The psalm in Jonah 2:2-9 (2:3-10 in Hebrew) is a fine example of a thanksgiving psalm, and everything in its expression and theology would sound fine in the book of Psalms. However, on Jonah’s lips after we have heard the narrative of chapter one, it takes a different flavour. Read in its place in the [&hellip...
Spotting the exaggerations and humour in the book can help us understand, but it also acts as a warning!...
In this short series (of two podcasts) I’ll describe two things I think I know, two stakes in the ground when I come to think about the topic of “universalism” that has been much discussed (and even more an excuse for slanging matches) recently around the Bible-focused blogs. Let’s start by admitting there are many [&hellip...
I has been too long since I added to my (very) slowly growing series on Jonah. So, when I saw that this magnificent little book was among the ones otherwise missing from the April carnival I could not resist. We like our stories (fairly) simple, we want to know who the goodies and the baddies [&hellip...
There are many ways in which the story-tellers of the Bible ensure that their tellings are lively and engaging. One is through the way they report speech. There is usually more “direct speech” (where the words of a character are “quoted”) then “indirect speech” (where the teller tells us the gist of what the character [&hellip...
Juxtaposition: putting things together to make something “more than the sum of the parts” is a common artistic skill, it is common (but often unrecognised) in the Bible. As my least favourite book of the Bible helps reveal!...
Jonah is carefully and neatly structured into four acts (the chapters): Act one: Jon 1:1-16 Pagan sailors converted Scene one: Jonah’s commission 1:1-3 Scene two: On a ship in a storm Jon 1:4-16 Jon 1:17 (MT & LXX 2:1) bridge Act two: Jon 2:1-10 Jonah talks to God Scene three: in the belly of the [&hellip...
Like soap-operas, and other serials, biblical narratives with several episodes often seek to bridge between two parts. These bridges are often verses that serve to link one episode to another. We’ll look at examples from Ruth, Jonah and Genesis 2-...
Biblical narrative is seldom clumsy and not often more complicated than it needs to be. So apparent clumsiness is usually intended to show us something. As I hope to convince you it does in Jonah 1:10. ...
The prophet Jonah (at least as his story is told in the book that bears his name) is perhaps the most orthodox if perhaps the most heteropractic (( The prefix “ortho-” straight or right and “hetero-” different or wrong are used as opposites. The endings “-dox” to do with worship or theology and “-praxis” to [&hellip...
