Commentary on Paper by Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg

Abstract

In this discussion, I stress two points. First, I have underlined the powerful understanding Dr. Zornberg brings to her exegesis of the book of Jonah via her competence as Biblical scholar, literary critic, and master of psychoanalytic theory. In her hands, Jonah becomes a fully minded person, not just a moral icon. Second, I have focused on her major thesis, that Jonah's need to escape, his repeated going down into and away from himself, evolves from his putative trauma, which is comprised of not only the horror of near death but also the shock of survival.

Notes

¹With the following two exceptions. In 1Kings 14, Jonah ben Amittai is mentioned as the prophet who mediates King Jeroboam II's turning away from his defiance of God. In 2Kings 17, the legend is spelled out that Zornberg utilizes as grounds for her hypothesis that Jonah was severely confronted with the discontinuity of life (the trauma of survival). In the time of King Ahab, a baby (who is purported by midrashic sources to have been Jonah ben Amittai) is born to a starving widow, dies, and is resurrected through the mediation of the prophet Elijah.

²Many scholars have argued that the text must have been written many years post the sack of ancient Israel by the Assyrians and the Babylonian Exile, because the Jews would be too embittered to embrace God's egalitarian concern for Nineveh. However, Walton (2006) pointed out that the residents of Nineveh were welcoming of other gods and would have been open to Jonah. A modern irony supports this view. The ruins of ancient Nineveh lie just outside of Mosul in northern Iraq and contemporary Iraqi citizens believe and value the alleged fact that Jonah is buried there.

³Zornberg follows Simon (1999) in identifying Tarshish with Tartesus in southern Spain. However Rabbi Bernard Mehlman (2002) pointed to the many uses of Tarshish throughout the Bible in contexts that suggest it may mean, in so many words, “only God knows where.”