A Biblical Text and its Afterlives: The Survival of Jonah in Western Culture

A Biblical Text and its Afterlives: The Survival of Jonah in Western Culture. By Yvonne Sherwood. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xii + 321 pp. $65.00 (cloth); $ 24.95 (paper).

This agile exploration of the reception history of Jonah probes a variety of responses to the biblical book in Christian, Jewish, and secular traditions from the first centuries A.D. to the present. Thoroughly postmodern in her approach, Sherwood brings classical and "low" culture into an eclectic conversation, refusing to privilege academic discourse and dominant church readings over other modes of engagement with the biblical text. Sherwood polemicizes against mainstream readings that try to force the outrageous, carnivalesque story of Jonah into the constraints of normalcy-"normalcy," for Sherwood, connoting self-righteous pietism that attempts to legitimize colonialist ideologies of Western, Christian, and high-culture supremacy.

Chapter 1, "The Mainstream," examines theological appropriations of Jonah in the New Testament and onward (Augustine, Calvin, Pusey). Sherwood rejects traditional anti-Semitic readings of Jonah as carnal Jew, clown, and primitive nationalist, and eviscerates the favorite church view of the book as a proto-Christian universalist tract. Chapter 2, "Backwaters and Underbellies," foregrounds peripheral and eccentric readings of Jonah from Jewish studies and cultural studies, exploring a variety of modes of engagement including Jewish midrash, contemporary Chilean poetry, a George Orwell essay, Melville's Moby Dick, and American television. In Chapter 3, "Regurgitating Jonah," Sherwood offers her own close reading of the Hebrew text under the influence of deconstructionism, seeing Jonah as a self-conscious comedy of resistance that situates its implied audience uncomfortably close to the periphery of biblical tradition. While supple and engaging, her reading is not, to my mind, fundamentally different from other literary readings that appreciate the puns and parodic qualities of the story of Jonah. What may be most novel to some readers is the way Sherwood speaks about the text as 11 generat[ing] surpluses, sediments, residues" (p. 269), a narrative "at odds with itself' (p. 273) in which words "split, mutate, and recombine" (p. 285), and so on.

Sherwood strives for neither comprehensiveness nor depth, offering instead a tantalizing sampling of interpretive possibilities in hopes that these alternative readings will destabilize and render more permeable the boundaries guarded by Christian interpretation and the discipline of biblical studies. Her dense, tangled metaphors and mercurial cultural references do not always make for easy reading (typical example: "a red-faced Jonahas-Shylock caricature scuttling off the critical stage into obsolescence," p. 98, a phrase that surely mixes metaphors in four different ways). Sherwood's style misfires occasionally with an unnecessary pun or strained pop-culture analogy, but for the reader with stamina, there are fresh insights on almost every page. The book is best suited for scholars, but the well-read layperson who has a tolerance for literary-critical jargon ("episteme," "alterity," "metaleptic") also will find much here worthy of reflection. Any preacher or professor who has despaired of thinking an original thought about an all-too-familiar biblical text will find Sherwood's hermeneutics exhilarating.

Sherwood represents mainstream Christian tradition and conventional biblical studies as generally monologic, puerile, and deadening; potential strengths of orthodox theological readings do not interest her. Hers is a scholarly temperament that thrills to hermeneutical discomfort and the multiplying of open-ended questions. Sherwood is anxious to show that biblical studies need not remain static and unimaginative, and here she has succeeded. Most thought-provoking for the Anglican believer may be Sherwood's call to acknowledge widely divergent readings of Scripture and allow them to destabilize one another in a shifting, disordered dialectic.

My hope is that Christian theologians will not simply dismiss her postmodern project but will rise to the challenge, listening more intently to responses to God's Word that are whispered, sung, snarled, and laughed by a cacophony of unfamiliar voices ancient and contemporary. Our edgy, uncertain world is in desperate need of nuanced preaching and teaching that acknowledge its complex spiritual disjunctures, its passionate and confused embodiment, and its deeply complicated joys and fears. Unimaginative hermeneutics and reactionary domestication of wild biblical texts such as Jonah will not suffice. Books like Sherwood's show us that new interpretive horizons continue to unfold, inviting not only more sophisticated reading strategies but also newly creative, even transgressive proclamations of the Gospel.

CAROLYN J. SHARP

Yale Divinity School

New Haven, Connecticut

Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Spring 2002
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