Thursday, March 22, 2007

Chapter Two -- Communiques from the Carpe


2 Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish, [it is only in English that it is a whale] 2 saying,“I called to the Lord out of my distress,and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol

[the place of the dead -- In the Hebrew cosmology there is water under the earth. "Below the ground and it's surface waters, far down, lay Sheol, where the dead pass their silent existence." from The Grand Contraption: The World as Myth, Number, and Chance David Park pg. 5 It occurs to me that one of the differences between Sheol and heaven is the silence in the underworld and the continuous praise around the throne of the Holy One of Israel.]
cried and you heard my voice. 3 You cast me into the deep,

into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me;
all your waves and your billows passed over me.

4 Then I said, ‘I am driven away from your sight;
how shall I look again upon your holy temple?’

5 The waters closed in over me; [Jonah is at the point of drowning

-- the waters are up to his neck and

seaweed is wrapped around his head].
the deep surrounded me; weeds were wrapped around my head
6 at the roots of the mountains.

I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever;
yet you brought up my life from the Pit,
[Some see this as the death of Jonah and that
God raises Jonah from the dead -- that he remembers God as he lies dying.]
O Lord my God.

7 As my life was ebbing away, I remembered the Lord;
and my prayer came to you, into your holy temple.

8 Those who worship vain idols forsake their true loyalty. [Those who forsake their true loyalty -- here the pot call the kettle black -- he who has fled the presence of the Lord only to find that he cannot escape the presence of the Lord.]

9 But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you; what I have vowed I will pay.
Deliverance belongs to the Lord!” 10 Then the Lord spoke to the fish, and it spewed [the word is vomited] Jonah out upon the dry land.

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