Clarel, Jonah, and the Whale:A Question Concerning Rachel's Missing Children

Abstract

Moby Dick: Jonah, Ahab, and Ishmael Father Mapple’s sermon on Jonah in Moby-Dick is a biblical narrative in the form of a short story, allegorically structured as a parable on nationalist hatred and divine compassion. It takes its point of departure from the obscure figure of a pre-exilic prophet, borrowed from the brief story about the reign of Jeroboam II (2 Kings 14.23-29). Jeroboam was king in Samaria for forty-one years. He not only saved Israel from extinction, but also “restored” its utopian “Solomonic” borders (1 Kings 8.65) south to the Dead Sea and north as far as the great Syrian cities of Hamath and Damascus. Jeroboam’s great success is attributed to his obedience to the advice of the prophet, Jonah Ben Amittai, who was from the town of Gath ha-Hepher in the Lower Galilee. This prophet Jonah incited Jeroboam to a holy war with the ambition of bringing all of Yahweh’s land back to Israel.1 The Book of Jonah’s use of this figure—a classic biblical portrayal of the prophet of Yahweh’s judgment, ever zealous for Israel’s messianic victory over nations in uproar (Psalms 2.1-2)—offers a man who is eager to complete the great victories of 2 Kings by bringing Yahweh’s judgment to the heart of the empire itself. This Jonah wishes to be another Elijah in his zeal: a veritable Nahum, a prophet of doom to bring divine destruction on the great city of Nineveh (Nahum 1-3). The book opens as Yahweh tells Jonah that the news of the great evil of Assyria’s Nineveh has come to him (Jonah 1.2). This same motif is used in Genesis 18.21 when Yahweh tells Abraham about his plans to destroy the evil city of Sodom. Although in Genesis, Abraham had argued against Yahweh that the innocent not be destroyed with the guilty, in Jonah’s book, the prophet is no Abraham, one in whom all the nations of the world are to be blessed (Genesis 12.3). Jonah knows already that his Yahweh has become “a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in