastes are an exact fit to the lovely serenity in front of me. It might be worth explaining why they came back to me so powerfully.
The first sentence of Eccl. 1.7 was used by Elie Wiesel as the titles of his two volume autobiography, in my view one of the most important literary accounts of the Holocaust. Volume One of his memoir he titled All Rivers Run to the Sea, and Volume Two, And the Sea is Never Full. Wiesel survived Auschwitz and for the rest of his life he determined to tell the stories of those who perished there, and to bear witness through these stories and his own story to the truth, the reality, the factual inescapability of the Shoah.
As a Nobel Prize winning novelist, an essayist and journalist, Wiesel like Jeremiah the prophet, wrote to inform, to declare, to bear witness, to ensure that the truth would never be silenced, or forgotten, or denied. Two days ago in our different ways we marked Holocaust Memorial Day and yesterday I was reading about Elie Wiesel. And while standing by that lovely stream flowing out of the marsh into the sea, the words of Qoheleth came naturally to mind, towing with them memories of reading Wiesel's autobiography.
It was 1997. I was on holiday in Yorkshire National Park, near Goathland, in a lovely 19th C railway cottage beside the railway where every day a steam train passed. I was sitting under a tree, in a deck chair, beside the stream at the bottom of the garden, reading All Rivers Run to the Sea. The story had just reached the point where the chugging of the steam trains arriving at Auschwitz, and the screaming of the whistles, signalled arrival, with all the horror and terror that lay ahead.
And at that precise moment, in that eerie way that defies our most insistent common-sense, the Yorkshire steam train came under the bridge with a huge puff of white smoke and a loud whistle. I'm not sure I have ever fully recovered from that near numinous sense of fear and heightened awareness, as the world of 50 years earlier coincided with my immediate mental images of the book I was reading. What I do know is this; I can't read (or recall) that verse of the Bible without remembering that Tuesday afternoon, in July 1997, sitting beside a stream, reading under a tree, when Elie Wiesel's testimony was accompanied by sound effects choreographed by I'm not sure what – or whom.
"All rivers run to the sea, and the sea is never full." The writer of Ecclesiastes was too good a philosopher-preacher to indulge in frivolity for its own sake. And Elie Wiesel was too serious in his calling as survivor, storyteller and witness, and too burdened by memory of what happened to his people, to choose his book titles carelessly.
He doesn't explain his choice. As one who stood in that liminal space reserved for those whose life experiences make faith in God at times all but impossible, he stood in defiant trust; and as one for whom at other times faith was at least real enough to have an argument with a God in whose world Auschwitz happened, he stood his ground before God, albeit with his shoes off.
For myself, I defer to a man whose humanity, was so deeply wounded and permanently formed by unimaginable suffering, both witnessed and experienced. Today's lovely walk, in a world beautiful and far removed from all the brokenness elsewhere, I was ambushed by a scene of a river and the sea, and by a memory of a book I once read, under a tree, beside a stream, alongside a railway.
"All rivers run to the sea, and the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they will return."
…In the lengthening shadow he has climbed
again to the ridgetop and across
to the westward slope to see the ripe
light of autumn in the turning trees,
the twilight he must go by now
that only grace can give. Thus far
he keeps the old sectarian piety:
By grace we live. But he can go
no further. Having known the grace
that for so long has kept this world,
haggard as it is, as we have made it,
we cannot rest, we must be stirring
to keep this gift dwelling among us,
eternally alive in time. This
is the great work, no other, none harder,
none nearer rest, or more beautiful.
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."
Years ago, I sat at coffee with a man who was recovering from a stroke. He was as unmystical as anyone I ever met. Down to earth, a man of good humoured shrewdness, lived for his family and worked hard all his life to make things happen for them, his own unapologetic self-description, a working man. He spoke of his time as a telephone engineer in Orkney, laying cables across the moorland. One day, unbidden, unexpected and unexplained, he was aware of the presence of God. And he knew. He knew he was known, and by Whom. His life, he said, was never the same after that. He remembered the cold wind, the cry of curlews, the unthreatening loneliness, and most of all – the space.
We talked a while about God, moorland, the cry of moorland birds, and the way such emptiness can suddenly be filled with presence. We agreed that the cry of the curlew is one of the most beautiful sounds in Scotland, a combination of longing and the cry of the heart that opens us up to the incredible, sometimes the ineffable.
At such moments of opening, I believe in the democratisation of mysticism, and the need to stop categorising and defining what in the end is the interruption of our lives by the God who invests those rare moments with transcendent significance. So in one sense, my friend was unmystical – in another sense this most practical of men was alert to the invasion of gift, responsive to the call of God, and spoke only in quiet humility of what had happened to him. God had happened to him – and it is the sharing of such spiritual reality that is one of the most persuasive encouragements for the rest of us. We too have had our moments.
The Moor
It was like a church to me.
I entered it on soft foot,
Breath held like a cap in the hand.
It was quiet.
What God there was made himself felt,
Not listened to, in clean colours
That brought a moistening of the eye,
In a movement of the wind over grass.
There were no prayers said. But stillness
Of the heart’s passions — that was praise
Enough; and the mind’s cession
Of its kingdom. I walked on,
Simple and poor, while the air crumbled
And broke on me generously as bread.
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.