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. Chapter 1 published 2024.
Table of Contents (titles not final)
1. Words Hurled Upon the Sea: Scribal Culture and the Role of Writing in the Book of Jonah –
Amy Erickson
2. Jonah and Prophecy – Klaas Spronk
3. Jonah and Ritual – Anne Katrine de Hemmer Gudme
4. Jonah and Ancient Near Eastern Social Values – Jo-Marí Schäder
5. Jonah and the Performative – Steven Mann
6. Language and Identity in Jonah – Robert Holmstedt
7. Jonah and the Book of the Twelve – tba
8. Rolling in the Deep: Literary Layers and Textual Art in the Book of Jonah – Rhiannon Graybill, Steven McKenzie, and John Kaltner
9. Jonah and Aesthetics – tba
10. Irony and Humor in Jonah – Karolien Vermeulen
11. Jonah and Nonhuman Animals – Suzanna Millar
12. The Human-Divine Relationship in Jonah – Aron Tillema
13. Jonah and Ecology, Ecotheology, and Environmental Science – Alexander Abasili
14. Spatiality and Directionality in Jonah – Gert Prinsloo
15. Jonah, Travel and Mobility – Anat Shapiro
16. Jonah in the Arts – tba
17. Jonah and the New Testament – tba
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Iliff School of Theology
This essay argues that the book of Jonah reflects a culture that grew out of intense engagement with biblical traditions and tropes even as it renders them strange and often problematic. While recognition of Jonah’s myriad allusions is widespread, many scholars have seen them as upholding traditional theologies about God’s sovereignty and Israel’s sinfulness, a reading that undergirds interpretations of the dynamic between Jonah and God. However, Jonah playfully critiques the idea of God’s sovereignty along with prophetic depictions of the divine word as stable and transferable. The essay concludes with an analysis of Jonah 4 to show that the book of Jonah is imprinted with the aesthetics, concerns, and values of an innovative and skeptical iteration of scribal culture.
