Jonah’s Story, Our Challenge: Reading a Biblical Narrative in Today’s Church and World
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Overview
Jonah’s radical and enigmatic nature calls for deeper exploration and engagement. Given its brevity, it is also an ideal text for multiple readings from a range of perspectives that complement, build upon, or challenge and critique each other. In Jonah’s Story, Our Challenge, each chapter brings a different hermeneutical tool to the text, to demonstrate the wealth of fresh readings and new vistas which can open up, and the rich resources for ministry which can come from these multiple readings.
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- Brings different hermeneutical tools to the text in each chapter.
- Demonstrates the wealth of fresh readings and new vistas which can open up.
- Offers rich resources for ministry which can come from these multiple readings.
- Preface
- 1 Jonah’s Readers: Perspectives on Interpretation
- Jonah probed and tickled
- The author, the text and the reader
- 2 Jonah’s World: Historical and Social-Science Perspectives
- From historical to social-scientific criticism
- The book of Jonah as read by Jerusalemite literati in Persian Yehud
- Social science and the reading of prophetic story
- 3 Jonah’s Art and Reception: The Poetics of a Biblical Narrative
- Narrative criticism and biblical poetics
- The building blocks of narrative
- Narrative criticism and the biblical story as art
- The politics of genre
- Reader-response criticism and the contribution of the reader
- 4 Jonah’s Challenge: Contextual, Liberationist and Postcolonial Interpretation
- Contextual biblical hermeneutics
- Liberationist readings
- Postcolonial biblical interpretation
- 5 Jonah’s Depths: Psychological Biblical Criticism
- Psychoanalytical (Jungian) textual interpretation
- Psychological approaches to the book of Jonah
- 6 Jonah’s ‘Otherkind’: Ecological Readings
- Initial responses to a radical challenge
- Developing ecological-critical approaches to the Bible
- Bibliography
- Notes
- Index of Bible References
- Index of Other Ancient Texts
- Index of Names and Subjects
This thoughtful and far-reaching book emphasises the inherent plasticity of the book of Jonah and reveals its interpretative richness and diversity. Moeller challenges us to re-evaluate our own preconceived ideas of what the book of Jonah is all about and guides us towards a fuller appreciation of the multiple and often mutually contradictory interpretations of the book.
—Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer
This is an extraordinarily wide-ranging study of many possible ways of reading the book of Jonah, based on close knowledge of all the major types of biblical interpretation in use today-from now traditional ‘historical-critical’ approaches all the way to postcolonial and ecological readings. In the process, Karl Moeller introduces the reader into the current scene in biblical studies in an attractive and approachable way. An ideal book for anyone beginning to study the Bible, but with much to teach even experienced readers who may be bewildered by the variety of methods now encountered, and who need a re-orientation. Jonah turns out to be an ideal text to try out various methods. Highly recommended!
—John Barton