In the belly of the Word/3 - The prophet’s escape and conviction of being the cause of the impending drama
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 03/03/2024
"Any community in the grip of violence or oppressed by some disaster willingly engages in a hunt for a ‘scapegoat’. People want to convince themselves that their troubles depend on a single culprit who can be easily disposed of”
R. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p.118
“He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish; so he paid his fare and went on board, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the LORD.” (Jonah 1:3). Jonah boarded the first ship and ran away. He paid the ‘fare’ of the transport, and then embarked ‘with them’. In the Bible when life and death are at stake, the ‘market price’ often comes into play, often in places where we least expect it. For example, for Abraham in the purchase of the land to bury Sarah (Gen. 23) or in Jeremiah for the field in Anathoth (Jer. 32), two key episodes where the reference to price reinforces the extreme solemnity of those acts. When a price is mentioned in Scripture, we must interpret it as a sign, a symbol of something else. By telling us that Jonah paid the price for the ticket to board, the Bible enhanced the spiritual solemnity of this decisive moment in Jonah's story. The biblical God has learned to ‘speak economics’ because he wants to speak to us about life and death, he wants to be understood by us - even in these details the true beauty of the Bible’s secular nature is hidden.
Then there is that ‘go with them’. In His escape from God Jonah found, perhaps sought, human company, as if the presence of a group of men could replace the absence of the Lord; as if the noise of the voices of those fellow (mis)adventurers could make him forget the sound of another voice that he had chosen not to listen to. When you run away from yourself, you start alone but end up in companies, often unlikely, improvised and precarious, still preferred to the loneliness that echoes back a terrorizing voice: we surround ourselves with many voices to forget that one voice. Sometimes companionship is like this.
“But the LORD hurled a great wind upon the sea, and such a mighty storm came upon the sea that the ship threatened to break up. Then the mariners were afraid, and each cried to his god. They threw the cargo that was in the ship into the sea, to lighten it for them. Jonah, meanwhile, had gone down into the hold of the ship and had lain down, and was fast asleep” (1: 4-5). However... after the ‘but’ of Jonah (1:3), here is another adversative narrative and theological conjunction. The sailors cast their cargo into the sea, but they did not yet know that the real weight on the ship was Jonah. They prayed to their many gods, hence they are pagans, "representatives of the seventy nations of the earth" (L. Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, VI, p. 194). The ship was about to sink, but Jonah, continuing his descent and escape, had ended up in the lowest part. There, he fell into a very deep sleep and was not awakened by the storm. It was not the good sleep of Adam (2:21), nor that of Daniel's visions and prophecies. It was instead the different kind of sleep of the depressed, something similar to the sleep of Elijah under the broom tree (1 Kings 19:4), the sleep of those who get drunk to stop thinking about life, perhaps hoping not to wake up again. An angel did not wake him from that sleep but the cry of a man: "The captain came and said to him, ‘What are you doing sound asleep? Get up, call on your god! Perhaps the god will spare us a thought so that we do not perish” (1:6). The captain used the same language that God had used in Jonah's call - ‘Go, cry out’ (1:1) - in Hebrew: qûm, qāra’. Jonah had not responded to the invitation of YHWH, but now he seems to respond to the invitation of a man - how many people begin to dialogue again with a God they no longer understand if they are reached in a hold of the earth by the cry of the poor and within that cry of human pain they begin a new apprenticeship of the voice of God!
So they cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah. They asked him: “Tell us why this calamity has come upon us. What is your occupation? Where do you come from? What is your country? And of what people are you?” (1.7-8) In the ancient world, including the Bible (e.g. Josh 7:17; Acts 1:26), in certain contexts, drawing lots was a means to discern the divine will.
But here we are in the centre of this first chapter: the logic of the ‘scapegoat‘ crept in among the sailors. In that situation of extreme danger and imminent death, the simple yet misguided question took hold: whose fault is it? The (illusory) resource of last resort becomes the identification of a culprit to blame and then cast out of the community to restore peace with the divinity and appease it. The sacrificial victim must be guilty and the community must be convinced of their guilt for their expulsion to be deserved - how many scapegoat rituals exist within every meritocracy! For René Girard, the scapegoat must meet certain characteristics: a) have evident signs of physical or moral difference (a physical or psychological defect, evident cultural, religious or ethnic diversity); b) be a non-essential element for the survival of the group, an ‘extreme’ person (a king or an outsider); c) the scapegoat must be a member of the group without being an essential part of it; d) finally, once sacrificed, the scapegoat paradoxically assumes divine qualities, since the salvation of the community is attributed to them. In this way the choice of the victim falls on someone whose death will not be avenged and so the violence will not be ‘repeated’.
Jonah possessed all these characteristics: he is different ("I am a Hebrew,’ he replied. ‘I worship the LORD, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land"(1:9)). He is outside the group of sailors, so no one will avenge him, and in the end he will calm the waters. Only his evident guilt is missing: this would be provided by Jonah himself.
The (distant) biblical reference to the scapegoat mechanism is found in Leviticus (16:9-10), in a passage where a mysterious ancient deity (‘Azazel’) appears, to whom the scapegoat is offered: "but the goat on which the lot fell for Azazel shall be presented alive before the LORD to make atonement over it, so that it may be sent away into the wilderness to Azazel" (Leviticus 16:10). It is important to note that also in this case the goat to be sent into the desert is chosen by ‘casting lots’ (16:8) - like Jonah.
These verses are built around the tension between innocence and guilt: “Please, O LORD, we pray, do not let us perish on account of this man’s life. Do not make us guilty of innocent blood; for you,” (1:14). For the sailors who did not have all the information, Jonah is an imperfect scapegoat because of his dubious guilt - and for this reason they first try to return to shore: "the men rowed hard to bring the ship back to land, but they could not" (1:13). But we readers know, instead, that Jonah is not innocent, and therefore in the book the scapegoat mechanism works perfectly.
But here's another twist: "Then they said to him, ‘What shall we do to you, that the sea may quieten down for us?’ For the sea was growing more and more tempestuous. He said to them, ‘Pick me up and throw me into the sea; then the sea will quieten down for you; for I know it is because of me that this great storm has come upon you.'" (Jonah 1:11-12).
Jonah asked to be thrown into the sea.
In this amazing scene we find important echoes of the Servant of YHWH from second Isaiah (Chap. 55), where an innocent person becomes a vicarious victim for the people. However many (including Jerome, Commentary on Jonah, p. 58) have seen it as a foreshadowing of Christ, another innocent scapegoat - and how can we not do so in the light of the sailors’ words addressed to God: "Do not make us guilty of innocent blood" (1:14), which we will find centuries later in the story of the Passion (Mt. 27:25)? Interestingly, Girard also offers an original interpretation of the mysterious ‘sign of Jonah’ found in the Gospels: “What is the sign of Jonah? The reference to Matthew's whale is not very enlightening, and we must prefer Luke's silence... The ‘sign of Jonah’ designates, once again, the collective victim" (Il capro spiatorio, p. 186).
In these few dense verses, multiple narrative and theological registers intertwine, all of great relevance from many perspectives.
At the centre is Jonah's experience. He felt that he was the cause of the storm and impending death, because he associated it with his disobedience to God - ‘I know…’ This experience of Jonah’s can be repeated whenever a person believes that there is a link between their spiritual-moral disobedience and a problem happening around them (in a family, in a business, in a community...). What matters is the subjective belief, not the objective truth of that belief. A woman, a man has made a mistake, perhaps a sin. As a result, they find themselves in the wrong place. A tragedy occurs, a collective suffering. They begin to believe that this suffering would not have happened without their ‘no’ and they find an obvious cause-and-effect relationship. Thus they end up in great psychological-spiritual suffering, one of the greatest kinds of suffering and in the desperate search for a solution, one day they may begin to obsessively think that the only real solution is for them to go away. And if at the same time that this new Jonah is experiencing this personal ‘trial’, a collective scapegoat mechanism is also triggered against them, this ‘pincer’ movement produces very serious consequences unless someone or something intervenes to break this deathly cycle. Because the terrible logic of the scapegoat becomes perfect when a twofold malicious exercise succeeds: (1) the community is convinced of the victim's guilt and (2), an essential element, the victim is convinced of their own guilt and therefore, unlike animals, they ask to be thrown into the sea. Like Jonah. “So they picked Jonah up and threw him into the sea; and the sea ceased from its raging” (1:15). The initial hesitation of the sailors trying to avoid Jonah’s death can also be read as a ’no’ from the Bible to the legitimization of such terrible mechanisms of social death that we see repeated every day.
We are saved from these deadly traps if, in the hold of our hearts, we do not lose faith in a deeper and truer innocence than our faults or if someone guards this faith for us, which we have lost.
