I am going through the Book of Jonah for my daily quiet time. In my
reading this morning, something puzzled me, but I was unable to
articulate why it was puzzling me. I had a hard time formulating my
question, let alone arriving at any answers! But I checked out a
commentary, and that cleared things up a bit.
In Jonah 1, God tells Jonah to go to the wicked city of Nineveh and
preach against it. Jonah does not want to go, so he hops on a ship to
Tarshish. On his journey, a fierce wind threatens the ship and those on
it, and each shipman is crying out to his god. The shipmaster finds
that Jonah is sleeping and tells Jonah to cry out to his (Jonah’s) god.
This passage looks pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? So why was I
confused? Well, as I said, I was struggling to articulate to myself why
exactly I was confused, but I knew that the topic of my confusion
concerned how the book was portraying the pagan shipmen’s religious
beliefs. Each person has a god. Each person is crying out to his god
in hopes that the tempest will go away. Moreover, they seem to believe
that each person’s god exists—-the pagan shipmaster did not tell Jonah
to cry out to any pagan gods but rather to cry out to his own (meaning
Jonah’s) god. It sounded to me like a belief in patron deities, in
which each person has a god looking out for him or her. But why cry out
to one’s own personal god? Why not cry out to the god of the sea, who
is responsible for what goes on there?
The IVP Bible Background Commentary clarified to me my question and offered a reasonable answer:
“1:5 each cried to his own god. Patron deities were
rarely cosmic deities, so the sailors would not have thought that their
personal or family gods had sent the storm. In the polytheistic
context of the ancient world, one could generally identify divine
activity with confidence, but it was another matter altogether to
discover which god was acting and why. The sailors call out to their
gods in the hope that one of their patron deities might be able to exert
some influence on whichever god has become disturbed enough to send the
storm. They are calling out for assistance, not in repentance. The
more contacts made the better, so the captain awakes Jonah so that he
could also call upon his patron deity.”
So they were calling upon their patron deities because they thought
that these deities may have connections with whatever cosmic deity was
causing the storm.
Questions still remain in my mind, though. Okay, Jonah tells them
that the Hebrew God is god of sea and land and is the one causing the
storm. The shipmen agree that the Hebrew God YHWH is the one causing
the storm and they eventually make vows and offer sacrifice to the
Hebrew God. But the IVP Bible Background Commentary denies
that this means that they abandoned polytheism and converted to
monotheism. It says that “the sailors may have vowed to offer a
memorial sacrifice of some sort to Yahweh each year on the anniversary
of this event.” They still probably continued to worship their own
gods, though.
Where, now, is my confusion? I wonder what exactly they thought
about YHWH, during the time that they accepted that YHWH was the one
causing the storm and also when they offered sacrifice and vows to
YHWH. Did they come to agree with Jonah that YHWH was the god of the
sea and land? How would that impact their religious worldview? One
would think that the God of the sea and land is pretty significant and
high up in the divine hierarchy. Would YHWH take the place of their
cosmic deities, in their minds? Or could they still go on believing in
their cosmic deities, while seeing YHWH as higher than them in the
hierarchy? Or maybe they just believed that YHWH was simply another
cosmic deity and that Jonah was wrong to see him as the God of sea and
land, even though they acknowledged that Jonah’s god was the one causing
the storm.