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. ...
In this podcast I’ll again argue that Robert Carroll gets it wrong. Despite his own fierce black humour he fails to acknowledge its presence or at least its prevalence in the prophets. He writes about humour in Hosea in: Carroll, Robert P. ‘Is Humour among the Prophets’. On humour and the comic in the Hebrew [&hellip...
In Understanding the prophets: Part one I spoke about the “Three Cons” as a key to reading the prophetic books of the Old Testament with understanding and in ways which are faithful to their original intention. In this second part we’ll look at an example from Amos 5:18ff. and apply this approach. The result will [&hellip...
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...
I’ve already a podcast on Jonah 1:7-8 Direct speech in biblical narratives if you want a fill in between the last podcast and this one. Had you noticed? We were eight verses into the book and Jonah had not said one word. In Jonah 1:1-8 not a peep out of Jonah the prophet, so 1:9 [&hellip...
In these two verses we get some more clues about how to read the book of Jonah, we’ll notice how everything is big, and how the ship has personality. I’ll suggest that Jonah is in some ways like a children’s story, larger than life and painted in bright primary colours. I’ll even suggest that there [&hellip...
Malachi is a short prophetic book, the name Malachi just means “my messenger” which seems to be what the speaker calls himself. It has no more details of time, place or person in the superscription (as most prophetic books do), but the content suggests Judah after the exile under Persian rule. The book opens opens [&hellip...
These four chapters tell the story of God’s prophet Jonah (who attentive Bible students know from 2 kings 14:25: He restored the border of Israel from Lebo-hamath as far as the Sea of the Arabah, according to the word of the LORD, the God of Israel, which he spoke by his servant Jonah son of [&hellip...
