In the American opera, Porgy and Bess, the character Sportin’ Life sings “It ain’t necessarily so.” He is skeptical about some of the events in the Bible, such as Jonah being swallowed by a whale, and, hence, feels that he doesn’t have to take the Word of God seriously. For Jesus’ contemporaries the account of the repentence of the Assyrian Capital of Nineveh at the preaching of Jonah would have provoked even more skeptism. The people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast and all of them, great and small, put on sackcloth. The Assyrians were completely ruthless and violent during the entire period of their dominance of the Middle East. The thought of their repenting would have been ludicrous. But the Jewish people understood something that Sportin’ Life missed — that some parts of the Bible are not history but parable, a story with a point. The Book of Jonah is such a parable. When we read the Bible we must be sensitive to the kind of literature (genre) that the author intended.
MARCH12023
By Church Staff
