Jonah: The World of Inversion and Crisis
THE STORY OF JONAH
In my last article, I looked at the Inferno by Dante Alighieri. I have another article coming out on the Purgatorio soon with similar themes. In the epic poem, there’s a theme of inversion. Dante sees sin as virtues that become disordered. Sins like lust are perversions of love or pride as perversions of hope and faith. There’s a point where these virtues become inverted turning into vices and sin. To drive the point home, he has to climb down Satan into the cave underneath to find himself up in the shores of Purgatory. In this theme of inversion, I want to continue with the story of Jonah. The biblical story of Jonah is one of the shortest and deepest texts in all of the Bible. It takes on a genre that can be found in ancient mythology. Odysseus riding under the thick wool on the ram to escape the Cyclops compares to Jonah being spit out by the whale after being under for three days and three nights. Russian Orthodox commentator Jonathan Pageau would see this as the covering with skins found throughout scripture. Anthropologist René Girard would see the covering as sacrificial substitution. Let’s explore these concepts further as we dive into the journey of Jonah.
God commands Jonah, a prophet, to go to the city of Nineveh to repent for their wickedness,
“Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.”1
Jonah disobeys God and sails to Tarshish “from the presence of the Lord.”2 He found a ship at the port city of Joppa and sailed to Tarshish- the westernmost part of the known world. As he was sailing with other passengers, the Lord sent a great wind upon the sea creating a tempest. The mariners were afraid and cried to their god as Jonah was asleep at the bottom of the ship. The captain wakes Jonah asking him to call onto his God to calm down the sea afraid of dying. They casted lots to see who was the guilty soul for causing this storm. The lot landed on Jonah causing him to be subject to interrogation,
“Then they said to him, “Tell us on whose account this evil has come upon us. What is your occupation? And from where do you come? What is your country? And of what people are you?”3
Jonah admitted he was fleeing from the Lord causing this mighty tempest upon them. The mariners were afraid as they saw him as the cause of their problems. Jonah offers himself as the answer to the mariners problems,
“He said to them, “Take me up and throw me into the sea; then the sea will quiet down for you; for I know it is because of me that this great tempest has come upon you.”4
The men tried avoiding throwing him overboard at all costs, but finally throw him over as a last resort. The men were converted from the incident and made sacrifices to the Lord after. The Lord appoints a “great fish” to swallow Jonah and was in the belly of the fish for “three days and three nights.”5
In the deep of the sea and the fish, Jonah writes a lamentation to God asking for forgiveness and a move towards repentance. Some key verses here,
“I called to the Lord, out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice. For you cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood was round about me. . .
I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever; yet you brought up my life from the Pit, O Lord my God. . .
Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their true loyalty. But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you; what I have vowed I will pay. Deliverance belongs to the Lord!”6
God tells the fish to spit out Jonah on to the shore and the process repeats. God tells Jonah to go to Nineveh telling them to repent their ways. Jonah goes to Nineveh this time towards God taking three days to go through the city. Jonah tells the people of Nineveh,
“Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s journey. And he cried, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”7
The people of Nineveh repented, made sacrifices, did fasting, and other ritual customs for God. This is a key verse,
“But let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and let them cry mightily to God; yes let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence which is in his hands.”8
God spared his wrath after the people of the city repented to the disappointment of Jonah. Jonah complains to God he “knew” he’d be merciful and spare the city. He devolves into a state of pity asking God to kill him. Jonah set out east of the city under a shade to see what would become of the city. God appoints a plant to give Jonah shade as he rests, but the same God appoints a worm to eat the plant. God then directed the wind eastward as the sun was beating on Jonah. Jonah asked to be killed once again out of pity for the plant was gone now. The story ends,
“And the Lord said, “You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night, and perished in a night. And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?”9
BIBLICAL & LITERARY INVERSION
Let’s define inversion here: When I speak of inversion, I refer to the hierarchies of being, virtues, and cultural orders being turned upside down. It’s literally the “upside down'“ world. The story of Jonah is told precisely in this context as you’ll see:
A prophet of God disobeys God; sailing away “from the presence of the Lord.” Tarshish, in this context, is the end of the world away from God altogether. This reminds me of the scene in Inferno where Dante describes the voyage of Ulysses. In the Inferno, I recalled that Ulysses sailed to the western end of the world (“away from the presence of the Lord”) to find virtue and glory being stalled by a great tempest along the way. They were heading towards a great mountain which scholars later identify as the Mountain of Purgatory. This represented Ulysses trying to reach Paradise without the Divine Revelation of God.10 Jonah, in parallel fashion, attempts the same journey. Both Ulysses and Jonah encounter a great tempest on the sea with slightly different results.
Jonah was asleep in the bottom of the ship indicating spiritual death. This is a man losing all purpose in his life while this was Ulysses’ purpose. Jesus asleep in the ship when the disciples encountered their tempest indicates a resolution of this story. You can see the inverses at play here. Jonah on the ship is also the inverse of the biblical story of Noah and the inverse of Girard’s concept of a sacrificial crisis. Simply, the Noah story involved a man of God who was saved from His wrath after a great flood. His righteousness saved his family and two of each animal. The rest of the world, filled with sin and violence, was erased clean to start anew. This is how Jonah becomes the inverse of Noah:
Jonah is consumed by the sea while Noah is spared from the sea.
The pagans on the ship represent Noah’s faith while Jonah represents the pagan way.
The pagans are converted from their obedience in Jonah while they suffer for their disobedience in Noah.
The pagans calm the storm by getting rid of the disobedient sinner in Jonah while they were swept up by the storm in Noah. Also, the city of Nineveh (pagan culture) is spared.
There are more parallels we can lay out biblically, but the inverse takes on another dimension. Girard had many things to say about the Jonah story. He writes,
“The ship represents the community, the tempest the sacrificial crisis. The jettisoned cargo is the cultural system that has abandoned its distinctions. The fact that everybody calls out to his own particular god indicates a breakdown in the religious order. The floundering ship can be compared to the city of Nineveh, threatened with destruction unless its people repent. The forms may vary, but the crisis is always the same.”11
Girard expanded on the story of Jonah about the divine nature behind “Chance.” The casting of lots shows that Chance had a role to play in the judgment of God or the gods. Though I appreciate this point by Girard, I want to hit another point I was surprised to not see discussed (at least in this book). There’s an inversion to the sacrificial crisis itself in Jonah. Girard just missed this greater point (who am I to judge one of the greatest minds of the last couple centuries) here:
In a sacrificial crisis, the possessed mob chooses the victim to be sacrificed. In Jonah, he chooses himself as the sacrifice (Christological).
To expand, Jonah takes on the role of the mob while the group on ship are avoiding scapegoating altogether.
God honors the choice to cast lots (superstition/chance) to cast divine judgment. The pagans institute the Will of God.
The pagans honor the true God while Jonah doesn’t.
As we can see, the sacrificial crisis is inverted in Jonah as well. To bring a positive light to Girard, he does see the main point of the story through the sacrificial lens. He writes,
“What we see here is a reflection of the sacrificial crisis and its resolution. The victim is chosen by lot; his expulsion saves the community, as represented by the ship’s crew; and a new god is acknowledged through the crew’s sacrifice to the Lord whom they did not know before. Taken in isolation this story tells us little, but when seen against the backdrop of our whole discussion, each detail requires significance.”12
THE CARNIVAL
Girard is correct that each detail requires significance as it always does in scripture. The inversion in biblical and literary tales isn’t reserved for just the abstract; this pattern exists in literature and scripture because it exists in real life. The fact this pattern is revealed in the Word is of even more significance. There is a culture of confusion permeating in our world today. A lot of people jokingly call it “clown world” except it is theologically and philosophically accurate. In my earlier article entitled “The Origins of Culture”, I dissect Girard’s concept of the sacrificial crisis behind the festival— particularly the The Bacchae by Euripides,
“Women began acting like men and men acting like women. The place of the sovereign god is removed from the top. The distinctions between familial and cultural institutions fade away. This is the recipe for reciprocal violence that encompasses the climax of the play. Pentheus is the victim holding the place of the scapegoat that ends with his brutal death.”13
The origin of the festival is in fact the “festival gone wrong” resulting in violence. The purpose of the festival is to terminate all festivities. This is why festivals traditionally precede a season of holiness or discipline. The festival allows the abolition of distinctions that typically hold a culture together. In Girardian fashion, the “festival gone wrong” is when these abolition of distinctions go too far resulting in sacrificial violence for its resolution. I’m not going to replay the entire festival motif as you can read in my other article below, but it’s relevant to the analysis of Jonah.
If the story of Jonah is describing the upside down world, this is a proper lens to look at the current state of the world. The differences between men and women are abolishing in a near permanent state of confusion. Distinctions among family, gender, sex, and the like become chaotic and undefined. Incompetency is rewarded over meritocracy, cowardice over valor, immorality over morality, idols over God, and more. The entire hierarchy is thrown upside down throwing Jonah overboard into the depths of Sheol. This is a state of perpetual inversion that resembles the permanent carnival where the extremes come to the middle and the middle to the extremes. The permanent carnival eventually resolves in the surrogate victim. Crises of the modern world take longer to manifest and to resolve. The longer the crisis permeates, the greater the scapegoat is needed for its resolution.
I want to end from this last thought from Douglas Murray— author and commentator on cultural issues. This is a quote from his last appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast with host Joe Rogan. He says,
“You know this? [Camille] Paglia says at the end of every empire, they get interested in sexual fluidity, hermaphroditism, and so on. And I do think that if this is the end of American dominance in the world, and it could be — if America falls into civil war, then this is the end of American dominance. It’s the end of the West as we saw it, and the rise, obviously, and the overtaking by China. . .
I think it must be something to do with those boundaries and all other boundaries starting to erode. I mean, the nature of society is that we have certain fixed ideas that we agree on. I mean, by the way, trans is a brilliant one. The whole nonbinary thing is a brilliant one if you wanted to pull apart society because, again, get people to pretend that men and women don't exist. Get people to pretend that one of the things that we’ve all known from the beginning doesn't exist, and you can do all of the other stuff too. It’s a brilliant one to demoralize people on. Say there’s no difference between men and women, the penis is a social construct. … If you do that stuff, then of course people end up, they just doubt everything, everything. And that's why these things worry some of us, because if everybody is persuaded to doubt what they see with their eyes, then they can be persuaded to fall for absolutely anything next.”14
Jonah 1:2
Ibid. 1:3
Ibid. 1:8
Ibid. 1:12
Ibid. 1:17
Ibid. 2:2-3, 6, 8-9
Ibid. 3:4
Ibid. 3:8
Ibid. 4:10-11
Girard, “Conclusion”, Violence and the Sacred, p. 313
Ibid. p.314
September 17, 20202 edition of “The Joe Rogan Experience”