VII.

SUPPOSED AND REAL PURPOSES FOR WHICH THE BOOK WAS WRITTEN.

POPULAR supposition says that the one purpose of the Book of Jonah is to record history for the benefit of the religious world. Attention has already been called to the unhistorical character of the story, and we have not only seen that its originlay in some legend now lost to the world, but that few statements in the entire book will bear the scrutiny of scientific research.

Although these conclusions are contrary to the teachings of most Christian and Jewish religious organizations, with hosts of their learned theologians of the past, yet modern critics, assisted by the new light from Nineveh and the Assyr

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ians, are enabled to search the book with a deeper penetration.

It is not without deep study for many years, and by many men, that the real purpose of the book has been discovered. Many theories as to what that purpose was have been advanced, some of them humorous, others impossible. Perhaps the most curious explanation of all has been suggested by one who supposes the story to be true, and that, when Jonah was cast into the sea, a ship named the Fish (Dag, in Hebrew) picked him up, or swallowed him, and three days later landed him, or vomited him out, safely ashore. In this way Jonah was in reality in the fish's belly three days and three nights. Another view, quite as untenable, is advanced by Rev. Alexander Mitchell; he supposes the book to be "An account of a vision seen by Jonah while in a trance, or state of somnambulism." If this is true, Jonah was given to having strange dreams. Another ingenious explanation

is offered by Ragozin (History of Assyria, 208-211), who calls the story an Oriental fable. As mentioned above, the idiogram which the Assyrians employed in writing the name of Nineveh, may be translated to mean a fish-house, or a fish city. This author says: "The big fish that swallowed Jonah was none other than Nineveh, the fish city itself, where he must have been sufficiently encompassed by danger to warrant his desperate cry of deliverance."

Renan is inclined to regard the book as a satire, and sees in it advice for "the incredulous to join the group of saints. The canticle commenced in the belly of the fish, composed of scraps of psalms which have no reference to the circumstances, the preaching to the Ninevites almost comical in its brevity, the repentance of Yahveh, taken from the oldest Jehovistic narratives, the good unknown king who was converted so easily, the beasts that share the fasts, Jonah's despair

about a gourd, are all touches which could not have been taken seriously". . . . (History of Israel, vol. iii).

Dr. Lyman Abbott, who sees a didactic purpose in the book, calls it "a satire on the narrowness of certain Judaistic teachers of the second and third centuries before Christ." He says: "Outside of ecclesiastical circles, this story invariably produces a smile. Might not this suggest that it was intended by the author to produce a smile? that he wrote it to smite with ridicule that narrowness of spirit, that religious provincialism which is more amenable to ridicule than to any other weapon? (Outlook, Feb., 1897).

It is not only in modern times that the story of Jonah has been regarded as a humorous book. The passage from Lucien already quoted would indicate that it was so regarded in his day. Mutianus Rufus (1527) advanced the interpretation that the whale was a bathhouse having that sign; the kikaion, or gourd,

was a bather's straw hat. In the celebrated poem, Im Schwarzem Walfisch zu Ascalon," an interpretation erroneously ascribed to Hermann von der Hardt is that the whale was a tavern, with a picture of a whale for its sign.

Niebuhr, an early student of Assyrian, believed the story of Jonah to be a real prophecy of the destruction of Nineveh. He said: "The prophecy was delivered in the city about forty days, or (according to a system of interpretation which claims that a Biblical day equals a year), forty years before the revolt of Media, which was the actual cause of the destruction of Nineveh." According to this view the city was actually destroyed as Jonah prophesied, but it should be remembered that Yahveh repented and did not destroy the city..

Dr. Kohler sees in the story a warning to the Jews whose city seems to have been on the verge of destruction. "The threatened city of Nineveh reflects the fate of