La Ballena de Antonia, in XÃ bia Spain created by Toni Mari. Photo my own.
If you would like to listen to me reading this essay, hit play on this recording. I find it super helpful when my favourite writers record their essays in a podcast style, so I thought I'd give it a go myself. Let me know if you appreciate it.
The joke of the title is sadly was not one I can take credit for, kudos there goes to my friend Elliot Grove, but the credit for this project can be found in two sermons I had the privilege to preach in August 2019.
As I prepared those sermons, a two part series on one book of the Bible (long story short, Jonah seemed manageably short, but also with enough to talk about!) I found myself telling the story of Jonah in a more and more comedic manner. Those of you who know me may have noticed I operate within a world of jokes, sarcasm, sit-coms and explosive laughter but I wondered as I pondered the story whether this was a hindrance to my preaching. Christians (on the whole) believe that the Bible is quite a serious text, with some odd parts*, but a text that tells of love and grace and therefore it needs to be read earnestly. I was concerned that perhaps I wasn't reading the story earnestly, and was doing it a disservice but I also knew that the Bible is a representation of human life, and that I didn't personally have a problem with humour within that representation. And so, the question was born: did the author mean it to be funny, was it supposed to be an observational comedy, or was it just me?
Studying at an Evangelical** college meant that the first questions or comments I received from fellow students about my potential dissertation title was whether it was okay to even find the Bible funny because 'surely it's disrespectful to find humour in our sacred text'. This became the first question that needed to be answered as the rest of the project was suddenly rather dependent on that. You can read more on that here.
Once I'd worked out (spoiler alert!) that I could justify looking for humour in the text, the next job was to work out how. This looked like a lot of reading other people's work, as it is really important to not read humour into the text if it's not there, so some really robust testing of the text was needed, and so I lifted that method from bigger brains than mine. 1
I was looking for 4 things:
There has to be a lot of comedic features - not just one, two or three, but a clustering of features in the book.
The humorous view should offer an explanation for the hard to understand parts of the text.
The humorous view should be coherent with the wider text, which is considered for this study as other prophetic books and the wider arc of the Hebrew Bible (different to the Old Testament).
The brainy people who study the Bible for a living should agree - years of scholarship shouldn't directly disagree or disprove the arguments.
And so I started on my mission, looking for parody, absurdity and wordplay in the original text to try and answer my big question: does the author of the Book of Jonah deliberately use humour to enhance the story of Jonah?
Many of you asked to read a copy of my answer to this question, and I am happy to pass on the full 14,653 words on to you, but I'm pretty sure that most of you will appreciate the simplified version! So this is going to be a series of blog posts as I work through my dissertation and the notes I was given on it and I slim down and polish the points I made in it. Hopefully there will be a new blog post every two weeks, but I'm chronically good at over-promising, so who knows what I'll manage. It will probably be about 4 posts in addition to this one.
A disclaimer: this research is an undergraduate dissertation that achieved a 2:1. It is not the cutting-edge of scholarship, it is so far from perfect that it only just made it into the 'good' category on the Durham marking scheme, and it is a summary of a lot of other people's work that should have much more attention paid to it. Lots of work by other people will be referenced throughout the posts.
The positive side of the disclaimer coin is that this piece of work is something I am proud of, something that I am passionate about, and something that I hope is accessible to those who have never taken RE past year 9. Theology likes big words, confusing concepts and blowing people's minds. My prayer is that this blog series doesn't have many big words or confusing concepts, but that it does blow your mind just a little bit because the project deepened my love for the Old Testament and the joy that I find in God.
Any questions, or comments get in contact, I'd love to chat!
* See: The murder of Eglon in Judges 3; The naked randomer at the arrest of Jesus; and many many more...
** Evangelicals tend to hold a high view of the Bible, of Scripture, seeing it as the infallible and real word of God.
1: Jackson, Melissa. Comedy and Feminist Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible: A Subversive Collaboration, 2012.