{"id":20125,"date":"2019-10-08T16:16:23","date_gmt":"2019-10-08T21:16:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/?p=20125"},"modified":"2019-10-08T16:16:23","modified_gmt":"2019-10-08T21:16:23","slug":"jonah-every-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2019\/10\/08\/jonah-every-year\/","title":{"rendered":"Jonah, every year"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

Tomorrow Your Humble Blogger will be one of the people reading Jonah at the Yom Kippur service. It\u2019s my second-favorite Yom Kippur joke<\/a>, you know.\r\n

Jonah<\/a> is a very odd book. It has, essentially, two stories: the first part, in which Jonah tries to flee from the Divine presence, is caught in a storm at sea, swallowed by a fish and returned to dry land; and the second part, in which Jonah causes the people of Nineveh to repent, and then he sulks under the shade of a giant gourd, which the Divine destroys. There\u2019s a lot of humor in the story, and a lot of, well, perplexity.\r\n

The funniest part, in my arrogant opinion, is 1:5-6. There\u2019s a mighty tempest in the sea, the ship is foundering, the sailors are terrified, and Jonah\u2026 is napping. The rav khovayl<\/i>, the chief of the sailors, goes down to where Jonah is laying down in the ass-end of the ship and he says ma-l\u2019kha nir\u2019dam<\/i>: what the fuck, sleepyhead?\r\n

That\u2019s my own translation. The KJV has What meanest thou, O sleeper?<\/i> and the NASB has How is it that you are sleeping?<\/i> But I image the guy probably swore a little more than that, anyway.\r\n

Anyway, this time around I clicked on the concordance for nir\u2019dam<\/i> and looked into it a little more. It\u2019s not the ordinary word for sleep, which is probably yashan<\/i> or shenah<\/i>. I think nir\u2019dam<\/i> is more like passed out<\/i> or unconscious<\/i>. I looked at who else is described as asleep using nir\u2019dam<\/i> (or tar\u2019demah<\/i> from the root). For actual named people, there are four: First, there\u2019s Adam, who is put into a deep sleep in Genesis 2 so that the Divine can perform a little rib extraction surgery. Then there\u2019s Sisera in Judges 4, who slumbered so deeply that Ya\u2019el was able to nail his head to the ground with a tent peg. Then there\u2019s Daniel 8, where the prophet had a distressing vision asleep with his face on the ground and had to have it explained to him, and which left him worn out for days afterward (and then it\u2019s all repeated in chapter 10). And then there\u2019s our man Jonah. Other people are described as nir\u2019dam<\/i>, either because they are miraculously asleep (such as Saul\u2019s guardians in 1 Sa 26 or the horses in Psalm 76) or because they are Proverbially slothful but they aren\u2019t actual characters with names or anything.\r\n

I think it\u2019s implied, then, that Jonah isn\u2019t actually just napping. He\u2019s not unconcerned about the storm; he\u2019s out cold. Is he drunk? The text doesn\u2019t say so, and Scripture isn\u2019t generally shy about calling out people who have looked on the wine when it was red. Did the Divine impose a sort of miraculous slumber on Jonah through the first part of the storm? That seems to be what is implied by the use of nir\u2019dam<\/i>, but whatever for? What purpose would it serve, to knock out Jonah for half<\/i> the storm, only to let the shipmaster wake him up?\r\n

I don\u2019t have an answer to it at all. Maybe I will by this time tomorrow\u2014although if I do, I will probably have a different answer by next year, and more questions.\r\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I>
-Vardibidian.\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger leaves out that 'Jonah' means 'dove', and what Jonah has in common with the other dove that experiences a Scriptural storm at sea is left as an exercise for the reader.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[207],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scripture"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20125"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20125\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20127,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20125\/revisions\/20127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}