Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
fashioning the ark and his subsequent agricultural endeavors) participates
in the creative work of God.
For the same reason that Noah's obedience results in the saving of some
remnant of nature, Jonah's abandonment of his prophetic election threat-
ens to end in natural calamity. The physical destruction of Nineveh that
was sure to follow if Jonah did not bring God's corrective revelation to that
city is this story's correlative to the great flood. Prophecy coincides with
God's creative work in nature, and this means that prophetic obedience and
disobedience have natural consequences. Just as the story of Noah enacts
the positive side of this relationship, Jonah's westward flight across the
Mediterranean, away from “the presence of the L
oRD
,” enacts its inverse.
Having refused God's call to enlighten the Ninevite Gentiles, Jonah (by a
telling ironic stroke) finds himself among Gentiles nonetheless, but now as
a kind of antiprophet who, by abandoning God's word, has brought death
rather than life. Jonah and his Gentile shipmates can be saved from the
tempest only if he separates himself from them by again reclaiming his pro-
phetic office, and this occurs when he professes his identity as a Hebrew
and makes the prophetic disclosure that it is his own disobedience that
threatens their destruction. The priestly separation that Jonah acknowl-
edges in this speech is then ritually enacted as he commands the crew to
throw him into the sea (Jonah 1:9-15). Now dead to the world, Jonah again
is made alive to God, and the consequences of his reclaimed election are
then played out in the story's final scene. Having arisen from the depths of
the sea, the repentant prophet is restored to the solid ground of the ordered
creation. God's primordial separation of the land from the sea is once again
replayed. For a second time Jonah finds himself among the Gentiles, but
now he has reclaimed his prophetic election. Separated from them by his
obedience to God's revelation, Jonah's message is heeded and the destruc-
tion of Nineveh averted.
If the Catholic past found its biblical touchstone in the rebellious phase
of Jonah's prophetic ministry, the Protestant world to come is anticipated
by the prophet's rebirth and also in Noah, that other flood survivor of the
Bible whose priestly heroics are similarly aligned with the theme of nature's
instauration. Bacon draws out this second linkage by making Bensalem's
isolation from the world the consequence of a second great flood. We are
told by one of the island's governors that the first Atlantis of legend was in
fact an ancient confederation of civilizations in the Americas that was later
destroyed, not by an earthquake as Plato had surmised, but by a “deluge or
innundation,” an act of “Divine Revenge” brought against it because of its
