Jonah 2 used to be one of my favourite passages in the Bible. For now, let's just say, it's complicated. If I was an editor, I would have told the author, "Lose either chapter 2 or chapter 4; you can't keep both." Chapter 2 makes Jonah pious; chapter 4 makes him sound racist. Chapter 2 makes him sound like he was converted in the belly of the fish; chapter 4 makes it sound as if the fish never happened.
Chapter 2 (in the Hebrew numbering, which is one ahead of the English) begins with the explanation, "And Yhwh provided a great fish, to swallow Jonah," and the chapter concludes, "And Yhwh spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah upon the dry ground." What happened in between? 2:1[1:17] continues, "Now Jonah was in the stomach of the fish, three days and three nights." Now, for me, as the editor, I would have again explained, "that's enough - less is more - I like it just as is." Chapter 2 would then read:
"And Yhwh provided a great fish, to swallow Jonah. Now Jonah was in the stomach of the fish, three days and three nights. And Yhwh spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah upon the dry ground."
Silence is golden, and the silence of the three days would speak to the reader: what happened those three days in darkness? Were those days informative? Was he just whingeing? Did he have an epiphany? Those questions would then be answered, first positively (Jonah did indeed preach in Nineveh, ch 3) but then negatively (he did not want them to repent, ch 4). Instead, by including the psalm of chapter 2, we are left trying to figure out what its point is, and how these words, which on the surface sound theologically sound, could come from the mouth of one who behaves so abominably in chapter 4.
Anyway, enough about the theology. What's going on in the structure?
There are a pair of bookends: 2:1[1:17] And Yhwh provided a great fish to swallow Jonah // 2:11[10] And Yhwh spoke to the fish and it vomited Jonah upon the dry ground.
In the body of the prayer, there is the narrator's introduction, and, possibly, at the end, his summary conclusion: 2:1c-2[1:17c-2:1] Now Jonah was in the stomach of the fish three days and three nights, and Jonah prayed to Yhwh his God from the stomach of the fish. // 2:10c[9c] Salvation comes from Yhwh. The reason I could include the end of v10[9] is because, contra the NIV, there is no introductory speech there, and it doesn't flow from v9[8]. But what it does do is mirror the introduction to the psalm, indicating that salvation is indeed from Yhwh, the right object of all our prayers.
The remainder of the psalm is divisible in two, with two subsections, each half concluding with "to your holy temple," (2:5[4], 8-10[7-9]), while the first parts theologically describe the experience of drowning (2:3-4[2-3]; 2:6-7[5-6]). The body of the psalm is then an ABAB structure.
What is not clear in English is the four times something is said to be at the very centre, albeit with three different Hebrew words, each referring, in different ways, to the bodily centre:
Now Jonah was in the stomach מעה
And Jonah prayed to Yhwh his God from the stomach of the fish מעה
From the belly of Sheol I called for help בטן
You hurled me [...] into the very heart of the seas לבב
He is not on the edge, on the cusp, but at the most inward part of the fish, of Sheol, of the seas. His view of his conundrum is that it is the worst it could possibly be.
Regardless of language, another thing which stands out is the manifold ways water is described:
- the depths
- the very heart of the sea
- the swirling currents
- waves and breakers sweeping over me
- engulfing water
- the deep
- seaweed
- roots of the mountains
- bars of the earth
And that's not even mentioning the great sea creatures able to swallow and sustain human life for three days and three nights (do you remember this bloke who lasted almost 90 seconds in a whale's mouth?)! Now I'm not a particularly great swimmer (I've nearly drowned four times), but I still don't think I'm as hydrophobic as Jonah's prayer shows him to be. He really hates the stuff.
Not least is because, as this prayer demonstrates, at the bottom of the sea lies the gateway to Sheol, the place of the dead. Whether you get sucked down a hole (cf Numbers 16) or down the bottom of the ocean, down below lies the "realm of the dead" (as per the NIV), a place no one wants to end up.
What I haven't discussed is what it all means. As one of my interlocutors on Twitter noted, "there isn't a line from him in that prayer that isn’t proved wrong elsewhere in text of Jonah." I think he's probably right.
