Jonah's Story, Our Challenge

Karl Möller is a freelance writer and speaker with many years’ experience of teaching in university and theological education contexts. He is the author of The Song of Songs: Beautiful Bodies, Erotic Desire and Intoxicating Pleasure (2018), Reading Amos as a Book (2014), and A Prophet in Debate: The Rhetoric of Persuasion in the Book of Amos (2003).

"This thoughtful and far-reaching book emphasises the inherent plasticity of the book of Jonah and reveals its interpretative richness and diversity. Möller 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."

• Preface vii1 Jonah’s Readers: Perspectives on Interpretation 1Jonah probed and tickled 3The author, the text and the reader 52 Jonah’s World: Historical and Social-Science Perspectives 9From historical to social-scientific criticism 9The book of Jonah as read by Jerusalemite literati in Persian Yehud 12Social science and the reading of prophetic story 153 Jonah’s Art and Reception: The Poetics of a Biblical Narrative 21Narrative criticism and biblical poetics 21The building blocks of narrative 22Narrative criticism and the biblical story as art 37The politics of genre 38Reader-response criticism and the contribution of the reader 534 Jonah’s Challenge: Contextual, Liberationist and Postcolonial Interpretation 60Contextual biblical hermeneutics 61Liberationist readings 74Postcolonial biblical interpretation 845 Jonah’s Depths: Psychological Biblical Criticism 102Psychoanalytical (Jungian) textual interpretation 106Psychological approaches to the book of Jonah 1106 Jonah’s ‘Otherkind’: Ecological Readings 138Initial responses to a radical challenge 139Developing ecological-critical approaches to the Bible 143Bibliography 172Notes 191Index of Bible References 197Index of Other Ancient Texts 201Index of Names and Subjects 202