Jonapsalm

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Jonas prayer in the belly of the fish: the Jonapsalm (Sargis Babayan, 2011)

A prayer text in the biblical book of Jonah is called Jonapsalm . It includes the verses Jonah 2, 3–10  LUT . In the following it is assumed that the Jonah book is a teacher narration.

psalm

The Jonapsalm can be viewed as an independent little psalm , even if, in the opinion of many exegetes, it was newly written for the Book of Jonah. It has a rhythmic structure (Qina meter) and consists of three stanzas (verses 3–5; 6–8; 9–10).

The poet resorted to well-known psalm motifs and created a so-called song of thanks for the individual (comparable to Psalm 30 , for example ) with the following structure typical of this genre:

  1. Introduction; Looking back at hardship and salvation (verse 3)
  2. Emergency description (4–7a)
  3. Description of the rescue (7b – 8)
  4. Confession and Vows (9-10).

A typical psalm motif is the sea as a world of chaos and death ( Tehom ), in which the worshiper sinks helplessly. An example of this is Psalm 69 . Sinking in the sea expresses the maximum distance from God and thus forms the opposite of visiting the temple , the place where God meets. As appropriate as the water theme is in the context of the Jonah book, the temple motif in the Jonapsalm, which plays no role in the prose text, is bulky.

Another reference of the Psalm to the (Hebrew) prose text is the motif of going down: Jonah goes (1,3) to Jafo (וירד); he goes (ibid.) down into the ship (וירד) and went down into the lowest room of the ship (ירד) in a raging storm (1.5). This corresponds to going down (ירדתי) to the sea floor in the Jonapsalm (2,6).

Literary criticism

The relationship of the Jonapsalm to the teacher narration in which it is embedded is assessed differently. A prose story without the Psalm would be more self-contained, but if Chapter 2 consisted only of the opening and closing movements, the harmony of the book structure would be disturbed.

A majority of exegetes now assume that in the final text of the Book of Jonah, the psalm and the narrative form a compositional unit. This results in a parallel structure of chapters 2 and 4, in which Jonah is alone with his God and in which the situation described above is looked back on. Jörg Jeremias judged: "Even for interpreters who, like me, tend towards the literary solution, it is true that the Book of Jonah - at least in the final stage - must be interpreted with the psalm (and more likely then: from it)."

Meaning in the Jonah tale

The story of the Jonah tale, which had progressed rapidly until then, comes to a standstill when Jonah lingers in the fish's belly praying - until it is spat on land. “This simultaneity between ' narrated time' and 'narrative time' sets a deeper identification process in motion.” The implicit reader should acquire the Jonapsalm, which is not difficult for him because it is a “psalm potpourri” of quotations and allusions to the psalter .

In the final text of the Jonah book, the rescue of Jonas begins with the fish being swallowed - that is why the Jonapsalm in the fish belly is a prayer of thanks - and after a three-day waiting period, the hero returns from the world of death (sea) to the community of people. With the psalm, the Jonah figure has already placed himself in the community of praying Israelites (temple motif).

reception

The Evangelical Worship Book provides Jonah 2 as the sermon text for Holy Saturday (III). In the Benedictine Antiphonale , the Jonapsalm is prayed as a canticum in the Sunday vigil during Easter .

literature

  • Peter Weimar: Jon 2.1-11. Jonapsalm and the story of Jonah . In: Biblische Zeitung NF 28 (1984), pp. 43-68.
  • Uriel Simon: Jonah. A Jewish comment. Stuttgart 1994. ISBN 978-3-460-04571-2 .
  • Rüdiger Lux: Jonah, prophet between “refusal” and “obedience”: a narrative analysis study . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1994. ISBN 3-525-53844-8 .
  • Hermann J. Opgen-Rhein: Jonapsalm and Jonabuch. Speech form, history and contextual meaning of Jonah 2 . Stuttgart 1997. ISBN 9783460003811 .
  • Jörg Jeremias: The prophets Joel, Obadja, Jona, Micha (ATD 24,3) . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2007. ISBN 978-3-525-51242-5 , pp. 89-96.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Rüdiger Lux: Jonah . S. 171 .
  2. ↑ Jörg Jeremias: ATD . S. 94 .
  3. ↑ Jörg Jeremias: ATD . S. 91 .
  4. ↑ a b Rüdiger Lux: Jona . S. 184 .
  5. ↑ Klaus Grünwaldt: The didactics of the book Jona. In: Religious Education Institute Loccum. Retrieved July 27, 2018 .
  6. ^ Rüdiger Lux: Jonah . S. 174 .
  7. ↑ Evangelical church service book . 3. Edition. Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-7461-0141-7 , pp. 314 .
  8. ↑ Abtrei Münsterschwarzach (ed.): Benediktinisches Antiphonale . tape 1 . Münsterschwarzach 2002, p. 463 .