Handy - Jonahs World Social Science and the Reading of Prophetic Story

Jonahs World

Series Editor : Philip R. Davies and James G. Crossley, University of Sheffield

BibleWorld shares the fruits of modern (and postmodern) biblical scholarship not only among practitioners and students, but also with anyone interested in what academic study of the Bible means in the twenty-first century. It explores our ever-increasing knowledge and understanding of the social world that produced the biblical texts, but also analyses aspects of the bibles role in the history of our civilization and the many perspectives not just religious and theological, but also cultural, political and aesthetic which drive modern biblical scholarship.

Published:

Sodomy
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Yours Faithfully: Virtual Letters from the Bible
Edited by Philip R. Davies

Israels History and the History of Israel
Mario Liverani

The Apostle Paul and His Letters
Edwin D. Freed

The Origins of the Second Temple: Persian Imperial Policy and the Rebuilding of Jerusalem
Diana Edelman

An Introduction to the Bible (Revised edition)
John Rogerson

The Morality of Pauls Converts
Edwin D. Freed

The Mythic Mind: Essays on Cosmology and Religion in Ugaritic and Old Testament Literature
Nick Wyatt

History, Literature and Theology in the Book of Chronicles
Ehud Ben Zvi

Women Healing/Healing Women: The Genderization of Healing in Early Christianity
Elaine M. Wainwright

Symposia: Dialogues Concerning the History of Biblical Interpretation
Roland Boer

Forthcoming:

Sectarianism in Early Judaism
Edited by David J. Chalcraft

Vive Memor Mortis
Thomas Bolin

Linguistic Dating of Biblical Texts: An Introduction to Approaches and Problems
Ian Young and Robert Rezetko

Social Science and the Reading of Prophetic Story

Lowell K. Handy

First published 2007

by Equinox, an imprint of Acumen

Published 2014

by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Lowell K. Handy 2007

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Notices
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN-13 978 1 84553 123 2 (hardback)
978 1 84553 124 9 (paperback)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Handy, Lowell K., 1949
Jonahs world: social science and the reading of prophetic story /
Lowell K. Handy.
p. cm. (Bibleworld)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1 84553 123 X (hb) ISBN 1 84553 124 8 (pb)
ISBN 13 978 1 84553 123 2 (hb) 978 1 84553 124 9 (pb)
1. Bible O.T. JonahCriticism, interpretation, etc. I. Title.
BS1605.52.H36 2007
224.9206dc22
2006025527

Typeset by S.J.I. Services, New Delhi

This book began as a suggestion for a contribution to a commentary series using social-science approaches for books of the Hebrew Bible originally proposed by Diana Edelman early in the 1990s. Because I had an interest in short stories in the Bible as reflections of the society in which they were written, I half-jokingly volunteered to do the social science of Jonah. To my surprise Diana accepted the offer and put my project down on her list. I had accumulated a sizable amount of material for the project when the series stalled, atrophied, and was finally shelved. I took the material on Jonah, condensed it into a single chapter, producing a volume on biblical short stories for laity and introductory students, and then proceeded to box up or throw away most of the material researched for the projected volume. Two residential moves later, Philip Davies contacted me about writing the original book for a new series for Equinox. Whatever I have left in a box for the original project is now in a storage facility. So, I began essentially from the beginning.

My own introduction to the story of Jonah was indirect. I was raised in a family that belonged to the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), so what Bible stories we knew were almost entirely from the New Testament. I know exactly when I first came across the story of Jonah. One of my parents was reading to me the Carl Barks Donald Duck story in the May 1953 issue of Walt Disneys Comics and Stories in which Donald is attempting to be invited onto a television quiz show by performing some new and publicity-engendering feat. He is inadvertently swallowed by a whale that coughs him up on the beach. Rushing into the TV producers office he demands to be put on the show only to hear from the unimpressed producer Its not a new experience! A chap named Jonah beat you to it by some two thousand years! Having no idea to what the reference was, I asked my parent who related the story of Jonah in a shortened condensed fashion. So short, in fact, that for most of my childhood I held the mistaken notion that Jonah had bested Donald by having stayed in the whale for two thousand years, not that he had done it two thousand years earlier!

I expect that I had read the short book of Jonah at some point before entering college, but I cannot actually recall having done so. The earliest memory I have of reading the tale is when we were assigned the book of Jonah in Ken Kuntzs 1969 Beginning Hebrew class at the University of Iowa, where I worked my way through the Hebrew along with a small, but august, class of Bible scholars. I recall clearly two things from that experience: (1) early on I learned to translate the Hebrew before checking any English translation, and (2) poetry is a lot harder to deal with than prose (it was our first encounter with poetry in the class, and as everyone in the field knows, Ken loves poetry).

As useful to this project as any academic courses was a five-year stint I spent working at the Fort Dodge, lowa, plant of the United States Gypsum Company. Working production lines in the Block and Board plants provided invaluable insight into corporate hierarchies, not, in fact, unlike academia save that labor was much more valued there than I have witnessed at any institution of higher learning.