We made it through Obadiah, and some long lessons on the Edomites, and now we have arrived at Jonah, the most exciting of all the prophetic books. In preparation for our Jonah studies, I checked my large collection of children’s bibles at home to see which of the minor prophets made an appearance. As I suspected, Jonah is with rare exception the only minor prophet to appear in illustrated Bibles. In addition, Jonah is the only prophet to get his own musical production at the Sight & Sound theater. Jonah is the only Hebrew prophet to have a full-length Veggie Tale movie. For most Christian adults, Jonah is the prophet that we come to with the most familiarity, but much of that familiarity comes from hearing Jonah’s story as a child.
As part of the Bible Fiber reading challenge, I tried to read Jonah with fresh adult eyes. I had never read Jonah after doing deep studies in the other minor prophets who proceeded him, so it was interesting to get a feel for his place among the twelve. And Jonah is an awkward fit among the other prophets. The literary differences, in both format and message, between Jonah and the other prophets are striking. Jonah is technically not a prophetic book; in that it is not written as an oracle and never takes a first-person voice. It is a narrative book, written anonymously, telling a story in third person about Jonah. In fact, Jonah is the only prophetic book that takes a mocking tone toward the prophet-in-focus. Out of four chapters, only five words in Jonah can be classified as an oracle. We will get to that short oracle in chapter three.
