UC Davis

This dissertation is an exercise in bringing to bear broad theoretical trends in Religious Studies and Myth Theory to a biblical text that has long fascinated biblical scholars and popular culture alike. Biblical scholars are quick to say that the many strange narrative features within the book of Jonah such as a runaway prophet, mourning cattle, repentant non-Hebrew characters, and the oft-cited whale are superfluous, a distraction from the “real” moral purpose of the story of Jonah. Yet, I show that ancient and contemporary communities have been continually attracted to these same features modern scholars wish to ignore, suggesting they serve as dynamic points of reflection dealing with immediate social crises. It constitutes, in fact, key features of how myths function. For example, retelling Jonah’s silent flight among some laypersons and clergy allows them to ruminate on Jonah’s psychological profile and their feelings of being commanded to do things they do not wish to do. This trans-temporal project inspires not only a renewed focus on texts and the scholars who study them, but on the complex relationship between the Bible and society – now and in the past.

The first and largest section of the dissertation asks how the book’s earliest audience might have understood many of these strange narrative features. As a composition written within the context of the Babylonian exile and an uprooted Judean population, how is the book reflecting on space and place? As a post-exilic community that possessed a significantly altered relationship with non-Judean populations, to what extent can recently published archival material shed light on this new relationship? These questions and more animate the first section of this dissertation. The second section, comprised of contemporary ethnographic material, connects to the first through myth theory. I suggest that, like some of its earliest interpreters, modern communities continue to reflect on the book’s indeterminate features in order to solve imminent social and cultural issues. Interviewing clergy and laypersons decenters modern scholarly sensibilities about the book of Jonah by pointing to its diverse use in social life, allowing us to rethink previously unquestioned assumptions about the purpose of sacred texts and thereby promoting partnerships with modern readers as significant interpreters of the Bible. This section has the advantage of taking data from modern, contemporary settings rather than attempting to reconstruct and recreate the audience(s) of the past, but ultimately suggests a similar movement between the two otherwise different sets of readerships characteristic of an incongruity felt between them when reading a text like Jonah.