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

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Cambridge University Press, 2000 - Bibles - 321 pages
This book charts the mutations of the book of Jonah as it latches onto Christian and Jewish motifs and anxieties, passes through highbrow and lowbrow culture, and finally becomes something of a scavenger among the ruins, as, in its most resourceful move to date, it begins to live off the demise of faith. This book is concerned with those versions of the biblical that escape proper disciplinary boundaries: it shifts the focus from "Mainstream" to "Backwater" interpretation. It is less a navigation of interpretative history and more an interrogation of larger political/cultural issues: anti-Judaism in Biblical Studies, the secularization of the Bible, and the projection of the Bible as credulous ingenu, naive Other to our savvy post-Enlightenment selves.
 

Contents

The Mainstream
9
Jonah and Jesus as typological twins
11
The evolution of a biblical character
21
3 Divine disciplinary devices of the book of Jonah as a tractate on producing docile disciplebodies
32
Jonah and the cani cacharis or a concluding scientific postscript
42
survivals hauntings Jonah and Stanley fish and the Christian colonisation of the book of Jonah
48
Backwaters and underbellies
88
I Jewish interpretation
97
3 On the strained relations between the backwaters and the mainstream or how Jewish and popular readings are prone to bring on a bout of scholarly ...
176
on Jonahs infinite regurgitation and endless survival
196
or the strange secular afterlives of biblical texts
201
Regurgitating Jonah
210
2 Regurgitating Jonah
239
the book of Jonah as the quintessential story and the most typical of biblical texts
280
Bibliography
293
Index
315

2 Popular interpretation
137

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