[The AMAIC would give the priority to Jonah, instead]
....
Boreas the fleeing wind
There is a further connection to Phineus, who in
Apollonius’ Argonautica, is
pursued by the vengeful Harpies because he has betrayed prophetic secrets.
After promising the Argonauts that he will help them with his prophetic gifts,
he is delivered from his pursuers by the Boreads, the “fleers,” sons of Boreas,
the northern wind that brings the worst storms at sea.**16** The story of
Jonah begins very abruptly with his flight, right after God's command that he go
and deliver his oracle to Nineveh. Jonah betrays nothing of the divine message
entrusted to him, but he flees to avoid its accomplishment (as he sees it), and
does so without explanation. He flees from the consequences of the message he
has received but, paradoxically, not the structure of prophetic tales, in which
one expects failure. In these stories, the structure is as follows: the more
trustworthy the prophets, the less willing to hear them their audience will be.
Above all, kings are expected to resist the message and punish the messenger,
thereby increasing the element of veracity for the audience of the story. In
fear of retaliation, Elijah flees to the Horeb after his victory over the
prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel, walks one day in the desert, sits under a
broom tree, and asks for death, saying: "Israel has forsaken the covenant,
slain prophets, and I, even I only, am left."**17** In the second part of his
adventure, Jonah also flees to an analogue of the desert, that is, a dry place,
with wind, as opposed to the fluid and humid vastness stirred up by storm
winds. But he is not pursued. Jonah does what prophets (and Jason and his
friends) are supposed to do, namely, he flees, but for no apparent reason. He
is pushed by rhetorical reason alone, the force of the text and previous
biblical stories.
The puzzling motif of Jonah's flight, however, is
connected to the Argonautic cycle of stories in two ways. First of all, it
indirectly creates a storm caused by God’s great wind, in Hebrew ruah
gdolah. Secondly, the Hebrew word
for fleeing in Jonah 1.2,
boreah, corresponds closely to
the name of Boreas, the storm god and father of the Boreads. A "fleeing" sea
creature, a leviathan, actually appears in the texts of Ras Shamra and is
mentioned in Isaiah 27.1 and Job 26.13. It is a sea monster originating in the
primordial chaos and threatening chaos. In the story of Jonah, however, the
"fleeing" is separated from the monster, yet still connected to a storm. I
propose therefore that the Greek word Boreas has a semitic origin, perhaps the
Ugariticboreah. Chantraine’s
Dictionnaire étymologique du grec classique gives no sure origin for the Greek word, but the
presence of other Argonautic elements in the story of Jonah makes it distinctly
possible that mythical elements surrounding Boreas were borrowed by the Greeks,
together with the name, from Semitic mythology. The stories surrounding this
divinity or hero associated with storms were adopted at a much earlier stage,
perhaps at the end of the second millennium before our era. The sound change
from a pharyngeal to an alveolar fricative ("heth" to "s") is natural, since Greek lacked the former
(a later example of this sound change appears in one of Jerome's letters, in
which he speaks of a Silas whose Hebrew name is Shaloah).
....
No comments:
Post a Comment