What is it about?
Jonah is a funny biblical book, but what sort of humor is it? This article traces the shape of Jonah's humor with help from the literary theory of Mikhail Bakhtin. Jonah's "carnivalesque" sense of the world finds liberating humor in life's ambiguities, messes with social rank, brings heroes down to size, and exaggerates everything. The purpose of this kind of humor is to present a world that is truly open-ended: anything could happen!
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Why is it important?
The humorous nature of Jonah has been recognized for some time, but it has often been interpreted as a satirical critique aimed at some target or another. Bakhtin's analysis of "carnivalesque" humor helps us see that Jonah is not pointing the finger at some external target of satirical attack. It's challenging the whole serious order of the world, in order to make space for a genuinely undetermined future.
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This page is a summary of: “Who Knows?”: A Bakhtinian Reading of Carnivalesque Motifs in Jonah, Vetus Testamentum, December 2021, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/15685330-bja10073.
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