BURNING WITH GOD’S ANGER:

A PHENOMENOLOGICAL EXEGESIS OF JONAH

“This [cosmos], the same of all, no god nor man did create, but it ever was and is and will be: ever-living fire, kindling in measures and being quenched in measures.”[1]

-Heraclitus

Who knows what Anger is or where it comes from?[2] Who knows the fierce anguish that Rage evokes? Who knows what Anger feels like? Anger scorches each letter of the book of Jonah. Its heat radiates throughout the text as a fire raging across the earth. Its victims, however, are not the ‘wicked’ Ninevites. Rather, the text flickers with the tantalizing conclusion that YHWH and Jonah are welded together in an experience of fierce anger. Jonah kindles the possibility that the text is not so much attempting to explain the nature of the divine/humanity or tell a tale of absurdity as it is bursting forth a phenomenological examination of Anger itself. This text shows more than it says about the phenomenon of anger by cleverly painting a blended image of human Rage and divine Anger. Readers of this text are invited into the experience of Anger, but are not met with the cooling waters of grace and mercy. Rather, readers feel the all-out existential despair that anger consumes and leave the text with nothing but the question of an angry God. The only place to begin in this text, however, is with the beginning of Anger. And, in this katabasis into the hell of Rage, we begin in the same spirit as the questioning Ninevites asking, “Who knows?”[3]

JOKING WITH JONAH: A HERMENEUTIC

A few key pieces of insight will act as a guide for our descent into the belly of Anger alongside Jonah and YHWH. First, one must call into question the ability to understand who composed the text we now call ‘Jonah’. Assuming a later date of composition leads readers to wonder why this text exists in the first place. Given that the author(s) of this text knew that Nineveh fell in 612 BCE, why would an individual or group decide to fabricate a tale in which a supposed ‘wicked’ city did not meet divine-commissioned destruction?[4] Adopting a psychoanalytic approach can help expose possible intentions and ramifications of the composition of such a text. Jacques Lacan once wrote:

the frivolity of jokes–the specific joy of which, as Freud shows us on the basis of his technique, stems from the fact that they make us share in the dominance of the signifier over the significations of our fate that are the hardest to bear.[5]

Jokes, in other words, have the innate ability to expose features of the unconscious and even contain certain coping capabilities (i.e. the ability to deliver the individual over to a degree of jouissance). If one views the book of Jonah as a joke, then, one can also conclude that perhaps the text attempts to expose a feature of the author’s experience that was ‘hardest to bear’. Additionally, Lacan mentions how the “unconscious is the Other’s discourse in which the subject receives [their] own forgotten message in the inverted form suitable for promises.”[6] In this context, Lacan’s framework also offers a potential explanation as to why this joke lingered–and still lingers–among its audiences. Perhaps, the author(s) of the joke of Jonah unconsciously composed the tale to make sense of some traumatic scorch mark and in so doing inscribed a ‘forgotten message’ that held significance for some community at some point in antiquity. As readers of this text, then, we potentially have access to the unconscious register of its author(s) and can extract the ‘forgotten message’ from the joke of Jonah. Yet, what are the exact contents of this unconscious message?

Based on the content of the book as a whole, one cannot help but notice the fiery language and all-consuming drive towards connoting forms of anger/rage. The text deals with an angry sea, a raging God, and a scathingly “suicidal” human being. Might this rage be the very dynamic that the joke of Jonah attempts to unconsciously reveal? By engulfing the overtly humorous saga of Jonah with anger/rage, this text reveals how its authors attempted to douse the flames of their own burning anger.

WATER THAT DOES NOT QUENCH

The opening verses of Jonah depict a sea that grows in its own rage just as YHWH burns with anger. As early as 1:2, readers discover a gesture towards the impending rage of YHWH by seeing how the wickedness of the Ninevites had ‘come up’(עָלְתָה) before YHWH. While עָלְתָה certainly carries the more explicitly directional connotation of something (i.e. the wickedness of the Ninevites) coming literally in front of YHWH, the word also carries the rhetorical invocation of images associated with burnt offerings (Gen.8:20, 22:2; 1 Sam.7:9; Lv.1:4; et al).[7] Rather than a pleasing, aromatic burnt offering that meets the nose of YHWH, however, it is the wickedness of the Ninevites that we smell. Resultantly, this single gesture towards a burnt offering ironically–and let us not forget that irony is often a form of humor–sets the stage for a ravenous display of divine rage. Yet, YHWH does not throw down a cloud of smoke, a pillar of fire, or lightning as one might expect from a god burning with anger. Rather, readers meet this deity’s anger amidst the (whirl)wind and the sea. In fact, the wind and the sea are the very kindling that perpetuate and embody the anger of YHWH. While it is YHWH behind the roaring sea and storm, it is the sea itself that receives the (burnt) offerings of the mariners (1:5, 11). Yet, the sea still rages. The humorous irony of the waters of the sea failing to quench the hot anger of YHWH becomes so striking that readers cannot help but laugh at the predicament. YHWH thirsts for a burnt offering while the sailors attempt to extinguish the sea with a watery sacrifice. How can one not laugh at their absurd and absolutely confounding paradox of a situation?

The sea rages on (1:11). Two words characterize the anger of the sea: סֹעֵר ׃ (1:11,13) and סֹעֵר.)1:15( זַּעְפּ carries the notion of literal ­storminess, but can also describe various states of being ‘perturbed’ in heart (2 King 6:11) or ‘storm-tossed’ (Is 54:11). More interestingly, however, סֹעֵר also contains a potential relation to an Arabic word (سَعَرَ) that can mean to “kindle fire, excite, [or] inflame.”[8] While the relation to this Arabic word might merely be a philological leap, even the potential relation between the Hebrew and the Arabic words displays the sentiment behind סֹעֵר. The sea is not just stormy; the sea rages with hot anger and burns with a torrential flame. The second word describing the sea’s character (זַּעְפּ) much more directly relates to the way the sea feels in the opening section of Jonah. Wilhelm Gesenius notes, “the original idea [of זַּעְפּ] is either that of foaming…or else that of burning.”[9] The figurative indication readers experience in 1:15 is that just as anger foams up from within the self and just as one burns with rage, so does this raging (זַּעְפּ) sea. Ironically, the water expresses its rage through unexpected forms of speech. The waters of the sea are not literally hot flames engulfing the mariners. Yet, the Hebrew lends itself towards such an absurd image. Readers laugh at the paradoxically enraged sea and the mariner’s predicament. The foaming of the sea does not quench its anger (nor YHWH’s for that matter), but expresses that very rage. The sea burns with a ferocious anger that does not relent until it receives its burnt offering: a human sacrifice. While the sea might cease from its raging (1:15), the mariners’ offering does not seem to quench the burning anger of YHWH.

In a stunning juxtaposition to the creation myth in the opening verses of Genesis in which the deity speaks the cosmos into existence out of the sea, the Jonah saga speaks of the deity’s rage through the sea’s silence (יִשְׁתֹּק). The cessation of the sea’s foaming anger in 1:15 does not properly parallel a cooling of YHWH’s anger as one might expect.[10] Rather, the momentary textual silence only allows the reader one final breath before they are swiftly and greedily consumed (see בְלֹעַ as it appears in 1:17) by the full measure of YHWH’s anger.[11] While the mariners might have escaped the anger of YHWH, their sacrifice does not placate the deity’s anger. In fact, their offering–the sacrifice of Jonah–provides the exact occasion for the overt display of YHWH’s rage in the form of an absurd deus ex machina (a big fish that swallows Jonah). This boiling point in the text reads as pure irony and humor. Behind the humor, however, lurks the uneasy realization that YHWH is not laughing. This god, instead, still burns with anger.

THE FORGOTTEN MESSAGE ‘GOES UP’ TO NINEVEH

Jonah sits in the belly of YHWH’s anger for three days and three nights. This god’s anger is like entering into death (2:2). This god’s anger is like discovering the heart of the foaming sea (2:3). This god’s anger is like being surrounded and trapped by chaosmic nothingness and being reduced to ashes (2:5).[12] As sojourners of the text, we join Jonah in his katabasis into the underworld of YHWH’s anger. We prostrate ourselves before the anger of YHWH as we prepare for the prophetic proclamation against Nineveh. Having experienced the decimation that is YHWH’s anger, we are vomited out of Jonah’s prayer before the Ninevites and are told to deliver a message. As vessels carrying this deity’s rage, we go forth to Nineveh and prepare to cry out from our anger. Yet, what is this message we carry?

Phyllis Trible calls attention to the inherent ambiguity contained in 3:2 regarding the ‘message’ Jonah will bring to Nineveh. Trible writes, “the lack of a specific message in the word leaves Jonah and the reader to ponder what his commission is like unto or different from the first.”[13] Readers, instead, are given only a trace of what this message could have been through Jonah’s enigmatic, five-word prophecy appearing in 3:4.[14] Jonah’s terseness further obfuscates the reader’s ability to understand YHWH intended message. To complicate the matter, Trible also explains:

Although the NIV and NRSV properly translate the verbal form nehpāket as passive, “will be overturned” or “overthrown,” they might also have properly translated it as reflective: “overturns itself” or “overthrows itself.” Grammatical ambiguity allows Nineveh to be both the recipient and the agent of a word whose meaning is itself ambiguous. Placed on the lips of Jonah, the verb and the verbal form produce exquisite ironies.”[15]

Perhaps, however, this double-ambiguity and irony bubble up within the text for the purpose of merely confounding the reader and leading to further consternation in an already disconcerting tale. Perhaps, this ambiguous message bears the trace of the Lacanian ‘forgotten message’. While the authors refuse to give readers access to this message, the text still contains the trace of the message itself. In this light, the humor of the double-ambiguity and clever irony reveals what the author attempts to unconsciously conceal. Still, one must ask of this increasingly perplexing and laughable saga, “What is this forgotten message encoded within the text?”

The Ninevites’ response to Jonah’s prophetic announcement potentially offers a path into this mystery. Their response (i.e. a national fast described in 3:5, the king of Nineveh putting on sackcloth and ashes outlined in 3:6, and–most absurd of all–all human beings and animals crying out to the deity in 3:8) seems to indicate that Jonah’s message struck a chord of fear and/or impending doom. Yet, the truest response that illuminates the path towards discerning Jonah’s true message emerges in 3:9. The Ninevites ask here, “Who knows? God may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish” (3:9). If one trusts the narrator, they are led to believe­­–from this verse–that Jonah’s proclamation in some way disclosed the fact that the deity is enraged (and has set their mind on volcanic destruction). The Hebrew phrase used to describe YHWH’s ‘fierce anger’ (אַפּ חֲרוֹן) in 3:9 displays just how visceral, bodily, and explosive the deity’s rage has/had become. As Ernst Jenni and Claus Westermann explain, “[אַפּ] indicates ‘anger,’ with an easily understood development of meaning from ‘nose’ to the gesture of ‘snorting’ (in anger), which manifests itself in this body part.”[16] In other words, the Hebrew phrase reveals that YHWH’s anger has moved beyond the abstract/poetic register and now fumes from the deity’s nose. Red-faced and enraged, YHWH no longer holds back in such a way that even the Ninevites can sense this god’s heat. Interestingly, the Akkadian form of the word ‘nose’ (appu) “is also a term for the highest point or the peak of an object.”[17] Textually speaking, then, perhaps 3:9 reveals the embodied height or peak of YHWH’s rage.

Jonah’s message ‘goes up’ to Nineveh and YHWH as a burnt offering. It meets their noses and they repent. The Ninevites turn from their wickedness just as YHWH turns from his [sic] impending act of wickedness (רָעָה). We simultaneously discover the peak of YHWH’s anger and the pinnacle of the text’s irony/humor in 3:9–10. In an incredible display of role reversal, the Ninevites and YHWH act as co-conspirators. They both turn from their wicked ways and join hands in relenting. A reader of this text would have recoiled at this ridiculous absurdity. Flickering in the flames of this joke, however, rests the sea-sickening notion that–perhaps–YHWH has more in common with the Ninevites than with the established–yet neglected–protagonist, Jonah.

FROM THE NOSE TO THE THROAT: DIVINE AND HUMAN ANGER

Thus far, Jonah’s katabasis has taken readers into the depths of divine rage. The final verses of the joke of Jonah, however, dramatically shift attention away from the divine and onto/into the human incarnation of anger. Jonah’s rage (יִּחַר in 4:1) parallels YHWH’s in its ferocity and bodily expression. Brown, Driver, and Briggs relate Jonah’s anger to an Arabic word (harwatun) that involves a “burning sensation…in [one’s] throat.” [18] The Pit in Jonah’s throat burns his countenance with a scathing sensation of pain that cannot be extinguished. Jonah does not enjoy YHWH’s siding with the Ninevites. Jonah even goes so far as to proclaim YHWH’s turning away from the act of evil as an evil in itself (as indicated in the use of יֵּרַע in 4:1). From the start of the close, Jonah’s position resounds: he is enraged at YHWH’s newfound lack of anger. It is almost as if YHWH emptied all of that stormy rage from the preceding verses into Jonah–a mere vessel of burning anger. The close of the story begins, then, with only one hot-headed character with absolutely nobody to empathize with him. To further distance Jonah’s position from YHWH’s, his blistering plea in 4:2 indicts YHWH with a turn to irony. Jonah claims that this deity­­–from his perspective–is supposed to be ‘slow to anger’ (4:2). Trible clarifies this irony in saying, “the description ‘slow to anger’… literally reads ‘long of nostrils’, an anthropomorphism connoting friendliness and graciousness. It contrasts with ‘the burning of his nostrils’ in 3:9.”[19] To press further, the overwhelming depiction of this god throughout the joke of Jonah is not one that is ‘slow to anger’. Rather, YHWH begins in anger and it is only near the end of the tale that the anger appears to subside. The deity described in the text might more appropriately be described as ‘slow to become patient (if at all)’. Resultantly, Jonah’s words in 4:2 are ironic and prophetic in that they read as an oracle against YHWH. Jonah burns YHWH with his flaming tongue in such a way that readers laugh with a sinister smirk as if they know and feel Jonah’s rage. Jonah’s irony occasions a disclosure of the full sentiment of anger that characterizes the entirety of this text.

It is not merely the case that Jonah experiences human and divine rage and it is not just the case that this anger is visceral and scorches his throat. Jonah feels this anger so deeply that he recognizes it would be better “to die than to live” (4:3). The suicidal turn in the text is striking. If Jonah truly wished to die, then why would he not simply take his own life? If this rage has driven him to the point of death, why does he not throw himself into the fire of death and end his own suffering? Perhaps, this is not a purely suicidal desire effervescing from a traumatic experience. In the Hebrew Bible, “Moses (Num 11:14–15), Elijah (1 Kings 19:4), Job (Job 6:8–11), and Jonah (Jon. 4:3) each asked God to take their lives, but in every case God refused.”[20] Jonah joins the ranks of others that came up before him in imperatively asking YHWH to take his life (נַפְשִׁ). Interestingly, Jonah’s language further indicates that he feels as if YHWH–in an act of kenosis–has emptied his [sic] rage into Jonah’s body. Anger has erupted from YHWH’s burning nostrils into Jonah’s scorching throat just as the breath of life flows from YHWH’s nose into the throat of every living human (see Gn 2:7 for this play on the language). Jonah–in this sense–positions himself as a prophet against YHWH. He bursts through YHWH’s macrocosmic temple in flames of rage. He enters the holy of holies and issues a case against the god that claimed to graciously and mercifully create human beings. Jonah reproves YHWH by claiming that he has unfairly experienced the anger of the deity and wishes for the torment to cease. How could one blame Jonah for feeling the way that he feels? His anger is not misplaced: YHWH’s is.

The fact that YHWH does not take Jonah’s life further problematizes the deity’s actions. The text could have resolved itself by Jonah peacefully entering unto death under the cooling shade of the bush (4:6). Yet, YHWH continues to torment Jonah by revoking the sole relief Jonah has experienced in this harrowing tale by destroying the bush with a worm (4:7). And perhaps­ the most vicious act of all, YHWH sends a ‘sultry’ (חֲרִישִׁ֔ית) wind to engulf Jonah (4:8). While this Hebrew word refuses to lend itself over to a simple translation or interpretation, the variety of meanings leaves one with only negative connotations. Perhaps, this wind has something to do with “cutting into some material” (i.e. cutting into Jonah).[21] Or, maybe this wind is a “scorching desert wind, capable of withering and wilting vegetation.”[22] And, even more ominously, perhaps this wind is merely “silent [or] quiet” in its ability to provide relief to the downtrodden Jonah.[23] Whatever this wind carries, it fuses together with the raging sun and further consumes Jonah to the point of even hotter despair. Yet, YHWH does not lovingly relent as he [sic] so swiftly succumbed to concerning the Ninevites. The entire saga ends with Jonah in flames. Unable to move, he must listen to YHWH’s final rhetorical and ambiguous question concerning the fate of the Ninevites (4:11). Readers are left outside of the city alongside Jonah without shade, under the broiler of a sultry wind and a raging sun. The tale concludes where it once began: with YHWH’s unrelenting, burning anger.

BURNING WITH RAGE: A PHENOMENOLOGY OF ANGER

The conclusion of this myth takes place in perhaps the most ironic and humorous geography possible. To leave readers (alongside Jonah) outside of the city of Nineveh would leave readers in laughter. Readers know that Nineveh actually fell in 612 BCE. YHWH did not relent and the city did not repent. Thus, Jonah’s situation is not grounded in a historical reality. Readers do not need to join in Jonah’s rage because Nineveh did fall and YHWH’s rage was emptied upon that wicked city in reality. Yet, one cannot help but wonder why a group of authors would compose this tale. Is it purely for the irony, the laughter, and the joke? Or, does this story disclose a ‘forgotten message’ within its joke? This exegetical work has attempted to uncover the possibility that the authors of this text were trying to make sense of a profound sense of anger that they felt. The community that composed this text and told its story clearly understood what it meant to experience anger and burn with rage. They attempted to explore how anger transmutes and transmits itself from the human to the divine and vice versa. They transcribe their anger into every word of this text and bring readers along their katabasis into the depths of anger. In summary, the joke of Jonah discloses the ‘forgotten message’ of what it is simply like to experience the flames of rage. As Lacan informed us, perhaps this community was attempting to extinguish some-thing that was ‘hardest to bear’. Given that the irony and humor throughout the frivolity of Jonah remain encased in the language of rage, perhaps the ‘forgotten message’ is simply that the authors were angry.

By being burned and scorched by YHWH’s anger, by experiencing the blisters of the raging sea, and by being sun-burned and wind-burned under the auspices of a sultry wind, readers of Jonah come to feel the authors’ Anger. Jonah presents itself, then, as a phenomenological exploration into the inner-workings of Anger itself. The only way a community could compose such an effective piece of literature would be if they actually felt the rage they inscribed into the text itself. Who knows what Anger is or where it comes from? The community behind Jonah knew what Anger is and where it comes from. In this textual encounter, readers place their noses against YHWH’s and breathe the same fiery air that burns through every angry throat in existence.

Endnotes

[1] Daniel W.Graham, “Heraclitus”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/heraclitus. Many of the themes scattered throughout this work rely upon pre-Socratic notions and individuals such as Heraclitus and his flux. While we certainly do not need pre-Socratic philosophy to make sense of the book of Jonah, I attempt to draw parallels to illustrate certain points.

[2] Much of this exegetical work was inspired by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg’s article “Jonah: A Fantasy of Flight” (2008). In this psychoanalytic work, Zornberg argues that “Jonah is evading a radical human posture between death and life, from which one may cry out to the Other from the depths of one’s creaturely vulnerability” (271). While my essay does not directly engage with Zornberg’s article, many of the themes and maneuvers attempts to mimic and play off of her incredible work.

[3] Jonah, 3:9a.

[4] Phyllis Trible. “The Book of Jonah: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections” in the New Interpreter’s Bible: Volume VII (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 465.

[5] Jacques Lacan. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, translated by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 376.

[6] Ibid, 366.

[7] William Lee Holladay and Ludwig Köhler, A Concise Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 273.

[8] Francis Brown, Samuel Rolles Driver, and Charles Augustus Briggs, Enhanced Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 704.

[9] Wilhelm Gesenius and Samuel Prideaux Tregelles, Gesenius’ Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament Scriptures (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2003), 250.

[10] The וַ that begins v.17 could indicate that the story is merely continuing if one chooses to translate the word as ‘and’. But, if one chooses to read this word as ‘but’–as is the case in the NRSV–then we discover that the silencing of the sea contrasts with the actions described in v.17. In this sense, YHWH’s anger is unlike the cessation of the sea’s raging. YHWH’s anger continues to burn even in the calming of the sea when we translate the וַ as ‘but’. To further illustrate this point, one could make a similar argument in 4:1 in which the cessation of YHWH’s anger contrasts with the advent of Jonah’s.

[11] Gesenius notes that בְלֹעַ usually involves “the idea of eagerness, greediness” in the sense of ingesting something with pleasure. In its use in v.17, readers confront the startling idea that the big fish–perhaps a symbol of YHWH’s pointed rage–eagerly and greedily swallows Jonah.

[12] The ‘prayer of Jonah’ (2:1–10) does not contain the same ironic play between fiery language and watery images as we discovered in chapter one. Rather, the imagery invoked throughout Jonah’s prayer draws upon more overt water images (i.e. being cast into ‘the deep’ in v.3a, being surrounded by ‘the flood’ in v.3b, being closed in by ‘the waters’ in v.5a, et al). Resultantly, I make an unacceptable interpretive leap in saying that Jonah’s prayer showcases how being at the heart of YHWH’s anger is like being ‘reduced to ash’. The far more ‘appropriate’ metaphor for this prayer would be to say that Jonah felt like a grain of sand being crushed by the waves of YHWH’s rage (as in v.3b). Be that as it may, carrying out the fire imagery even within Jonah’s prayer is an attempt to illustrate the irony the placement of the prayer stands for. Jonah’s prayer does not belong in this text, but this is precisely why it is there. As readers of the text, the prayer catches us off guard and further prepares one for oncoming punchlines of the joke in chapters three and four.

[13] Trible, 511.

[14] Ibid, 511.

[15] Ibid, 512.

[16] Ernst Jenni and Claus Westermann, Theological Lexicon of the Old Testament (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1997), 168.

[17] Ibid, 168.

[18] Francis Brown, Samuel Rolles Driver, and Charles Augustus Briggs, Enhanced Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 354.

[19] Trible, 518.

[20] Chad Brand, Charles Draper, et al., eds., “Suicide,” Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2003), 1540.

[21] Leon J. Wood, “760 חָרַשׁ,” ed. R. Laird Harris, Gleason L. Archer Jr., and Bruce K. Waltke, Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (Chicago: Moody Press, 1999), 327.

[22] James Swanson, Dictionary of Biblical Languages with Semantic Domains : Hebrew (Old Testament) (Oak Harbor: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1997).

[23] Wilhelm Gesenius and Samuel Prideaux Tregelles, Gesenius’ Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament Scriptures (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2003), 305.

Works Consulted

Graham, Daniel W., “Heraclitus”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/heraclitus.

New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha, Augmented Third Edition, New Revised Standard Version. Oxford University Press, 2007.

Trible, Phyllis. “The Book of Jonah: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections” in the New Interpreter’s Bible: Volume VII Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996.

Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, translated by Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2006 .

William Lee Holladay and Ludwig Köhler, A Concise Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament. Leiden: Brill, 2000.

Brown, Francis and Samuel Rolles Driver, Charles Augustus Briggs. Enhanced Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.

Gesenius, Wilhelm and Samuel Prideaux Tregelles. Gesenius’ Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament Scriptures. Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2003.

Ernst Jenni and Claus Westermann, Theological Lexicon of the Old Testament. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1997.

Chad Brand, Charles Draper, et al., eds., “Suicide,” Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary. Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2003.

Leon J. Wood, “760 חָרַשׁ,” ed. R. Laird Harris, Gleason L. Archer Jr., and Bruce K. Waltke, Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament. Chicago: Moody Press, 1999.

James Swanson, Dictionary of Biblical Languages with Semantic Domains : Hebrew (Old Testament). Oak Harbor: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1997.

Zornberg, Avivah Gottlieb. “Jonah: A Fantasy of Flight.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 18 (2008): 271–299.