Глава 2

1–11. The absorption of the prophet Jonah by a whale and Jonah's prayer. John 2:1. And the Lord commanded the great whale to swallow Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of the whale for three days and three nights. The fact of the three-day stay of the prophet Jonah in the belly of the whale is the focal point of his book, around which all the rest of its content is grouped, at the same time, by its nature, this event seems to go beyond any limits of faith. Meeting with bewilderment or furious attacks, it was subject to various kinds of reinterpretations and distortions almost more than any other place in the Bible. In view of the above, we will dwell on it in more detail. The main efforts of criticism are aimed at presenting the impossibility of the fact of Jonah's three-day stay in the belly of the whale as a truly historical event and to prove that it must be considered fiction. In order to achieve the latter goal, they try to present the entire book as a fictional work with one or another moralizing purpose and equate it in literary form either to a parable, or to an apologist (fable), or to an allegory. Without dwelling on the question of how much the book of the prophet Jonah can be identified with the forms of creative fiction mentioned above and found in the Bible (for this, see the introduction), we will point out first of all that calling the story of Jonah’s three-day stay in the belly of a whale fiction does not mean resolving the issue. It must also be said where this fiction came from. After all, fiction does not appear out of nothing; the richest fantasy still takes its images and pictures, or better to say elements of fiction, from reality; it is impossible to invent something that in reality does not occur in any form or similarity. This position is difficult to dispute, which is why the theory of pure fiction has recently met with few defenders. Another view begins to prevail, according to which it is considered necessary to put the contents of the book in one or another relation to reality, and so, making this concession, the story of the book of Jonah is declared a legend or myth. In this case, it is assumed that it is based on something truly historical, some event or phenomenon, but it, having been preserved for a long time in oral tradition, is embellished and distorted by popular imagination to such an extent that one can only guess with difficulty about this historical basis of the legend. In order not to be unfounded, defenders of this view make attempts to free the content of the book of Jonah from later layers of fantasy and find its historical grain, and some point out the historical basis in the life of the prophet Jonah or in Jewish history in general, while others even turn to pagan legends for this. According to the opinion expressed by Jewish rabbis and then Protestant exegetes, once the book of Jonah is stripped of its miraculous details, the true story appears before us. Jonah, indeed, they say, was sent to preach to Nineveh, but disobeyed God and sailed to Tarshish; During the voyage, a storm actually happened, but no miracle happened, the ship simply crashed, and Jonah unexpectedly survived. This shipwreck and salvation was understood by Jonah as a warning from above, and he headed to Nineveh. In order to present the very method of rescuing Jonah more closely reminiscent of the story of his book, they say that Jonah was saved by another ship, which was called “Whale”, on it (inside it) Jonah stayed for three days, and then was put ashore and went to Nineveh, or that after a shipwreck Jonah grabbed hold of a dead whale that was accidentally floating on the surface and they were then thrown ashore by the waves. Other interpreters clear the book of Jonah of miraculous elements by attributing them to the realm of dreams: Jonah, they say, while sailing to Tarshish on a ship, fell asleep (Jon. 1:5), a storm occurred. Just as often in a dream we react to the impressions of the reality around us, so Jonah, from the noise of the waves and pitching, began to see a storm in his dreams too. Feeling guilty before God, he sees in a dream that they are looking for the culprit of the storm, they cast lots, the lot falls on him, he is thrown into the water, and now a terrible monster seems to swallow him, but to his surprise, he lives in this monster and in a desperate cry prays to God for salvation, then the monster throws him ashore. Then Jonah wakes up. The storm was still raging at sea, there was confusion on the ship; This reinforced the impression of Jonah's nightmare, and he repented of his disobedience to God. In addition to these, there are other attempts to simply and naturally present the plot of the book of Jonah. We do not need to cite them all; we can limit ourselves to the two presented as the most successful. What is their value as experiments in explaining the book of Jonah? Undoubtedly, they can captivate with their simplicity and naturalness, but this is not enough: a simplified presentation of a fact is often its distortion. It is necessary that these simplifications have some basis for themselves, other than a simple reluctance to be miraculous. Meanwhile, defenders of the legendary nature of the book of Jonah, rejecting it as a historical witness, do not indicate any other grounds to support their words. Thus, their experiences in presenting the matter in their own way are mere assumptions that they like. Many such assumptions have already been made, they can be made and as many more as desired, but they cannot bring us closer to the truth, which is one. The unsatisfactoriness of attempts to find a historical basis for the book of the prophet Jonah in the circumstances of his life forces many interpreters to even turn to pagan mythology for sources for it. In this case, they most often point to the Greek myth of Hercules and Hesion, the Phoenician about Perseus and Andromeda, and the Babylonian about Oannes. They say that the book of the prophet Jonah, especially the story of a three-day stay in the belly of a whale, is a reworking of one or another of them. However, if we compare the contents of the book. Jonas with the mentioned myths, we will find very little in common between them. In particular, in the myth of Hercules, as it is transmitted by the most ancient pagan writers: Apollodorus, Ovid, Diodorus Siculus, Homer (Iliad, XX)) there are no details that could provide the basis for the story of the absorption of Jonah by a whale: the struggle of Hercules with the sea monster seems to be external, a duel; then, Jews could become acquainted with Greek myths no earlier than the time of Alexander the Great, and the book of the prophet Jonah more than a hundred years before that time had already entered the canon of sacred books. However, the most important objection to all attempts to indicate for the book. Jonah's mythological basis lies not in the fact that there is little similarity between the indicated myths and the content of the book of the prophet Jonah, and not in the fact that some of the indicated myths turn out to be later in comparison with the book. ions of origin, and it is morally impossible for a Jewish writer to use pagan myths to transform them into a legend about the prophet of Jehovah. Although the Jews were fascinated by paganism, it was a fascination with the forms of pagan cult and easy pagan morals, but they never forgot the ideological opposition between pagan polytheism and faith in the One God. In particular, the writer of the book of the prophet Jonah firmly believes in one God, the Creator of the universe (Jon.1:9), and considers pagan gods to be vain and false (Jon.2:9); How could such a person, with ideas and feelings contrary to everything pagan, take a story about pagan gods and rework it for the purposes of his religion? After attempts to indicate sources for the story of Jonah’s three-day stay in the belly of a whale in folk tradition, which embellished a supposedly simple event with miraculous details, and in pagan mythology, turned out to be untenable; we are confirmed in the idea that it must be considered a narrative about a real event and we will try, as far as possible, to understand it for ourselves. “And the Lord commanded the great whale to swallow Jonah.” The sea animal that God commanded to devour Jonah is called in the Hebrew text dag gadol, which means large fish. To designate marine mammals, not fish, the Hebrew language uses the words: levijatan, tanijm (Job 40:20, 7:12; Ps. 103:26; Gen. 1:21), but the word dag is not used, so in this case one cannot think that Jonah was swallowed up by a whale. Thus, the objection that the miracle of swallowing Jonah is unnatural, since the whale has a very narrow throat, falls away. As for the Greek and Slavic translations, they use the word κητος, whale, because then the concept of a certain type of mammalian animal was not connected with this word, and generally meant a sea monster, including a huge sea fish (“miracle fish-whale”). The text does not indicate what kind of fish swallowed Jonah, but one might think that it was a shark. A breed of shark called the squalus carcharias, a man-eating shark found in the Mediterranean Sea, reaches 32 feet in length and can easily swallow a person whole. “And Jonah was in the belly of the whale three days and three nights.” The expression “three days and three nights” in biblical language does not necessarily mean three full days (1 Samuel 30:12–13: Esther 4:16, 5:1), but can mean a period of time of even 26–28 hours (Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34), if it borders on the end of the first and the beginning of the third day. However, if we limit the time the prophet Jonah spent in the belly of the whale to 26–28 hours, then even in this form this fact continues to remain a miracle, that is, an event inexplicable by the action of natural forces alone in the usual manner. Therefore, the Savior calls this event a “sign”, similar to the miracle of His resurrection after three days of death, and Jonah’s stay in the belly of the whale is compared with the Savior’s stay in the tomb in hell. This means that Jonah was, as it were, buried in the belly of the whale; the natural conditions in which he found himself inevitably had to lead him to death, and if he remained alive, it was only due to the extraordinary action of the Omnipotence of God. “Where God wants, the order of nature is overcome.” In what way God preserved the life of Jonah in the belly of the whale, we are not given to know; We cannot understand how God acts in the miraculous, but the human mind does not completely abandon attempts to imagine the possibility of this or that miracle, to find analogues for it in natural phenomena, and thus find support for faith in our knowledge. Analogies that explain the miracle of being in the belly of a whale can be the return to life of a person after being under water, cases of imaginary death (lethargy) and, finally, the nine-month stay of a baby in the womb. From the above facts it follows, first of all, that death may not occur as soon as a person is deprived of air flow. True, the delay of death for a person under water happens for a short period of time, but the important thing is that such a phenomenon no longer becomes absolutely impossible; and what is possible under natural conditions, at least for a moment, is easy to imagine continuing through the action of God’s Omnipotence for a longer time. Such an action will no longer be unnatural for us, but only supernatural; the laws of nature are not violated by it, and God uses them for his providential purposes. Cases of lethargy, when a supposedly dead person is buried in the ground and continues to live for some time, indicate that a person with reduced vital activity can do without a normal amount of air for a relatively long time. If this is possible in a natural order, then it is all the easier to imagine such an event in a miraculous order. Finally, the natural laws that preserve the life of a baby in the womb of its mother are essentially no less incomprehensible and miraculous to us than Jonah’s stay in the belly of a whale. If the Creator created such laws according to which the life of one creature is preserved in the belly of another for entire months, then is it not in His power to direct and combine these laws so that the life of a person in the belly of a fish is preserved for three days? John 2:2. And Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the whale John 2:3. and said: I cried to the Lord in my affliction, and He heard me; from the belly of hell I cried, and You heard my voice. John 2:4. You cast me into the depths, into the heart of the sea, and the streams surrounded me, all Your waters and Your waves passed over me. John 2:5. And I said: I have been cast away from Thy eyes, yet I will again see Thy holy church. John 2:6. The waters embraced me to my soul, the abyss shut me in; my head was entwined with sea grass John 2:7. I descended to the base of the mountains, the earth blocked me with its barriers forever; but You, Lord my God, will bring my soul out of hell John 2:8. When my soul fainted within me, I remembered the Lord, and my prayer reached You, Your holy church. John 2:9. Those who worship vain and false gods have forsaken their Merciful, John 2:10. and with the voice of praise I will offer You a sacrifice; I will fulfill what I promised: salvation belongs to the Lord! The prayer of the prophet Jonah from the belly of the whale gives many reasons for objecting to its authenticity. They pay attention to the fact that it is similar in parts to various passages from the psalms, and from this they conclude about its compilative nature and on this basis attribute its origin to the time of the decline of Jewish writing. Indeed, the similarity of Jonah's prayer with the psalms is undeniable: the third verse is reminiscent of Ps. 17:7 and Ps. 119:1 ; fourth verse – Ps.68:3; fifth verse – Ps.30:23; sixth verse – Ps.17:5-6 and Ps.68:15, 16; seventh verse – Ps.17:16, 17; the eighth verse is Ps.142:4-7. But can it be concluded from this that Jonah’s prayer is a later compilation? Isn’t it more natural to think that Jonah in the belly of the whale expressed his feelings with familiar images of the psalms, for the state he was experiencing would not allow him to indulge in creativity. He took from the psalms not phrases and words, as a compiler would have done, but images and pictures, and ones that suited his state even more than the state of the psalmist (such are all pictures of water dangers). Then they point out that Jonah’s prayer, in its content, does not seem to fit the state of mind experienced by Jonah; Its main motive is thanksgiving for salvation, while Jonah from the belly of the whale should not have given thanks, but prayed to God for deliverance from mortal danger. This is explained by the fact that it was so unsuccessfully compiled by some later person. But, besides thanksgiving, Jonah’s prayer also contains an image of water dangers (4, 6–7 vv.) and a cry to God for salvation in the distress he is experiencing (3, 5, 8 vv.), in a word, everything that is considered necessary for prayer in order to be natural in the mouth of Jonah; only all this is depicted in prayer as moments that have already passed. The prophet experienced the greatest thrill of his life when, thrown into the sea, he sank more and more into the abyss, descended to the base of the mountains, as if into hell, felt the sea grass wrapping around his head, and the water began to reach, as it were, his soul, and then he prayed to God for deliverance from death. When he was swallowed by a fish and he continued to live in it according to the action of the omnipotence of God, he began to feel himself already saved by God; where and how God kept him, he most likely did not know then, but only felt that he was alive, saved from death, hoped that God would deliver him to the end (“I will see Your holy church again”), and therefore in prayer he already thanked Him. Thus, we see that Jonah’s prayer, in its content, was quite suitable for the state of mind experienced by the prophet Jonah. Its main subject is the depiction of Jonah’s stay in the cramped state of grief and his salvation. This subject is developed in prayer in strict sequence. First, it correctly alternates between pictures of the prophet’s external dangers (4, 6, 7) and a description of the state of mind he experienced at that time (3, 5, 7–8), and it ends (9–10) with thanksgiving for the salvation that the prophet felt in the belly of the whale. It is divided into four stanzas of 2 art. in each and is constructed according to the laws of poetic parallelism, and the verses that describe the external position of the prophet are written in synthetic parallelism, and those depicting his mental state are written in antithetical parallelism. From this it is clear that Jonah’s prayer, in its logical structure and literary form, represents a harmonious and organically coherent whole. With its pictorial language, as a poetic work, it differs significantly from the rest of the book, which contains a historical story. John 2:11. And the Lord spoke to the whale, and it cast Jonah onto dry land. The place where Jonah was thrown out is not indicated in the text, but due to the connection of this verse with the beginning of Chapter III, the closest thing to understand here is the Palestinian coast of the Mediterranean Sea. You might be interested in: