Join Clint Loveall and Michael Gewecke as they dive into the intriguing book of Jonah. Covering a range of topics, they explore the timeless nature of Jonah and the mysteries surrounding its authorship and date. Discover how this seemingly simple children’s tale unfolds into a complex narrative filled with layers of symbolism, metaphor, and theological meaning. Get ready to encounter the fascinating character of Jonah, a broken and reluctant prophet, and explore the themes of human brokenness, divine care for the unlikeliest of individuals, and the challenge of grappling with God’s will. Delve into the questions raised by this enigmatic Old Testament text and be prepared to be captivated by its profound insights.
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00:00:00:19 – 00:00:23:46
Clint Loveall
Hey, everybody. Welcome back. Thanks for joining us as we kick off a new study on this Tuesday. We begin the book of Jonah, an interesting book, I think, a book with which most Christians, most church people are familiar. You know, if you grew up in a church, there’s a chance if you’re my age, there’s a chance you had a whale and a and a Jonah on a flannel board.
00:00:23:51 – 00:00:52:31
Clint Loveall
I don’t know what that looked like in your youth, Michael, but if you’re a tale person, I mean, Jonah’s just it’s just one of those books that everybody knows. One of those stories that everybody knows. Though there are some parts in it, I think, that are surprising when you try to read and dig deeper. It turns out that there’s a lot more here than you might expect, which is surprising because, again, this this book is short.
00:00:52:33 – 00:01:23:15
Clint Loveall
It’s, I think, 48 total versus four chapters. It’s a simple story, though. It is very cleanly divided into four movements, four parts. And maybe to start with, as we try to do some background today, Michael, the first thing I think that you’d have to acknowledge about Jonah is it’s a strange book. And by that I mean, it’s unusual in in the Bible.
00:01:23:18 – 00:01:52:42
Clint Loveall
It there really isn’t anything else like it. It’s it stands out among its peers. For instance, we call Jonah one of the minor prophets or sometimes the 12 prophets. But the word prophet is not used at all in the book. This is one of those books that there’s a lot of questions, very few answers, and and accordingly, I think this is one of those books that, like Old Testament Bible people, they love this book because there’s so many unanswered questions.
00:01:52:46 – 00:02:20:00
Michael Gewecke
Yeah, let’s think of that for a second, because if you’re joining us here for this study, you might think to yourself that Jonah would be maybe a relatively simple book, especially if you have a memory of that story from when you’re a child. You know, maybe you would come to this conversation and you say, yeah, I think it’s a mystery how that fish thing worked, you know, But you might be surprised to the point that claims making here that actually Jonah has layer upon layer of mystery.
00:02:20:00 – 00:02:41:10
Michael Gewecke
In fact, modern scholarship is going to look at it and they’re going to come back with far more question marks than they come back with answers. And we’re going to explore, you know, some of the top level questions that you’re going to raise about this book that you’re not going to get a ready answer to. But it’s surprising because the characters are all an inversion of expectation.
00:02:41:15 – 00:03:02:49
Michael Gewecke
The Prophet is supposed to be an individual who’s the hero of the story. That’s a consistent thing throughout the Old Testament. But in this case, we have a reluctant prophet. He’s told to go, and instead of going into the place he’s supposed to, he goes the opposite direction. And then likewise you have pagans, which in the rest of the Old Testament are cast very consistently in a negative light.
00:03:02:54 – 00:03:34:41
Michael Gewecke
And in the Book of Jonah, they’re the ones to hear and to respond and to return to God. And then when we talk about them returning to God clan, it’s interesting because not only do we have accounts of these pagans doing unexpected things, there’s layers upon that because they’re the pagans upon the ship, The sailors who are with Jonah, when they respond to God in the language, there’s a different word of God listed there than the word of God we’re going to find in Nineveh when the native whites, who are also pagans, respond.
00:03:34:46 – 00:03:59:04
Michael Gewecke
And so there’s even layers upon that part of the conversation. In other words, it’s not just that Jonah’s the reluctant prophet. It’s not just that the pagans respond to God that an unexpected way. There may be even lessons and layers upon the God that they’re responding to and how much they’re responding to that There’s there’s a lot of questions that are going to be raised in the course of reading this text of what what’s happening here.
00:03:59:04 – 00:04:20:40
Michael Gewecke
And then if that’s not enough, Clint, you’ve got these four chapters and within them you have a real diversity of style. Within the study. We’re going to go from the narratives that we’re used to. It’s a kind of proclamation, though. It’s going to be very short. There’s not much prophetic word like you were accustomed to in the Old Testament.
00:04:20:45 – 00:04:42:09
Michael Gewecke
And then you’re also going to have this prayer, which is almost like a psalm, a very different kind of style injected into the book. And by the way, you’re not going to be surprised to hear that there’s a lot of scholarly debate over what we do with that different style that seemingly injected into this text And this, friends, is sort of the tip of the iceberg a little bit.
00:04:42:09 – 00:04:57:04
Michael Gewecke
There’s there’s a lot here in this book. So what might appear to you to be kind of a simple, clear cut children’s message type story is actually a very robust, very debated, very nuanced, mysterious Old Testament text.
00:04:57:09 – 00:05:22:19
Clint Loveall
Yeah. So maybe maybe to try and get into some of that. And we understand that this isn’t something everybody cares about. Some people just want to read the text and see what’s there, but sometimes the background is helpful. So let’s let’s look at a little bit of what scholars don’t know about Jonah. And it is surprising we don’t have a date for this book.
00:05:22:24 – 00:05:45:56
Clint Loveall
It would be typical that in most biblical books there’s a reference to a specific figure that we have a date range for, or maybe there’s a reference to a particular king or a particular event. Sometimes the book would even say in the time of whatever. None of that is found in Jonah. Jonah is timeless in the sense that it doesn’t date itself.
00:05:46:01 – 00:06:12:27
Clint Loveall
And that means that Bible scholars have had a 700 year period in which they’ve tried to date this book. So there are literally seven centuries worth of guesses of when you should date Jonah, and there’s no clear consensus. And again, Bible people love things that don’t really have answers because that gives them something to dig into and a mystery to try and solve.
00:06:12:32 – 00:06:49:40
Clint Loveall
But for the reader and again, this is whether it’s 700 years. Either way, it’s still ancient history for us. But the reality is we we we don’t know when Jonah was we have a 700 year window that this book could have been created. And we don’t know what to do with that. The other thing that’s interesting, there is one mention of a character named Jonah in the Old Testament, and that seems to be where we’ve gotten this name, though again, it’s not exactly clear that we’re talking about the same person.
00:06:49:40 – 00:07:14:27
Clint Loveall
It just it makes some sense that we are. But there’s nothing in the book of Jonah that equates to that other reference and makes that clear as well. And so you have a lot of mystery when it comes to authorship. We don’t know who wrote this. We think we know who it’s about, or at least we have some idea who it’s about, the character Jonah, and we have no idea when it was written.
00:07:14:27 – 00:07:18:05
Clint Loveall
And that’s that that alone makes this book kind of unusual.
00:07:18:19 – 00:07:40:55
Michael Gewecke
Yeah. And I think that you offer the really important note there. If you’re not interested in this introductory stuff, come back tomorrow or hit the next button wherever you’re listening to this, and you’ll jump to the study tomorrow when we start jumping into the text. But there are really interesting things here worth exploring because when you come to a book like Jonah, you might ask, well then if how do they get that range?
00:07:41:07 – 00:08:08:36
Michael Gewecke
They might say, Clint, that that’s a really interesting sort of historical, broad definition. And some of that is because the way that scholars are going to try to date a book like this is they’re going to look for some of the the way that words are used and the specific words that are entered into the text. And they’re going to ask like, what timeframes was were these things sort of most likely to have existed in the literature that we have?
00:08:08:47 – 00:08:41:57
Michael Gewecke
So a lot of sort of detective type triangulation that that, you know, scholars are going to do. They’re one of the things that I find so interesting is that the biblical authors know they may have done that intentionally. They may have done that not intentionally. It may have been that they had different focuses and intention. But but, Clint, to your point, that that Old Testament passage that lists Jonah is actually from Second Kings 14 here, and we’re looking at verse 25, I believe it is up here, spoken through his servant Jonah.
00:08:42:01 – 00:09:03:11
Michael Gewecke
Scholars think that might be a reference to the Jonah, the book that we have, it might not. It might actually be something completely separate. And I’ve read, you know, some scholars said that the author may not have wanted to give us a time frame because we were just supposed to naturally assume it was connected to that one chapter, that one verse in Second Kings.
00:09:03:16 – 00:09:33:41
Michael Gewecke
But they don’t know. We don’t know that. So it’s a fascinating kind of thing. When you come to a book that is in many ways written in such a way as to be timeless, it’s written so that we, the reader, are able to enter into it without getting caught up on the exact picture of time, even, quite frankly, we don’t need to feel exactly the way that Jonah does about the innovates to still get the point of the story.
00:09:33:41 – 00:09:53:08
Michael Gewecke
We might miss some of the trappings of it, but we can really enter into this story thousands of years later, and it still grip us because it has a timelessness in it. Was that purposeful? Was that written in by the authors and intended, by the way that they that they wrote it? Or is it simply the way that it has come?
00:09:53:13 – 00:10:09:10
Michael Gewecke
You know, we don’t actually have the answer to that. But that’s, I think, why the beautiful narrative kind of details of a story like Jonah is we’re not going to answer a lot of the mysteries of this text and that in some ways, I think makes it even more inviting. Then it does push us back.
00:10:09:23 – 00:10:37:30
Clint Loveall
Yeah, the very things that make it slippery, I think, make it accessible because it’s not locked into a particular date and custom. We don’t have to deal with a lot of strange names. We don’t have a lot of dated concepts or practices. We have a kind of bare bones story. And I think one of the things that does is makes it accessible throughout a range of time.
00:10:37:30 – 00:11:08:46
Clint Loveall
And in fact, there is so little history in this book that one of the other things that scholars have disagreed on significantly is what to even categorize the book of Jonah in terms of type of literature. Is this a parable, Is this history, is this sermon, is this a fable? Is this a satire? Is this some kind of allegory or novel?
00:11:08:51 – 00:11:34:01
Clint Loveall
And when I say that, you may think, some people sit around arguing about what kind of books, but there are patterns in the rest of the Bible when we’re dealing with history, there’s a general pattern of how that is written when we’re dealing with a parable, there’s a kind of obviousness to that. Jonah again manages to defy most of that.
00:11:34:06 – 00:12:05:06
Clint Loveall
And so people who specialize in biblical literature get together and they don’t even have a consensus on how you should think of this book in terms of what the authors intended when it was written. And I think, you know, again, that makes it very interesting. We’re getting in the weeds a little bit here, but just so you’re aware, there are some major ways of referring to God in the old Testament.
00:12:05:06 – 00:12:30:45
Clint Loveall
There is the word Elohim. That’s kind of the general word for God. There is the sacred name your way, and you would typically see in literature one or the other. Sometimes they cross over you. You get four different ways of referring to God with the combination of those words in the four chapters of Jonah. And they’re not contained one per each chapter.
00:12:30:50 – 00:13:00:20
Clint Loveall
It’s just that, again, when you look for a map or a legend to kind of understand Jonah, Jonah does not give in to that very easily. It leaves you with lots of questions. And I think, you know, aside from the story itself, which we’ll talk about again, those things alone make Jonah a very interesting piece of work.
00:13:00:25 – 00:13:41:11
Michael Gewecke
I think that one of the mistakes that you might make now, even on purpose, is if you came to Jonah and you’re looking to read it like a simple child’s tale, you would inevitably miss the layer upon layer upon layer of symbolic and metaphoric and theological and even cultural meaning that’s contained at every layer of the text. The the thing that Clint is sharing about the names of God might seem to you to be, you know, a far off detail that’s not germane to the conversation as we go and point out some of these moves that happened with within the Book of Jonah.
00:13:41:25 – 00:14:03:52
Michael Gewecke
I think you’re going to be astonished to see that the question that we’re going to be left with at the end of this book, which is fundamentally a question about Jonah and about his understanding a relationship with the Divine God. The question is simultaneously framed throughout the entire book. What of these other people and their encounter and understanding with God?
00:14:04:03 – 00:14:49:31
Michael Gewecke
There’s this beautiful kind of simultaneous transformation relationship and dare I say, maybe even a question of whether there is transformation for some of these characters. That happens throughout the text. And because of the story’s careful and expert writing, because of its use of multiple genres of writing, it keeps the reader from getting caught into a pattern. And and by the nature of the fact it keeps us off guard, I think what it does is it makes us throughout the whole story, keep ourselves from solidifying what we think the story is trying to teach us, so that when we get to the end, we’re still holding the whole meaning loosely enough that we can we can
00:14:49:31 – 00:15:09:31
Michael Gewecke
engage in the deeply generative questions it’s going to leave us with. And that’s what makes this book so interesting is on one hand, it’s full of mysteries and I think it’s worth sort of also naming one of the ironies of the study. A book of Jonah is with all of the mysteries and all of the things that we don’t know.
00:15:09:36 – 00:15:38:00
Michael Gewecke
This is one of those Old Testament books that there’s almost no scholarly debate about the text of Jonah itself. It’s considered to be a highly organized, highly accurately collected. I mean, if you look back through it, all of the textual work, there’s very little debate about what’s in Jonah, that there’s there’s scholarly agreement that the book that we have in Jonah is largely the same as the book that we have in the oldest texts that reflect it.
00:15:38:00 – 00:15:56:35
Michael Gewecke
So that’s the amazing thing. You have a thing that in so many ways as the as the text has been handed down hasn’t changed. And the thing that has been handed down is full of mysteries and full of questions. And that’s what makes it such a miraculous, miraculous and interesting book.
00:15:56:40 – 00:16:26:11
Clint Loveall
It it is. It’s a fascinating book. I want to warn our listeners, if you’re still hanging in there with us in this introduction, one thing that is maybe surprising as you get into, if you dig into Jonah, there is what I call it, darkness. There is running through this story, a head on confront Tatian with the hardness and the brokenness of the human heart.
00:16:26:15 – 00:17:04:37
Clint Loveall
Yeah, Jonah is. Jonah is is a very broken person. Jonah is going to struggle mightily with and even against God. And I think that makes Jonah a fast nailing character. But this is not and this is not an easy book thematically. Again, I think we’ve kind of we’ve kind of soften the tale by by thinking of this as a child story.
00:17:04:42 – 00:17:41:42
Clint Loveall
There are some deeply adult themes that run through this book and and I hope that we’ll be able to help draw those out, because Jonah occupies a very challenging place not only for Christians, but for people in general. What do I do when God seems to care about someone I do not? Or even more so, God cares about someone that I, I deeply dislike.
00:17:41:52 – 00:17:51:09
Clint Loveall
And Jonah, Jonah’s a hard man and I think that was I think that will show through. But this is not an easy story.
00:17:51:19 – 00:18:08:09
Michael Gewecke
Yeah, and just add one layer to that. We might be shocked to discover that Jonah knows his Bible. Jonah knows the things that that God has said. And in fact, Jonah uses it against God with some points.
00:18:08:09 – 00:18:13:41
Clint Loveall
I think I would go so far to say, Michael, that Jonah knows God. Yeah, I mean.
00:18:13:46 – 00:18:15:02
Michael Gewecke
Yeah, yeah.
00:18:15:07 – 00:18:17:25
Clint Loveall
But he isn’t happy because of that.
00:18:17:25 – 00:18:18:33
Michael Gewecke
I write.
00:18:18:37 – 00:18:22:06
Clint Loveall
That’s, that’s his, that’s his problem as well.
00:18:22:08 – 00:18:43:55
Michael Gewecke
That’s a good place to leave this conversation today. The hook of Jonah is what happens if one encounters God and is left wanting to push back against God? What? Where will that lead someone? And that is a question that if you’ve ever had doubt in your in your faith, if you’ve ever been a person who struggled to find a path.
00:18:43:55 – 00:19:04:10
Michael Gewecke
And it hasn’t seemed clear to you, Jonah is an incredibly important book to read and counter that if you’re a person who your faith seems to have been simple and a broad path, then you might discover and Joe and I kind of engagement with the faith that’s deep and meaningful, that that is also not easy. And there’s a lot to learn from that as well.
00:19:04:10 – 00:19:25:27
Michael Gewecke
So I certainly hope you will commit to join us for this. Share this video. If you think there’s another person who would benefit, please share a link. Let him know that it’s happening. Feel free to subscribe. That’s the best way to get notifications when we continue to upload new episodes this Monday through Thursday. And we of course hope that we will see you again tomorrow as we kick off Jonah itself.
00:19:25:31 – 00:19:26:33
Clint Loveall
Thanks for joining us.