Since this is what I'm up to, I thought I'd share it with you. Below is my translation of the Book of Jonah out of classical Hebrew into English. You might notice a few things about it: First, it hasn't been smoothed out. I tried to avoid idiom even when it communicated vividly. English is a very idiomatic language and sometimes we carry baggage into our idioms that I didn't want to color the text. Second, you may find certain phrases repetitive. The ancient Hebrews valued repetition as a narrative device in much the same way that we avoid it. This may most easily be attributed to much of the work's early life in oral tradition. The less unnecessary variety the easier it was to remember exactly. Third, some theological fun may jump out at you. The ancient Hebrews didn't have the same compunction that we have with assigning evildoing to God.

Then there are a few things that may not seem as obvious from a surface reading. This is where so many Christians have gotten into so many unnecessary arguments with each other. You see, as wonderful of a thing as the Protestant Reformation may have been in many ways, in others it was devastation to Christian scholarship. The notion that in an increasingly literate world all Christians should read their Bibles is a very good thing. But the idea that each reader is equally qualified to interpret Scripture is logical nonsense. The example here is that the Book of Jonah was never intended to be read as a literal historical account of something happening to an actual human named Jonah. Jonah was a very common name and one that here stands as an archetype for a common Hebrew man. It was a fable written with a specific theological message much in the same way that we use the story of the Pied Piper for a specific moral message in Western society. This is where I derive my belief that crediting each reader of Scripture with equal ability to interpret doesn't make very good sense. Without the kind of study and background that provides information such as Tarshish not being a strictly real place but rather being a stand-in for what we call "Spain" symbolizing the far end of the Earth, a reader might pick up the Bible and assume that it's actually a story about a guy sailing for Spain.

Rather, the Book of Jonah is a theological parable written in response to the increasingly xenophobic theology becoming popular in Israel/Judah after the return from the exile. Such theology is typified in Ezra/Nehemiah where priests instruct Hebrew men to divorce their foreign wives in a "cleansing" process. The Book of Jonah provides some of the richest and deepest examples of Scripture dialoguing with Scripture and refuting the simplistic notion that the Bible contains no internal tension or disagreement. Our understanding of God has evolved over time as we have sought him, as he has revealed himself to us, and as we have seen him in each other. This evolving understanding does not begin after the time of Christ, but rather is evident in Scripture from the very beginning of the book.

So enough blah blah blah-ing. Here's Jonah:

And so it was: the word of the Lord to Jonah son of Amittai saying: Get up and go to the great city Nineveh and cry against it because their evil has gone up in my face. And Jonah got up to go to Tarshish from in front of the Lord and he went down to Yafo and he found a ship going to Tarshish and he hired it and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish away from in front of the Lord. And the Lord sent out a great wind to the sea, and so it was that there was a great windstorm on the sea, and the ship thought it would be broken. And the sailors were afraid and every man cried out to his god and threw the vessels from the ship into the sea to make it lighter from them, but Jonah went down to the hold of the ship, and he lay down, and he slept deeply. And the chief of the sailors came to him and said to him, “Why are you in a deep sleep? Come cry out to your gods and maybe the gods will think on us and not let us perish.” And the men said to their companions, “Come and let the lots fall and let them make known whose is this evil on us.” And the lots fell and they fell on Jonah. And they said to him, “Tell us now on whose account is this evil on us? What is your occupation? And where are you from? And what is your country? And from what people are you?” And he said to them, “I am a Hebrew and I fear the Lord, the God of the heavens, who made the sea and the dry land.” And the sailors were afraid with a great fear and they said to him, “Why have you done this?” Because the sailors knew he fled from the presence of the Lord because he told them he had done this. And they said to him, “What will we do to you so the sea will be calm to us?” because the sea continued to rage. And he said to them, “Take me up and throw me into the sea and the sea will be calm to you, because I know that it is because of me that this great raging is on you.” But the sailors rowed hard to turn around, but they could not because the sea raged against them. And they cried out to the Lord and they said, “We beg you, Lord, do not let us perish for this man’s life and do not put on us innocent blood, for you Lord have done what pleased you.” And they took up Jonah and threw him to the sea ceased its raging. And the sailors had a great fear of the Lord and they made sacrifices to Lord and made vows. And the Lord prepared a great fish to swallow Jonah. And so it was that Jonah was in the stomach of the fish three days and three nights. And Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the stomach of the fish. And he said, “I cried because of my hardship to the Lord, and he heard me, from the midst of hell I cried and you heard my voice. And you threw me into the deep, in to the midst of the seas, and the floods surrounded me, and your waves passed over me. And I said that I was banished from in front of your eyes, yet I will look again towards your holy temple. The waters engulfed my soul, the depths surrounded me, the weeds were around my head. I went down to the bottoms of the mountains, the earth with its bar of the gate was around me forever, and you brought my life up from the pit, Lord my God. When my soul fainted I remembered the Lord, and my prayer went before you in your holy temple. Those that observe the emptiness of lying let go of their lovingkindness. And I with a voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you. That which I vowed I will pay. Salvation is the Lord’s.” And the Lord spoke to the fish and it vomited Jonah on the dry land. And so it was that the word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, and it said: “Arise to Nineveh the great city, and call out to it the proclamation that I give to you.” And Jonah arose and went to Nineveh according to the word of the Lord. And Nineveh was a great city to the Lord of three days’ journey. And Jonah began to go up to the city one day’s journey and he cried out and said, “Forty days more and Nineveh will be overturned.” And the people of Nineveh believed in God and proclaimed a fast and put on sackcloth from the greatest to the least. And from the king of Nineveh word came, and he got up from his throne and he put away his robe, and he covered himself with sackcloth, and he sat in ashes. And he called out and said in Nineveh by decree of the king and his great men, saying, “Men and beasts, herds and flocks will not taste anything. They will not eat food and they will not drink water. And you will cover with sackcloth men and beasts and you will cry out to God, and each man will turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands. Who knows? God may turn and repent and turn from his furious anger and we may not perish.” And God saw their deeds because they turned from their evil ways, and God repented of the evil that he said, and he did not do it. And it displeased Jonah greatly and he was angry. And he prayed to the Lord, and said, “I pray, Lord, was not my word this when I was in my land? And so I fled then to Tarshish because I knew that you are a God of grace, slow to anger, full of lovingkindness and you repent of evil. And now, Lord, please take my life from me, because it is better for me to die than to live.” And the Lord said, “Are you very angry?” And Jonah went from the city and sat on the east of the city, and there he made a booth, and he sat under it in the shadow until he could see what would happen in the city. And the Lord God prepared a plant to come up over Jonah to be a shadow over his head to save him from his sadness. And Jonah was very happy from the plant. Then God prepared a worm when the dawn rose on the next day and it struck the plant and it withered. And so it was that when the sun did arise, God prepared a harsh east wind and the sun was hot on Jonah’s head and he fainted and sought his soul to die, and he said, “Better than to live is to die.” And God said to Jonah, “Are you very angry about the plant?” And he said, “I am very angry even to death.” And the Lord said, “You had compassion on the plant for which you didn’t work and didn’t make it grow. It came up in a night and perished in a night. And I should not have compassion on Nineveh the great city where there are more than six twenties of thousands of men who don’t know their right hand from their left hand, and also as many cattle?”

Good stuff, right? Next up is Malachi.