Preface vii 1 Jonah’s Readers: Perspectives on Interpretation 1 Jonah probed and tickled 3 The author, the text and the reader 5 2 Jonah’s World: Historical and Social-Science Perspectives 9 From historical to social-scientific criticism 9 The book of Jonah as read by Jerusalemite literati in Persian Yehud 12 Social science and the reading of prophetic story 15 3 Jonah’s Art and Reception: The Poetics of a Biblical Narrative 21 Narrative criticism and biblical poetics 21 The building blocks of narrative 22 Narrative criticism and the biblical story as art 37 The politics of genre 38 Reader-response criticism and the contribution of the reader 53 4 Jonah’s Challenge: Contextual, Liberationist and Postcolonial Interpretation 60 Contextual biblical hermeneutics 61 Liberationist readings 74 Postcolonial biblical interpretation 84 5 Jonah’s Depths: Psychological Biblical Criticism 102 Psychoanalytical (Jungian) textual interpretation 106 Psychological approaches to the book of Jonah 110 6 Jonah’s ‘Otherkind’: Ecological Readings 138 Initial responses to a radical challenge 139 Developing ecological-critical approaches to the Bible 143 Bibliography 172 Notes 191 Index of Bible References 197 Index of Other Ancient Texts 201 Index of Names and Subjects 202