2020-06-08
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Concept: THE MYTH OF JONAH
1. Britannica
Jonah is a recalcitrant prophet who flees from God’s summons to prophesy against the wickedness of the city of Nineveh. According to the opening verse, Jonah is the son of Amittai. This lineage identifies him with the Jonah mentioned in II Kings 14:25 who prophesied during the reign of Jeroboam II, about 785 BC.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Book-of-Jonah
2. Collins dictionary
1) Hebrew prophet who, having been thrown overboard from a ship in which he was fleeing from God, was swallowed by a great fish and vomited onto dry land.
2) The book in which his adventures are recounted (Book of Jonah).
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/jonah
3. Merriam-Webster dictionary
1) an Israelite prophet who according to the account in the book of Jonah resisted a divine call to preach repentance to the people of Nineveh, was swallowed and vomited by a great fish, and eventually carried out his mission.
2) one believed to bring bad luck.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Jonah
Компонентно-дефиниционный анализ языковой единицы:
- Recalcitrant prophet
- Myth
- Whale
- Hebrew
- One, who bring bad luck
- Bible story
THE MYTH OF JONAH in the BOOK
Examples: «What was Jonah doing inside the whale in the first place? It's a fishy story, as you might expect. It all began when God instructed Jonah to go and preach against Nineveh, a place which, despite God's substantial record of annihilating wicked cities, was still - obstinately, unaccountably - a wicked city. Jonah, disliking the task for unexplained reasons which might have had something to do with a fear of being stoned to death by the partying Ninevites, ran away. At Joppa he embarked on a boat to the farthest end of the known world: Tarshish, in Spain. He failed to understand, of course, that the Lord knew exactly where he was, and what's more had operative control over the winds and waters of the Eastern Mediterranean».
«Inside the whale, for three days and three nights, Jonah prayed to the Lord and swore his future obedience so convincingly that God ordered the fish to vomit up the penitent. Not surprisingly, the next time the Almighty posted him to Nineveh, Jonah did as he was told. He went and denounced the wicked city, saying that like all other wicked cities of the Eastern Mediterranean it was about to be annihilated. Whereupon the partying Ninevites, just like Jonah inside the whale, repented; whereupon God decided after all to spare the city; whereupon Jonah became incredibly irritated, which was only normal in one who'd been put to a lot of trouble to bring the message of destruction, only for the Lord, despite a well-known, indeed historic taste for wrecking cities, to turn round and change his mind».
«God finger-flips the blubbery jail hither and thither like a war-game admiral nudging his fleet across maps of the sea. And yet, despite all this, the whale steals it. We forget the allegorical point of the story (Babylon engulfing disobedient Israel), we don't much care whether or not Nineveh was saved, or what happened to the regurgitated penitent; but we remember the whale».
«Perhaps: or perhaps not at all. When the film Jaws came out, there were many attempts to explain its hold over the audience».
«At bottom, this is the grip which the story of Jonah and the whale still has on us: fear of being devoured by a large creature, fear of being chomped, slurped, gargled…»
«On 25th August 1891, James Bartley, a thirty-five-year-old sailor on the Star of the East, was swallowed by a sperm whale off the Falkland Islands».
«For Jonah now read Bartley. And one day there will be a case, one which even you will believe, of a sailor lost in a whale's mouth and recovered from its belly; maybe not after half a day, perhaps after only half an hour. And then people will believe the myth of Bartley, which was begotten by the myth of Jonah. For the point is this; not that myth refers us back to some original event which has been fancifully transcribed as it passed through the collective memory; but that it refers us forward to something that will happen, that must happen. Myth will become reality, however sceptical we might be».
Характеристики концепта THE MYTH OF JONAH:
- Whale
- Myth
- Jonah
- James Bartley
- A large creature, fishy story, great fish
- God
- Bible
- Nineveh
- Wicked city
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