Loading…

A Gracious and Compassionate God: Mission, Salvation and Spirituality in the Book of Jonah is unavailable, but you can change that!

The book of Jonah is arguably just as jarring for us as it was for the ancients. Ninevah’s repentance, Jonah’s estrangement from God and the book’s bracing moral conclusion all pose unsettling questions for today’s readers. For biblical theologians, Jonah also raises tough questions regarding mission and religious conversion. Daniel Timmer embarks on a new reading of Jonah in order to secure its...

condition in 2:4–5. In this second look, however, the connection between Yahweh and the threatening waters has disappeared. Now the waters themselves ‘enclose’ Jonah to the point of death, the deep ‘surrounds’ him, and weeds are ‘wrapped’ around his head. These images are almost a depiction of a burial at sea, and clearly show the life-threatening aspect of Jonah’s time in the sea: will he escape? His chances of doing so are reduced even further by the depth of his descent: he sinks to the very ‘roots
Page 86