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Presentation
The Editors

The book of Jonah is different from all of the other books in the Bible. It is classed among the minor or, as the Hebrew Bible calls them, the latter prophets. It has neither prophetic oracles nor visions, but is simply the story of a messenger who, if he is a prophet, has very few prophetic utterances to his credit. This story is so extraordinary, however, that each of us retains a vivid recollection from childhood of Jonah swallowed by the whale or else sitting despondently under the withered plant. And think how many other images of Jonah there are, as witness numerous paintings and sculptures, beginning with the moving frescoes that have been found in early catacombs.
Yes, this book is wonderfully rich. It is sometimes considered as a fable which, under the guise of :~ a very subtle humour, teaches a very real lesson in human psychology. God enjoys playing with us, and under an exaggerated style with its images and hyperboles, he wants us to grasp an inexpressible reality: he is so great that everything depends on him, so great that he infinitely transcends all human thought, however religious it may be, and yet he loves his creatures, all of them, even animals. He takes pleasure in being gracious. It should not surprize us that this book is read on the Day of Atonement in the synagogue while, for Christians, the traditional time for reading it, chapter 3 especially, is during Lent.
Jonah, who is a witness of the mercy of God for Israel and the nations, is also for the evangelists and for many fathers of the Church, a figure of Jesus. If these latter have compared the three days and three nights that Jonah spent in the belly of the great fish to the three days and three nights that the Son of man spent in the heart of the earth, Benoît Standaert suggests that they have been struck, perhaps, by the fact that Jesus, as a prophet, is less messenger than witness, he whose very life is the message.
Each of us may discover in reading the articles of this Review, those of Jonathan Magonet and Beno?t Standaert in particular, that the people of Nineveh are not the only ones called to a true conversion of heart (and God alone knows how many Ninevites there are today!) but that Jonah himself must be converted and open his heart. There is a Jonah in each one of us, dialoguing with and also struggling with God, who needs to be touched and to be brought back to the stupendous discovery that our God is
"a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love".