Jonah and Prayer

I chose this image of Jonah for the cover of my most recent book, Before the Bible: the Liturgical Body and the Formation of Scripture in Early Judaism (2018), because it illustrates a central aspect of the thesis: scriptures remained fluid and open for continuing engagement and extension in liturgical contexts. Jonah has arms upstretched in an orans prayer posture, emerging from (or being swallowed by?) the big fish. On close inspection, you can see this is a micrographic image, meaning both Jonah and the fish are written in Hebrew characters. The medieval manuscript itself reflects the reading of Jonah on the afternoon of Yom Kippur. Before we attend to this later Jewish observance, let’s back up to Jonah in an earlier era.  

Like sparks from a steel striker on flint, intertextual connections between Jonah and other works fly in all different and unexpected directions. The sparks are a generative source of more activity. If the sight of Jonah ignited flames of recognition and amusement in you, then you recognize the book as a parody of conventional Israelite prophecy. But beyond Jonah’s links to the literary corpus of the former and latter prophets, the connections shed light on lived religion in early Judaism, particularly with regard to the composition of texts and the practice and performance of prayer. Jonah was written in the post-exilic period, a time of transition for prophecy, prayer, and scripture alike. Prophecy was increasingly textualized, detached from the oracles and acts of the earliest prophets like Amos or Hosea. In this process it was also anthologized and scribalized, that is to say, learned and often innovative scribes studied, collected, gave shape to, and reshaped the literary output. Prophecy was becoming a textual inheritance that served as a font for further study and interpretive extension. A simultaneous trend in the post-exilic period was the increasing composition and practice of prayer. The scribal anthologizers were also pray-ers, and by the Hellenistic-Roman era, learned sages and others seem to have offered prayers daily (Dan 6; Sir 39:5-8; 4Q504-506) in a cycle that that might include confession of sin, thanksgiving, and praise. In addition to contemporaneous individuals, prominent figures of yore, like David (11QPsa 27:10-11) or Jeremiah’s scribe Baruch (Bar 1:1-3:8), represent a new form of cultic prophecy, in which prayers themselves come to be understood as revelatory prophecy by interpreting and expanding earlier traditions, and in particular discerning the fulfilment of prophetic oracles.

The Dead Sea Scrolls reveal this trend even more clearly in that one-fifth of the corpus comprises prayers, psalms, and related material. Most of these prayers interpret earlier scripture. The texts we now know from the Bible were still fluid, in flux, being interpreted and extended in a variety of ways. Even more, one branch of the Qumran movement, the Yahad, with its leadership role in the person of the Maskil (“Instructor”), allows us to contextualize these activities in particular social contexts. The disciplinary shaping of the Yahad is known in part through the Community Rule, in which the reading of scrolls, the study of torah, and the offering of communal prayer were central activities.

How can we understand these trends through modern scholarly lenses? In my own work, I have proposed a theoretical framework that includes not only traditional literary and philological approaches but also anthropological and even neurocognitive theories that allow us to conceive of textual composition in a new way by thinking about the social contexts in which they were created and evolved.  

One important distinction to make in this approach is between prayer practice and performance. The practice of prayer is a meta-cognitive activity, to use Tanya Luhrmann’s term. Prayer to one’s god involves attention to one’s thoughts, but also ingenuity in imagining an invisible being, memory in recalling past interactions, and future hope with expectations of ongoing relationship and response. When such metacognitive behavior is a habitual and habituating activity, prayer practice shapes the self. Prayer allows for de-centering, re-centering, and self-cultivation of cognition. Our sources portray this activity as a kind of sacred attunement, which was thought to prompt further revelation.

If prayer practice is inwardly directed at cultivating the self, performance is outwardly directed. Performing prayer or scripture requires an audience, even if it is only for oneself, but it presumes social interaction and the reception of that which is performed. Performance involves different levels of engagement related to such factors as the rhetorical or illocutionary power of words, emotional intensity of delivery, embodied postures, and the semantic or “canonical” force of the message. Performance allows for connective fabric to be created between the performing body and the receptive audience, thereby shaping the community as well. Prophecy and prayer, performance, composition of scriptures and their interpretation were all intertwined in vital and vibrant ways as texts continued to be created. 

The post-exilic book of Jonah is an early window into this developing dynamic. Whoever composed the book of Jonah was learned in Jewish cultural texts and practices and took delight in playing with them. Jonah opens in medias res, as a kind of hyperlinked narrative expansion rooted in 2 Kings 14:25 where the prophet Jonah ben Amittai is mentioned. Yet this prophet does not behave like earlier prophets. Time and again, expectations regarding conventional prophetic behavior are upended as Jonah’s knockabout antics drive much of the narrative action. We learn much about how not to be a prophet through his perverse prophetic body. When divinely commissioned to announce judgement against the Ninevites, Jonah does not simply voice reluctance like other prophetic figures (Exod 3-4; Jer 1; Isa 6), but embodies his unwillingness to comply. Instead of going up to Nineveh, he flees from the divine presence in the exact opposite direction and winds up down in the deepest nether regions, praying in distress. His death-wish prayer after seeing divine mercy extended to Nineveh results not in the positive shaping of self, but a negated self-shriveling.

The two prayers in Jonah offer illustrations of two of the many patterns of how prayer might intersect with scriptural tradition. The prayer in Jonah 2:3-10 offered from the belly of the fish is akin to other long poetic prayers found in many narratives. Some of the prayers stand in tension with the narrative context and may be considered insertions, perhaps to make a contested theological point of contrast. The ironic aspect of Jonah’s first prayer is its thanksgiving genre, when one would expect a petition for help. It thus presents the wayward prophet as presumptuous in anticipating his salvation from the belly of the beast. Another notable feature of the prayer is its poetics, which draws upon and reworks water metaphors found in other psalms (e.g., Pss 31, 69, 88; Exod 15). Jonah prays not simply from the bottom of the sea, but from the belly of Sheol, the waters of the deep (tehom), the primeval chaos at the roots of the pillars of the earth. The cosmic geography of the thanksgiving prayer thus echoes the imagery of the temple that accords with ancient near eastern mythic accounts in which the divine warrior does battle and wrests victory from the evil forces of death and chaos.

The second prayer of Jonah (Jon 4:2-3) occurs after the Ninevites manage to stave off divine punishment through fasting, mourning, sackcloth and ashes, and repentance. Dismayed after the stunning success of his five-word oracle of doom, Jonah pronounces a prayer whose only petition is for God to take his life. The prayer adapts potent formulaic words from the scriptural tradition, Exod 34:6-7. The passage is known as the divine attribute formula, one of the “top hits” of potent formulas that are found in the scriptural tradition (cf. Isa 6:3; Num 6: 24-26; Deut 6:4-5; Psalm 91). Such liturgical formulas are reworked and readapted in a variety of contexts. Exodus 34:6 appears in many confessional prayers to “remind” God of his character and prompt forgiveness. The irony of Jonah’s use of the divine attribute formula is that the prophet hurls the potent words as an accusation and indictment of God for having mercy and a willingness to relent in light of historical circumstance.

The power of the divine attribute formula is known not only from literary and liturgical prayers but from ancient material evidence. An Iron Age inscription in the antechamber of the Khirbet Beit Lei tomb complex makes clear the use of the divine attribute formula. In that case, the writing of the divine name and its attributes seems to have served an apotropaic function. The inscription is in a boundary adjacent to a doorway before the actual bench tombs for primary burial to safeguard the place as an abode for the dead. So too, there is ample evidence for the material use of efficacious writing of potent liturgical formulas on amulets, tefillin, and in the later Roman era, on bowls.

Because Jonah is a literary construction of the post-exilic era with an elusive date and provenance, reconstructing its transformative and performative contexts is not possible. At some point, the book of Jonah was joined together with other short prophetic books to form a collection of twelve, where intertextual sparks draw it together in some ingenious ways. Joel and Jonah both employ the divine attribute formula of Exod 34:6-7, but to different effect. We can, however, mention another context in which we see aspects of both compositional use of the psalms in poetic prayer and the use of the divine attribute formula while delineating some aspects of their performance. This is in the collection of the Thanksgiving Hymns at Qumran (cf. 1QHa 4: 21-27, 6:34). Many, if not all, of the poems were performed by the Maskil who adopted an extreme posture of prostration as part of their ritual performance (1QHa 5:12, 8:24, 20:7-8).

The Hodayot poems are densely allusive and interpretive, weaving together not only narrative, prophetic, wisdom, and psalm texts that we know now from the Bible, but also drawing on other literature that was in the Yahad’s library. They are not “exegetical” in a contemporary sense of the word, in which interpretive tools are brought to bear on a stable, fixed text. Rather, these poems are erudite and creative jazz riffs. The learned maestro who composed them knew the sacred tradition intimately and was able to adapt and renew it, transforming both the texts and his audience in the process. Compared to the elaborate and erudite reworking of scriptural language found in the Hodayot, the thanksgiving psalm of Jonah from the fish is more like a bush league effort to reengage psalmic imagery. But both reflect the ongoing and interconnected process of prayer, prophecy, performance, and scriptural interpretation through the ingestion of scripture.

In early Christian tradition, the adoption of Jonah in liturgical contexts is related most closely to Matthew (Matt 12:39-40), in which the “sign of Jonah” swallowed in the fish and regurgitated after three days is understood as a type of Christian resurrection, of Jesus’s death, burial in the tomb, and coming back to life. The figure of Jonah was very popular in early Christian iconography and is found on many sarcophagi representing hope for the resurrection. So, too, the divine rescue of Jonah from the deathly waters of evil and chaos finds its way into baptismal liturgies which typologize Jonah, along with Noah/the Flood and Moses/the Red Sea. In Islam, Jonah is the only one of the minor prophets of the Hebrew Bible to warrant mention. The longest adaptation of the Jonah story (Yūnus) appears in Sūrah 37, in which Jonah is rehabilitated to a degree by offering a prayer of repentance.

To return to our starting point, as we can see from the illustration on the front of my book, Jewish tradition emphasizes a different theme—repentance—which is why it is used as the haftarah reading on the afternoon of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. We can observe, however, that even when it is adopted as the haftarah in the Yom Kippur service, this notion of extension of scripture obtains because the reading of Jonah is completed by verses from Micah 7:18-20, which also draw from the potent words of Exod 34:6-7. Beyond scripture reading, the performance of piyyutim, erudite liturgical poems that interpret the story of Jonah in other ways, enrich the service. In sum, we can see that in antiquity and today, traditional prayer is a performative, embodied activity through which the cultural tradition is reclaimed, mediated, sacralized, and renewed, shaping selves and communities in the process. Prayer practice and performance open up spaces for the extension of scripture; they are intertwined.

For further reading:

Csordas, Thomas J. “Practice and Performance in Ritual Language,” The Immanent Frame May 30, 2017; doi: Feb. 15, 2022.

Ehrlich, Uri. The Nonverbal Language of Prayer: A New Approach to the Study of Jewish Liturgy (Trans. Dena Ordan;TSAJ 105; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004).

Erickson, Amy, Jonah: Introduction and Commentary (Illuminations; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2021).

Luhrmann, Tanya M. “Prayer as a Metacognitive Activity” Metacognitive Diversity: An Interdisciplinary Approach Joëlle Proust and Martin Fortier, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

Newman, Judith H. Before the Bible: The Liturgical Body and the Formation of Scriptures in Early Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

Newman, Judith H. Praying by the Book: The Scripturalization of Prayer in Second Temple Judaism (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1999).

Mandell, Alice and Jeremy D. Smoak, “Spaces, Things, and the Body: On the Material Turn in the Study of Israelite Religions” Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 19 (2019) DOI: https://doi.org/10.5508/jhs29397

Judith H. Newman is Professor of Old Testament/Hebrew Bible at Emmanuel College, University of Toronto.