3 - The Divine Realm

Summary

The biblical book of Jonah falls readily into the generally recognized category of myth. In so far as it incorporates traditional communal functions of an “account of totality” with collective symbolic representations of the sacred, aware of truth and falsehood through intuitive consciousness it functions as a myth. In so far as “myth” traditionally has been interpreted as a story about the activities of gods, this is a rendition of the activity of Yahweh, Judah's God. Significant for the story of Jonah is the centrality in myth of confronting the dualities good/evil, consistency/contradiction, and truth/falsity as these traditional themes of communal life are conveyed through the activities of “the sacred, or the other, behind ordinary reality.” For the narrator of Jonah's story there is only one sacred other, at least only one true deity that actually does anything; however, the recognition that there are other people who believe in other gods is integral to the plot. For the author and the early audience of the tale it was not a distant, fabulous, or ancient world that had numerous peoples with sizable pantheons, this was the everyday world of Judah's neighboring populations as well as for a number of Judeans themselves. The book of Jonah makes a clear distinction between the God of Israel/Judah and the deities of other peoples and, by extension, between the Israelites/Judeans and peoples who would worship “other” deities.