Finding Words in the Belly of Sheol: Reading Jonah’s Lament in Contexts of Individual and Collective Trauma

Abstract

By reading Jonah’s lament in Jonah 2 through the lens of trauma hermeneutics, this article will try to better understand the words that have been assigned to the main character Jonah, which represent a community’s deep sorrow in the aftermath of the unspeakable horrors of warfare. Read as an attempt to ascribe meaning to individual and collective trauma, I propose that Jonah’s lament in Jonah 2 taps into the metaphors and images available in the lament tradition of the Book of Psalms. The application of symbolic language in ascribing meaning to traumatic events is particularly significant, and may help us derive new layers of meaning from the words placed into the mouth of the prophet who finds himself in the belly of Sheol.