An Apologetic For The Historical Character Of The Book Of Jonah -- By: Douglas Bookman

Journal: Central Bible Quarterly
Volume: CENQ 22:2 (Summer 1979)
Article: An Apologetic For The Historical Character Of The Book Of Jonah
Author: Douglas Bookman


An Apologetic For The Historical Character Of The Book Of Jonah

Douglas Bookman

Pillsbury Baptist Bible College

Owatonna, Minnesota

Introduction

Purpose Of The Study

The simple account of the prophet Jonah has ever been a favorite whipping-boy for the skeptic, the disbelieving critic, and, in general, the enemy of God’s Word for many centuries. But a more recent development is that which finds men who claim to accept Scripture as the divinely-inspired standard of truth and righteousness attacking the historicity of the account of Jonah. George Adam Smith says that the symptoms of parable are so clear in Jonah “that we sin against the intention of the author, and the Spirit which inspired him, when we willfully interpret the book as real history.”1 Zenus concludes that Jonah is simply a parable concocted in the fourth century B.C.; “an imaginative work,” to be sure, but a fiction nonetheless.2

The purpose of this study, therefore, is to determine whether the book of Jonah was originally intended to be understood as actual history, a plain statement of the actual facts of an historic event, or whether it was meant to be received as an allegory, a fictitious account of an imaginary event, told with the purpose of conveying some moralistic lesson. In brief, did the writer originally intend to write history or to compose a parable?

Necessary Presuppositions

There are two considerations which, though unprovable, must nevertheless be presupposed if there is to be any use for such a study as this. The first of these is the possibility of the supernatural. No one will deny that Jonah is permeated with the miraculous; indeed, many find an objection to the historicity of the book in that the supernatural is so very prevalent. Now if the possibility of God’s supernaturally intervening into the course of history is denied, the question of whether Jonah—with all of its emphasis upon Jehovah’s direct dealings with the prophet—is genuine history becomes tragically superfluous. Thus, for the sake of argument, the possibility of the supernatural must be acknowledged.

Second, it is necessary to presuppose the honesty of all those scholars involving themselves in this argument. It is certainly tempting to conclude with Feinberg that “the root of the difficulty is denial of the miraculous,”3 that the real motive behind the attack upon the historicity of Jonah is simply the present lack of ability to accept the supernatural; and this contention, i...

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