Why, of all prophets, Jonah should have been selected as the type of Israel, is a question hard but perhaps not impossible to answer. In history Jonah appears only as concerned with Israel’s reconquest of her lands from the heathen. Did the author of the book say: I will take such a man, one to whom tradition attributes no outlook beyond Israel’s own territories, for none could be so typical of Israel, narrow, selfish and with no love for the world beyond herself? Or did the author know some story about a journey of Jonah to Niniveh, or at least some discourse by Jonah against the great city? Elijah went to Sarepta, Elisha took God’s word to Damascus: may there not have been, though we are ignorant of it, some connection between Niniveh and the labours of Elisha’s successor? Thirty years after Jonah appeared, Amos proclaimed the judgment of Jehovah upon foreign nations, with the destruction of their capitals; about the year 755 he clearly enforced, as equal with Israel’s own, the moral responsibility of the heathen to the God of righteousness. May not Jonah, almost the contemporary of Amos, have denounced Niniveh in the same way? Would not some tradition of this serve as the nucleus of history, round which our author built his allegory? It is possible that Jonah proclaimed doom upon Niniveh; yet those who are familiar with the prophesying of Amos, Hosea, and, in his younger days, Isaiah, will deem it hardly probable. For why do all these prophets exhibit such reserve in even naming Assyria, if Israel had already through Jonah entered into such articulate relations with Niniveh? We must, therefore, admit our ignorance of the reasons which led our author to choose Jonah as a type of Israel. We can only conjecture that it may have been because Jonah was a prophet, whom history identified only with Israel’s narrower interests. If, during subsequent centuries, a tradition had risen of Jonah’s journey to Niniveh or of his discourse against her, such a tradition has probability against it.
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A more definite origin for the book than any yet given has been suggested by Professor Budde.[1489] The Second Book of Chronicles refers to a _Midrash of the Book of the Kings_[1490] for further particulars concerning King Joash. A _Midrash_[1491] was the expansion, for doctrinal or homiletic purposes, of a passage of Scripture, and very frequently took the form, so dear to Orientals, of parable or invented story about the subject of the text. We have examples of Midrashim among the Apocrypha, in the Books of Tobit and Susannah and in the Prayer of Manasseh, the same as is probably referred to by the Chronicler.[1492] That the Chronicler himself used the _Midrash of the Book of the Kings_ as material for his own book is obvious from the form of the latter and its adaptation of the historical narratives of the Book of Kings.[1493] The Book of Daniel may also be reckoned among the Midrashim, and Budde now proposes to add to their number the Book of Jonah. It may be doubted whether this distinguished critic is right in supposing that the book formed the Midrash to 2 Kings xiv. 25 ff. (the author being desirous to add to the expression there of Jehovah’s pity upon Israel some expression of His pity upon the heathen), or that it was extracted just as it stands, in proof of which Budde points to its abrupt beginning and end. We have seen another reason for the latter;[1494] and it is very improbable that the Midrashim, so largely the basis of the Books of Chronicles, shared that spirit of universalism which inspires the Book of Jonah.[1495] But we may well believe that it was in some Midrash of the Book of Kings that the author of the Book of Jonah found the basis of the latter part of his immortal work, which too clearly reflects the fortunes and conduct of all Israel to have been wholly drawn from a Midrash upon the story of the individual prophet Jonah.