century: in 1921 A. P. Herbert wrote a comic dramatization of the story; and Aldous Huxley wrote a poem ‘Jonah’ in 1959. And in music he has not been omitted: he is the subject of a seventeenth-century oratorio and, more recently, his name is the title of another by Lennox Berkeley. Why this popularity? Part of the reason must lie in the fact that the book is a story, and a story is more easily remembered than a prophetic oracle, a set of laws or a genealogy. Thus the stories of Joseph, Moses, Abraham