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Notes -
Jonah is a wonderful piece of satire, and it's a shame it will just be used as "kids, look at this time a whale vored a dude". Basically every other prophet suffers rejection, humiliation, and violence from their own people. Meanwhile, Jonah is sent to Israel's mortal enemies, tries to get out of doing his job, walks through the city giving the most half assed proclamation ("Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!")... and it works perfectly. Even the cows cover themselves in sackclothes and sit in ashes. Absolutely brilliant.
That said, it's unclear if teachers will present the narrative excerpts as clearly work of fiction, like Aesop's fables. Is that too close to establishment of religion? Schools are obviously allowed to teach evolution even though it offends young earth creationists.
The beautiful part of Jonah is the prayer, which is unfortunately not part of the reading. It acts as a sort of maximum externalization of salvation from a rock bottom psychological state, with Jonah poetically describing himself as being barred into the bedrock of the ocean (literal rock bottom). Many of the metaphors we use today to describe being in psychological disaster — can’t get above water; trying to stay afloat; drowning; out of our depths; swallowed whole; confined; in hell; fainting / dying; flooded with work; suffocating — these are all found or implied in the small little poem-prayer. In my view this is the real utility of the work, with the tale of empathy placed around it for added tropology. When the ancient Israelite found himself in disaster, he would remember Jonah, and in remembering Jonah he would remember what Jonah did. Jonah’s salvation comes from three behaviors:
His cessation of avoidance (no more fleeing from the Great Ought)
His expressing out of his troubles in words, imagery, and emotion (extremely useful psychologically, functioning as catharsis and rubber duck debugging in one)
His orientation toward hope and eventual deliverance from his troubles (“(though) I have been banished from Your sight, yet once more I will look toward Your holy temple”)
These are great behaviors. If you were to teach these behaviors in a class, it would be an advantage to those students who would otherwise avoid, ignore, and despair over their troubles.
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