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The Sign of Jonah

makes the fish spew him out after three days and three nights. Once rescued, Jonah is forced to preach to Nineveh, warning that in forty days the city will be destroyed. When the people repent and God saves them, Jonah is displeased and prays to God for the second time. He explains that he had earlier avoided pronouncing the prophecy precisely because he feared that God would rescind his decision to overthrow the city. In his anger, Jonah leaves Nineveh, builds himself a booth, and sits in its shade waiting to see what will happen to the city. God makes a shady castor-oil tree (qiqayon) grow up above Jonah, of which he is very glad; but at sunrise God sends a worm to kill the tree, and then causes a hot wind to blow, which angers Jonah and makes him faint and wish to die. "Are you truly angry because of the withering of the tree?" God asks Jonah. "I am truly angry, even unto death" is his answer. The moral follows, contrasting Jonah's concern for the tree, which lived so briefly and which he did not even help to grow, with his attitude toward Nineveh, a great city with thousands of inhabitants which he was angered to see saved. It was not only the moral of the story which made the book of Jonah, despite the image of a stubborn prophet, popular and important in the Jewish tradition from the early Hellenistic-Mishnaic period onwards. Jonah is mentioned as one of many in the prayer"He who answered the prayer of [Jonah], He will answer us," the Hebrew prayer which was the basis of the Christian Ordo Commendationis Animae. 3 Moreover, Jonah is the biblical book which is read and expounded at the Minhah, evening prayer on the Day of Atonement, just before Ne'ila, the closing prayer.4 God's mercifulness is probably the primary reason for this, but it must also be due to the character of Jonah, whom the midrash, while treating as an example of stubbornness, changed from a negative figure evading God's orders into one of the harbingers of the Messiah.5 The homilies on Jonah for the Day of Atonement appear to be very old, and two of them were attributed to Philo.5a Although the four versions of the Midrash Jonah are late compilations from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, it is obvious from the details, which appear earlier in the Gospels, in the Talmud, in the Koran, and in the artistic representations, that the midrashic compilations were established as early as the first century A.D.6 Closest to the Early Christian representations of the Jonah The most popular Old Testament scene depicted by the Early Christian artists was Jonah lying asleep, naked, under a booth covered by a climbing gourd vine, near a sea monster from whose mouth he had emerged. Many other episodes from the dramatic story of Jonah were represented by Early Christian artists, some of which figured in the Age of Spirituality Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and appear as examples in this paper. These are described individually and in relation to similar monuments in the catalogue of the Exhibition.1 Being such a common subject, the cycle of Jonah pictures has been discussed many times, and some successful attempts have been made to trace its origin, but not all the problems have been completely solved. It is hoped that this paper will fit another piece of the puzzle into place.2 It has been assumed that two distinct sources combined to produce the artistic representations of the Jonah cycle. The non-biblical story behind the depicted episodes was mainly of Jewish midrashic origin, while the visual formulae and gestures stemmed from Roman Pagan art.2a According to the Bible, the prophet Jonah sought to evade God's command to preach to the sinful citizens of Nineveh that their end was near (Jonah 1:2, 3:2). He did not wish to call on them to repent, since he knew that if they did mend their ways, they would be forgiven by God, his own prophecy of their destruction would not be fulfilled and he would thus be humiliated by appearing to be a false prophet. The book of Jonah is in many ways an odd phenomenon among the Major and Minor Prophets, as it contains no literary prophecies, whether of wrath or of comfort. It is undoubtedly a late compilation from the early Hellenistic period, a tale suitable for performance in the theatre, rather like the book of Esther. The different stages of the story, constructed as a series of dramatic escapes by Jonah, are easily visualized and inspire the artist's imagination. The scenes depicted start with Jonah's first escape, embarking on a ship sailing from Joppa to Tarshish. When God causes a storm at sea, Jonah is cast, at his own behest, into the stormy waves which then cease their raging. Seeing the miracle of the sea being calmed, the pagan sailors confess their belief in Jonah's God. Jonah does not drown, since God sends a large fish to swallow him up, but his suffering is such in the belly of the fish that he prays to God for deliverance. God