Jonah
Edited by
Karolien Vermeulen [+–]
University of Antwerp
Karolien Vermeulen is Research Affiliate Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Jewish Studies, University of Antwerp. Her research focuses on meaning construal in the Hebrew Bible and the role of various linguistic-stylistic elements that guide readers in that process. She has published on the style of the biblical text, particularly on wordplay, metaphor, performative language, and spatial imagination. She is the author of Conceptualizing Biblical Cities: A Stylistic Study (Palgrave McMillan 2020) and How We Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture’s Style and Meaning (with Elizabeth Hayes, Eerdmans 2022). She also co-edited Approaches to Literary Readings of Ancient Jewish Writings (with Klaas Smelik, Brill, 2014) and Doubling and Duplicating in the Book of Genesis: Literary and Stylistic Approaches to the Text (with Elizabeth Hayes, Eisenbrauns, 2016). Her current project focuses on home and belonging as imagined and construed in the biblical text.
The Book of Jonah, perhaps the most popular among the Minor Prophets, turns the world of its audience upside down. In four short chapters, it leaves its readers hanging between a series of binary oppositions. Over the years, the interpretation of Jonah has evolved from rebellious to virtuous and back, with a character searching for a place in the story world, a text challenging the genre and practice of prophecy, and a story with afterlives in different religious traditions. More recently, scholarship on the book has been flooded with ecological concerns, swamped by emotional readings, and held against the postcolonial light. Despite its comprehensible size, Jonah’s outlook still remains ambivalent and ambiguous. This volume engages with this unruliness in a timely manner.
This volume will be first published online and then as a print book.
