Jonah's commission

James Alfred Loader

University of Vienna and Unisa

ABSTRACT

This article analyses repetition and variance in God's two commissions to Jonah. The differences do not only concern the fact that the commissions occur at subsequent points in narrated time and that Jonah first disobeys and afterwards obeys, but also entail intertextual references, subtle idiomatic variance, plusses and minuses, and even a curious assortment of pointing phenomena in the Codex Leningradensis B19a. It is argued that the subtlety constitutes an adept application of the literary device of repetition. The technique is a means by which the narrator activates his options for opening new windows in the following sections on the confrontation of the Ninevites with the word of God. The curious pointing in B19a may merely be due to Samuel ben Jacob's following the pronunciation he was used to instead of the "correct" pronunciation or simple scribal errors, but it may also be that this was his way to draw attention to the shift.

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Correspondence:
Prof. Dr. James Alfred Loader
Faculty of Theology, University of Vienna, Dr.-Karl-Lueger-Ring 1, A-1010 Vienna
Professor Extra-ordinarious at the Department of Old Testament and Ancient Near Eastern Studies
P.O. Box 392, UNISA, 0003, South Africa
E-mail: james-alfred.loader@univie.ac.at