Читать книгу Jonah Through the Centuries - Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer - Страница 18

Other, related retellings turn the trope of ‘the fleeing Jonah’ into ‘Jonah the refugee’: Jonah is a man whom God abandoned. These retellings stem from Jonah 2:5 [Eng. 2:4], where Jonah expresses how he is cast out from God’s presence. They gain further inspiration from the affinity between the dialogue of God and Jonah in Jonah 4 and that of God and Cain in Gen 4. The comparison is triggered by the shared use of the Hebrew verb ḥarah = ‘to be angry’, as well as by the shared rare expression milifne Adonai = ‘from before the Lord’ (Jonah 1 and Gen 4). This intertextuality fashions Jonah as a type for the ‘wandering Jew’. This notion comes to the forefront in the novel The Strange Nation of Rafael Mendes by Moacyr Scliar, where the Jonah narrative lends structure to the novel.