SOURCE: Marcus, David. “The Book of Jonah,” and “Implications of a Satirical Reading of Jonah.” In From Balaam to Jonah: Anti-Prophetic Satire in the Hebrew Bible, pp. 93-159. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995.

In the following excerpt, Marcus lays out a case for Jonah as an anti-prophetic satire, and then advances several different possibilities concerning its main message.

The familiar story of the reluctant prophet Jonah, who refuses to carry out God's mission and who is swallowed by a big fish, is perhaps the most well known of all the stories in our corpus. But the book in which this story is embedded is curious for at least five reasons. First, there is the content of the book.¹ It is not a collection of oracles like the other prophetic books, but a narrative about an incident in the life of a prophet.² As such, it is similar to the stories...