Rich Man and Lazarus ; t.t. in warning and in inculcating truth He spoke according to the beliefs of His hearers and of His age, without necessarily endorsing those beliefs as true. (3) Or did both our Lord and His hearers, the scribes and Phari- sees, regard the story of Jonah as a parable or fictitious narrative, like others in the OT and in the Apocrypha, and did He thus refer to it? .Uthough in view of To U-"-"*, 3 Mac 6', Jos. Ant. IX. X. it is not very probable that our Lord's hearers regarded the book as fictitious, we might yet admit without hesitation that part of our Lord's reference could be thus explained. Even so firm a maintainer of the historicity of Jonah as Huxtable wTites in the Speaker's Commentary : ' The reference to Jonah's experiences, as yielding an illustrative parallel to what would be seen in His own case, or even as predictive of it, seems as cogent on the supposition of the book being an inspired parable, as on that of its beiu" authentic narrative.' And in fact a teacher might, without doing any violence to right teaching, cite well- known fiction {The Pilgrim's Progress, Basselas, Shakespeare's characters) to enforce warnings or moral truth, and so could our Saviour have done. There is, liowever, an objection to this explana- tion, besides that referred to above, which, it it be not a fatal one, is at least of considerable force, viz. that our Lord would not naturally have saitl of persons whom 3,Jictiun represented as repentant, that they would rise up in the Judgment ; nor would He have put as a parallel case to a fiction the facts of the queen of Sheba's visit to Solomon.
It does not seem possible to pronounce a decided verdict in favour of any one of these hypotheses to the exclusion of the others, though it may be allowed that (3) contains more of difficulty tlian (1) or (2) ; and whilst of these latter (2) is perhaps the more attractive, (1) can certainly be held with- out belittling our Lord's Divinity or detracting from His authority as a moral and religious Teacher, and without weakening the force of the lessons for all generations derivable from the use He made of the story of Jonah for the edification and warning of the men of His own day.
It remains to notice the difficulty connected with the reckoning of the three days and three nights. It is certain that this length of time did not literally elapse between the burial and the resurrection of Christ, and the commentaries in explanation usually follow the lead of St. Jerome and of St. Augustine, who point out tliat we must understand the passage on the principle that the part is taken for the whole ; and accordingly it is usually said that our Lord was in the 'heart of the eartli ' on three day -night periods or vvx^-rDifpa (reference is made to Gn P- * etc., Lv 23*=, 1 S 30'- ", 2 Ch lO'*- '-, Dn S" margin). It must be confes.sed, however, that this explanation seem-; somewhat forced, in view of the peculiar form nt tlir ^..ntiMicr in V.*, and there is not a little to !"■ :m4 .i-aiM-i it; and it is perhaps more satisfaotni\ in ^uiijiu^e that our Lord was .sneaking only in general terms. .A.t any rate the difficulty, such as it is, lends support to the arguments for the authenticity of the verse, since if it were an amplification by the Evangelist, or an interpolation, the Evangelist or the interpolator wuuld hardly have made our Lord utter a prediction expressed in a form not in literal and precise accord with the facts of the resurrec- tion as related in the Gospels.
It is worth noticing that the story of Jonah had a peculiar interest for the early Christians ; his deliverance from a strange sea-monster is depicted many times in the Roman catacombs as typifying the resurrection.
Literature,— Jerome. Com. in .Jonam, ii. 405, also in Emnfj. Mnllh. ii. 12. S3; Aufustine, de Consensu Emn>i. iii, 24, 00;
JORDAN
897
C. H. H. Wright, Biblical Essays, 18S6, pp. 34-98 ; Farrar, Minor Prophets, 1890 ; Lux Mundi, pref. to the 10th edition ; J. Kennedy, A Monograph on the Book of Jonah, 1895 ; Gore, Bampton Lectures, on ' The Incarnation,' Lects. vi. , vii. ; Sanday, Bampton Lectures, on 'Inspiration,' Lect. viii.; G. A. Smith, The Book of the Tivelve Prophets, vol. ii., 1898; Driver, LOT^, pp. 321-325 ; art. ' Jonah ' in Hastings' DB, in the Encyc. Bill. 1901, and in the Jeimsh Encyclopedia, 1904.
Albert Bonus. JONAH. — A link in our Lord's genealogy (Lk 3^°).
JORAU. — Son of Jehoshaphat, named in our Lord's genealogy (Mt 1").
JORDAN 1. Name.— The name of this river is
in the OT ]r!: ; LXX 'lopSoi-T)?, 'UpSavos, 'lopSivv-qi ; NT always 'lopSav-qs ; Jos. 'lopSavqi, 'Updavos.
The form of the word Yarden is difficult to explain. To say, with Ewald (Atisf. Lekrbuch der lifb. Sprache*, p. 426), or with Olshausen (Lehrbuch der heb. Sprache, p. 405), that the primi- tive form is Yarddn or Yarddn, does not help us much ; and we can hardly suppose, like Stade (Leii/buck der heb. Gram- matik, p. 176) or Winckler (Altorient. Forsch. i. p. 422 f.), that it is a word borrowed from another lan^^uage, seeing that it is " ■ ■ * be bi