Text Analysis and the Genre of Jonah

Abstract

"The little book of Jonah confronts Bible commentators and critics alike with a rather large hermeneutical crux. This problem does not directly concern certain constituent passages (though there are also several di¯culties in this regard) but rather the text as a whole: How are we to interpret it? The answer to this question is dependent upon how we respond to another, related query: What literary genre does the book of Jonah exhibit or exemplify? That question will be addressed in the following section. But why all the fuss? Is it not obvious to even the most unsophisticated reader that the text is a simple story? Maybe so—but the answer becomes increasingly cloudy the more one reads in commentaries, scholarly essays, text notes, Bible guides, and other studies that deal with this book. Here one discovers a wide range of opinion expressed with regard to the literary classi˜cation of Jonah—from symbolical allegory to historical biography and just about everything else in between. 1"