Jonah 2

The prayer in chapter 2 is formally a psalm of thanksgiving, though Jonah is still inside the fish when he prays it. The literary convention is familiar from the Psalter: the petitioner speaks from within the crisis as if the rescue has already occurred, confident the LORD has heard. Jonah prays from the belly of Sheol, from the heart of the seas, with the waters closing over him and the weeds wrapping around his head at the roots of the mountains. The imagery is drawn from the mythological deep — the cosmic ocean beneath the earth, the locked gates of the underworld — and the phrases are assembled from Psalms 18, 31, 42, 69, and 116. The prayer is a pastiche, and the literary sophistication of the pastiche is itself a kind of characterization: this is a prophet who knows the Psalter well enough to compose from it under pressure.

The theological point the psalm makes is the exact opposite of Jonah's opening flight. He fled from the presence of the LORD; the prayer discovers that the presence of the LORD extends to the belly of Sheol, to the bottom of the sea, to the darkest possible interior of the created world. Yet I looked again toward your holy temple — the Jerusalem temple, the dwelling place of the divine presence, three days' journey away — is the line that turns the psalm. Jonah, at the bottom of everything, looks toward Jerusalem and the LORD hears. The flight failed not because the sailor's storm caught him but because the underlying theological premise of the flight — that one could put distance between oneself and the divine presence — was wrong from the start. The fish vomits him out. Dry land appears. The commission is waiting.