Composition and Paronomasia in the Book of Jonah

LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE has traditionally centered on theme and the strategies of narrative construction. In the 1960 'sand 1970 's, however, scholars lent considerable dimension to their enterprise by focussing increasingly upon compositional techniques, including word-play, inclusio, chiasm, and the whole gamut of rhetorical, structural and generic devices available to the Israelite author. What has long been familiar to the scholar of Dante or Shakespeare has only of late assumed general interest for the biblical critic, namely, that artistry is manifest no less in the structure that houses meaning and content than in the meanings themselves. As a result, scholars have begun to explore the interaction between the formal, literary characteristics and the content of the materials they study. 1 This interrelationship-between intended content (which must be distinguished from meaning) on the one hand, and the dictates of form on the other, of plot-element or message, and genre, seems in much of biblical literature to have determined the final presentation of the work (note Hirsch, 1978, pp. 68-126). Replete with word-play, the book of Jonah affords a unique example of the contribution that formal artistry makes to the impact of the final work. Jonah's