Tolkien’s Original Jonah Compared to other Traditional Catholic Versions
Msgr. Ronald Knox, a prominent convert from Anglicanism, became “the fifth Catholic Chaplain at Oxford since the Reformation”, holding the position from 1926-1939.[1] During this time, he became a good friend of Tolkien, who was an Oxford don and one of the most prominent Catholics at the university. Soon after working as chaplain, Fr. Knox began working on what became known as the Knox Bible, a Catholic translation of Scripture from the Vulgate in consultation with the original languages. He completed this in 1950, and it eventually became the Bible used for the English Scripture readings at Mass in the UK during the 1960s; though divisive for its more dynamic-equivalent style, it was beloved by such Catholics as Bishop Fulton Sheen, who “notably favoured the Knox Bible as the source for his Biblical quotes.”[2] Tolkien, however, thoroughly disliked Knox’s translation, both for the quality of its English and its apparent infidelities to the original languages. During the ’60s, he complained, “We are still afflicted by ‘Knox’, though I live in hope and prayer that ere long this tribulation at least may be removed. But the obligation to listen to his versions at any rate makes one more attentive to the Latin in one’s missal.”[3]
Nonetheless, the parallels and discrepancies between Tolkien’s and Knox’s Jonah are intriguing.[4] In general, Knox follows the Douay more so than Tolkien, including Knox’s use of archaic English pronouns,[5] spelling the protagonist’s name “Jonas” (following the Vulgate) rather than Tolkien’s “Jonah” and “the Lord” instead of Yahweh. Conversely, Knox wrote Jonah in more of a storytelling style of prose, conspicuously unlike the formal tone of the Douay and Tolkien (likely one reason Tolkien disliked Knox’s use in the Mass). Knox explains Jonah’s motive for fleeing to Tarshish by translating “the face of the Lord” in 1:3 as “avoid the Lord’s scrutiny”, but unlike the Douay’s and Tolkien’s translation of 2:3 as “out of the belly of hell/Sheol”, Knox renders it as “from the very womb of the grave call I, thou art listening to me!” This echoes St. Ambrose, who wrote, “Like Jonah when he was in the belly of the fish, I prayed to you on behalf of the people. Similarly, Christ was with God from his mother’s womb, according to what is written, ‘Before the child knew good or evil, he chose the good.’”[6] In 2:7, Knox is arguably even more explicit on Jonah’s typology of the resurrection than Tolkien, translating it as “and still, O Lord my God, thou wilt raise me, living, from the tomb.”
One of the most interesting translation controversies in Jonah, however, is the plant miraculously grown by God in 4:6. Knox follows the standard program of rendering it simply as “ivy-plant”, akin to the Douay and based on the Vulgate’s hederam, which means simple ivy. But Tolkien, showing his deep love for flora, as well as his belief that a rarer word is more appropriate for such a hapax legomenon,[7] renders the Septuagint’s κολοκύνθῃ (from the Hebrew קִיקָי֞וֹן) as “colocynth” (his being the only English Bible translation to do so), a type of ivy that is both toxic and potentially medicinal and edible, thus fitting God’s use of doubling in his lesson to Jonah with the vine and pointing to St. Paul’s mention of the “root of bitterness” (Heb 12:15). It has also been conjectured to be the “vine of Sodom”, a plant native to the Near East and mentioned in Deuteronomy 32:32, since the colocynth’s fruit are traditionally called this.[8] (Knox, however, is more specific than Tolkien or the Douay in identifying the wind in 4:8 as “sirocco”.) As Brendan Wolfe explains,
Tolkien took special care over the name of the plant that shades Jonah in chapter 4, copying out the entry for ‘castor’ in the OED, exchanging notes with Jones on the subject, and ultimately opting for ‘colocynth’. Nevertheless, the reviser replaced this word with ‘castor oil plant’.[9]
The Douay’s Jonah is closer to Tolkien’s translation than Knox’s in some ways but less so in others. Tolkien sometimes prefers a more Germanic word over the Latinate renderings of the Douay, such as “sailors” in 1:5 vs. the Douay’s “mariners”. At other times, Tolkien is simpler than the Douay: his translation of 1:11, 13 merely says that “the sea was rising more and more”, whereas the Douay’s poeticizes it as “the sea flowed/tossed and swelled”. Tolkien, Knox, and the Douay all portray Jonah’s captor as a fish of some kind,[10] Tolkien and the Douay translating it as “great fish” while Knox uses the more mythic-sounding “great sea-beast”. Tolkien also follows the Vulgate and the Hebrew in rendering Jonah’s prayer from Sheol in poetic verse, imitating the two-line/verset parallel bicolon of Hebrew Qinah meter as in the Psalter,[11] whereas Knox and the Douay use only prose. In Jonah’s “todah, or thanksgiving, psalm”,[12] Tolkien generally focuses more on the prophet’s bodily health while the Douay treats his suffering spiritually and almost metaphorically, with the Douay having him say in 2:6 that “waters compassed me about even to the soul” whereas Tolkien says, “to my throat”, and while Tolkien reads, “The seaweed was wrapped about my head”, the Douay states, “the sea hath covered my head”.
Tolkien gives a very Christian rendering of 2:7, emphasizing the resurrection of the dead and the multiple levels of Hell: “I went down into the countries beneath the earth, unto the peoples of the past. But you raised up my life from the pit, Yahweh, my God.” This alludes to the Psalter, “Thou hast brought forth, O Lord, my soul from hell: thou hast saved me from them that go down into the pit” (29:4), while the Douay’s version of 2:7, “thou wilt bring up my life from corruption, O Lord my God”, echoes Psalm 15:10 and its multiple quotations in Acts.
Tolkien’s version of the Ninevites’ question about the possibility of God’s mercy in 3:9 seems to be phrased in hopeful way while the Douay’s sounds more doubtful. Interestingly though, Tolkien has the Ninevites wonder if God would “change his purpose” rather than “forgive” as in the Douay, which Tolkien repeats in 3:10, in place of the Douay’s “mercy”. Forgive/mercy are perhaps more theologically sound, but Tolkien’s version emphasizes that this is an instance of “conditional” prophecy,[13] where God prophesies that He will destroy and/or help people but only on condition that they repent. As Origen explains, “If that kind of conversion did not happen… what was said [was] no longer a deceit but already truth. There would have been a destruction that followed for Nineveh. It was up to those who hear.”[14]
Tolkien’s Interpretation of Jonah Compared to the Fathers
Tolkien left only one explicit interpretation of Jonah, but it is very revealing:
Incidentally, if you ever look at the Old Testament, and look at Jonah, you’ll find that the ‘whale’ – it is not really said to be a whale, but a big fish – is quite unimportant. The real point is that God is much more merciful than ‘prophets’, is easily moved by penitence, and won’t be dictated to even by high ecclesiastics whom he has himself appointed.[15]
Despite the consistent theme of punishment in the prophetic writings, God shows His Divine Mercy by always concluding with promises of mercy and restoration; indeed, He only sends the prophets to preach destruction to motivate the hearers to penance (sometimes even, as with Jonah, against the prophet’s own preferences). The “Sign of Jonah” is primarily significant for its fulfillment by Christ in the New Testament; as Tolkien notes, the prophet being eaten by a giant fish is a relatively minor part of Jonah’s story, ordered toward the overarching theme of God’s mercy toward sinners. The fact that God forgives the Ninevites, who were Gentile pagans and terrorized the Israelites and other surrounding nations for centuries with their brutal imperialism, simply because the Ninevites exhibited a few traditional penitential acts such as fasting, wearing sackcloth, and sitting in ashes, clearly demonstrates Tolkien’s point. Similarly, St. John Chrysostom refers to Tolkien’s theme of God being more merciful and responsive to penitence than some prophets:
God made these things happen so that the prophet might learn from them to be a lover of humanity and be subdued. Only to him did he cry out and say, ‘Imitate the sailors, the naïve men, who neither despise a single soul nor neglect a single body, yours. And you would allow to be destroyed, on your part, an entire city with myriads of inhabitants. These sailors, when they discovered who was responsible for all the evils that confronted them, still were not eager to condemn him; but you, who have no charge brought against you by the Ninevites, would convict and annihilate them’.[16]
Tolkien would have especially appreciated the Ninevites’ being forgiven principally through fasting, since he wrote about his own work, “Another saw in waybread (lembas)= viaticum and the reference to its feeding the will ([The Lord of the Rings] vol. III, p. 213) and being more potent when fasting, a derivation from the Eucharist.”[17] St. Ambrose similarly observed, “Nineveh freed itself from death by fasting”, and Chrysostom likewise said, “Like a heavenly power overseeing Nineveh’s charge, fasting snatched the city from these gates of death and returned Nineveh to life.”[18] This applies especially to the king of Ninevah, whose profound humility inspired all the people. His situation exemplifies something Tolkien described: “There exists the possibility of being placed in positions beyond one’s power. In which case (as I believe) salvation from ruin will depend on something apparently unconnected: the general sanctity (and humility and mercy) of the sacrificial person.”[19] St. Maximus of Turin also taught, “The king conquered enemies with a display of valor. He conquered God, however, by humility. He is a wise king who, in order to save his people, owns himself a sinner rather than a king. He forgets that he is a king, fearing God the King of all.”[20]
Although the Fathers mention God not being limited by His own appointed representatives on Earth less frequently, they do acknowledge it at least implicitly. St. Gregory of Nazianzus hints at Tolkien’s interpretation when he writes on Jonah’s attempt to “dictate” to God what he thinks is best by fleeing from His assignment: “For God alone of all things cannot be escaped from or contended with. If he wills to seize and bring them under his hand, he outstrips the swift. He outwits the wise. He overthrows the strong. He cuts down the lofty. He subdues rashness. He resists power.”[21] St. Jerome echoes him when he says, “those things also which men think for their good, when against the will of God, are turned to destruction”;[22] this would include the good of ordination, whether as a prophet or other “ecclesiastic”, as well as the “good” of destroying an enemy rather than forgiving them.
Jonah aligns with several themes that were very important to Tolkien even beyond his specific interpretation given above. One such theme was “God’s concern for the pre-Christian and non-Israelite world.” As K. R. Harriman notes,
Tolkien’s world is set in an imaginary time before Christ and before Israel in the history of our own world. It is a setting fit for narrated operations of Providence… God was at work in preparation for the gospel (or praeparatio evangelica), since God has not left himself without a witness to all nations (Acts 14:15–17; cf. 17:22–29; Rom 1:18–20). This applies to Tolkien’s fictional setting as to the actual history of our world.[23]
Wolfe similarly writes, “God does not confine his loving kindness to his chosen people, as Jonah seems to think he should, but takes thought for pagan sinners and even animals. He is the ‘God of second chances’, who saves Jonah from drowning and the people of Nineveh (who normally do not know Him) from the destruction they have earned: there is nothing mechanistic about His operations.”[24] This universal extension of God’s mercy and kingdom throughout the prophetic books is why Fr. Jones said of Jonah, “We are on the threshold of the Gospel.”[25]
Tolkien also would have seen Jonah as containing a Eucatastrophe, a term he coined for the “sudden joyous ‘turn’”[26] in fairytales where everything seems hopeless, just before the arrival of unexpected salvation:
Jonah’s proclamation to Nineveh leads to a sudden, joyous turn of events for them whereby they receive God’s gracious favor in sparing them his judgment. For Jonah, this is not an unexpected turn, of course, and that is why he did not want to proclaim the message to Nineveh. While Jonah is not inclined to see the ending as a happy one, the actual outcome of his proclamation is eucatastrophic for the Ninevites and anticipates what is still to come with the gospel. In fact, the eucatastrophe of the gospel (as Tolkien describes the resurrection in his ‘On Fairy-Stories’) is described in terms of the sign of Jonah (Matt 12:39–40; 16:4; cf. Luke 11:29–30).[27]
Tolkien had a special love for the theme of pity, which is likely what inspired his description of God in Jonah 4:2, unlike most English versions, as “a God of gentleness and pity”. This is why he wrote, in response to critics accusing his protagonist Frodo of failure,
They do not perceive the complexity of any given situation in Time, in which an absolute ideal is enmeshed. They tend to forget that strange element in the World that we call Pity or Mercy, which is also an absolute requirement in moral judgement (since it is present in the Divine nature). In its highest exercise it belongs to God.[28]
His angelic wizard Gandalf’s words could even serve as a translation of God’s response to Jonah: “Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”[29] Patristic writer Salvian the Presbyter applies this lesson to Jonah:
For though we read that the whole people wept, yet the lot of innocence of the little ones merited the greatest mercy. God said to Jonah, ‘You are greatly grieved over the vine.’ And a little later, ‘Should I not spare Nineveh, the great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons, who know not their left hand from their right hand?’ He thereby declared that because of the purity of the innocent ones, he was also sparing the faults of the guilty ones.[30]
Conversely, it could be argued that God spared Jonah because he was not unrighteously indignant but was trying to avoid what Bishop Fulton Sheen called “false pity”:
The power to become righteously indignant is not an evidence of the want of mercy and love, but rather a proof of it… there are some crimes the tolerance of which is equivalent to consent to their wrong. Those who ask for the release of murderers, traitors, and the like, on the grounds that we must be ‘merciful, as Jesus was merciful,’ forget that that same Merciful Savior also said that He came not to bring peace, but the sword… If mercy meant the forgiveness of all faults without retribution and without justice, it would end in the multiplication of wrongs… Mercy is for those who will not abuse it… and no man will abuse it who has already started to make the wrong right, as justice demands.[31]
This is substantiated by Nahum and Zephaniah (2:13-15), who prophesied the destruction of Ninevah, and reaffirmed by Tobit, who rejoiced over the imminent fulfillment of the prophets’ visions and of Jonah’s desire for justice when Ninevah was destroyed by the Babylonians (Tobit 14:2-13), an even not directly recorded in Scripture.
Even though, or perhaps because, he emphasized the theme of God’s pity and mercy in Jonah, in general, Tolkien is critical of Jonah’s motives, essentially accusing him of being unmerciful – which is the immediate impression given upon reading it. But the Fathers say that Jonah was not against the Ninevites’ conversion per se but feared being “convicted of falsehood” if the city was not destroyed as he prophesied,[32] or that they might reject it and destroy Israel, which he knew eventually would happen but did not want to see in his own time.[33] But the Fathers do still criticize Jonah’s foolish attempt to flee from God, as when Chrysostom says, “[God] wanted to put Jonah to shame by sending him to the great city of Nineveh, because he foresaw the prophet’s escape.”[34] St. Augustine similarly wrote that Jonah “was sad over the preservation of the Ninevites! He was frustrated over the redemption and salvation of the Gentiles!.. Yet the salvation of penitent nations is preferred to Jonah’s suffering and the shade that he loved.”[35] This largely aligns with Tolkien’s own interpretation.
Although Tolkien himself put little importance on it, one of the most consistent questions related to Jonah throughout history has been the identity and scientific plausibility of the “fish” that ate Jonah. In response to pagans laughing dismissively about the miracle of Jonah being eaten and coming back to life (or not?),[36] St. Augustine says,
I have noticed that this sort of question is a matter of much jest and much laughter to pagans. The answer to this is that either all the divine miracles are to be disbelieved or there is no reason why they should not be believed. We should not believe in Christ himself and that he rose on the third day, if the faith of the Christians feared the laughter of the pagans.[37]
This reflects Tolkien’s view of miracles and biblical inerrancy, as with the historicity of the Garden of Eden, about which he said,
I think most Christians, except the v[ery] simple and uneducated or those protected in other ways, have been rather bustled and hustled now for some generations by the self-styled scientists, and they’ve sort of tucked Genesis into a lumber-room of their mind as not very fashionable furniture, a bit ashamed to have it about the house, don’t you know, when the bright clever young people called: I mean, of course, even the fideles who did not sell it secondhand or burn it as soon as modern taste began to sneer.[38]
Excursus on Tolkien’s Isaiah and Job
The only book Tolkien completed for The Jerusalem Bible was Jonah. He did, however, contribute to two others: a sample of Isaiah and “editing the translation of Job in the Jerusalem Bible for English style.”[39] For Isaiah, Wolfe explains Tolkien’s process this way:
Before turning to Jonah, however, Tolkien offered a sample translation, choosing the first chapter of Isaiah. He opens Isaiah’s prophecy with stark alliteration, the poetic form dearest to him, but afterwards quickly grows more prosaic, perhaps out of respect for the sacred text: ‘2 Heavens hearken, earth give ear, for Jahveh speaks: ‘I have brought up sons and caused them to grow, but they have rebelled against me. 3The ox knows its keeper, and the ass the crib of its master; Israel knows nothing, my people understand nothing’.’[40]
Tolkien was a master of alliterative poetry, the native meter of Germanic languages (but less common in biblical poetry), so it makes sense that he would naturally gravitate to it as a means of poeticizing the English translation.[41] His spelling of the Tetragrammaton as “Jahveh” seems to have been the common form used by nineteenth-century German biblical scholars and was employed by Anthony Maas in the original Catholic Encyclopedia.[42] Tolkien’s choice of this passage of Isaiah also reflects his love for Creation, as with the animals’ participation in the penance of Ninevah in Jonah, and in his statement that
in moments of exaltation we may call on all created things to join in our chorus, speaking on their behalf, as is done in Psalm 148, and in The Song of the Three Children in Daniel II. PRAISE THE LORD . . . all mountains and hills, all orchards and forests, all things that creep and birds on the wing.[43]
As for Job, Mark Giszczak sees an imbedded connection in the published text of Job in The Jerusalem Bible, whose English Tolkien helped to polish, between Tolkien’s dwarves and Job 28, with its imagery of mining and smelting metals, as “the lamp-folk dig [and] hang suspended far from mankind” (Job 28:4). Giszczak can hear dwarves saying, “Down there, the rocks are set with sapphires, / full of spangles of gold” (Job 28:6), while verse 9’s statement, “Man attacks its flinty sides, / upturning mountains by their roots” not only recalls dwarves but also Tolkien’s translation of Jonah 2:6-7: “The seaweed was wrapped about my head / at the roots of the mountains. / I went down into the countries beneath the earth, / unto the peoples of the past”. Giszczak evocatively connects this influence to that of Catholic playwright William Shakespeare on the Anglican Authorized Bible: “It is amusing to me to see the great 20th Century novelist leave his fingerprints on the biblical text much like legend about the famed 17th Century playwright slipping a ‘shake’ and a ‘spear’ into Psalm 46 of the King James Version.”[44] So, Tolkien’s editorial hand can certainly be felt in Job as well.
Conclusion
JRR Tolkien’s translation of Jonah, and his contributions to The Jerusalem Bible, are further evidence of his devout Catholic faith, alongside his magnum opus The Lord of the Rings, which he described as “of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work”,[45] and the witness of his life in general. His biblical translations have many intriguing elements, word choices, and touches of poetic beauty that set them apart from many others, including their edited versions in the published Jerusalem Bible and other Catholic versions of Sacred Scripture.
Endnotes:
[1] Evelyn Waugh, The Life of Ronald Knox (Glasgow: Fontana, 1962), 75, 183.
[2] “The Knox Bible Remains Unlike any other English Translation,” Baronius Press, accessed August 10, 2026, https://www.knoxbible.com/why_is_knox_bible_unique.html.
[3] Showing his thorough knowledge of biblical Greek, Tolkien critiqued a specific reading in Knox: “I was irritated, for instance, by the rendering in last Sunday’s Gospel: thy son is to live, and wondered (uncharitably) if this quirk was due to more than a desire to be Knoxian and different. ὁ ἱόυs σου ζῃˆ and filius tuus vivit = ‘your son lives/is alive’. This is the obvious translation, and also greatly superior and truer to the dramatic narrative. Our Lord is represented as using the present (= now, as I speak), and later we learn that, as he spoke, His words were effective. At that moment the son returned to full health and the symptoms of disease, the fever, vanished. But last Sunday I troubled to look a little closer, and found that R[evised] S[tandard] has ‘your son will live’, and also (to my surprise) J[erusalem] B[ible]. Why? Is there some textual point (there is no textual note) – or grammatical? My knowledge of Greek is fading, but I do not see how ζ can be given either a jussive sense as in ‘is to live’, or a future. (Has it not rather its full sense ‘is in vigour’, better represented (if necessary) by modern ‘is alive and well’?) Surely if the future had been intended ζήσεται, vivet, would have been used. As in Matthew ix 18, where it is in place. There R.S. has ‘she will live’; but J.B. I regret to note, has the unnecessary elaboration ‘her life will be saved’. Has not J.B. here been ‘infected’ by Mark ἱύα σωθ καὶ ζήσῃ? Though this process may have played a part in producing the texts we now have, is it not a process to avoid in translating them, especially in such a translation as J.B.?” Tolkien, Letters, letter 289d.
[4] All quotes from the Knox Bible are copyright Westminster Diocese, 2013, and taken from www.newadvent.org.
[5] Tolkien reluctantly encouraged Fr. Jones in this decision for The Jerusalem Bible: “[T]hank you for all you are doing and particularly for your heartwarming interest — it cheers me in the bad moments and gives me courage (e.g. your support for the ‘you’ policy; without it I should have been most uneasy, having no great confidence in my own decisions; like you I regret the passing of ‘thou’ etc., but….).” Wolfe, “Tolkien’s Jonah,” 19.
[6] Ambrose of Milan, Jonah 2:1-2, in The Twelve Prophets, vol. 14, ed. Alberto Ferreiro and Thomas C. Oden, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: Old Testament (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2005).
[7] Tolkien, Letters, letter 234. This is also why Tolkien only reluctantly accepted Fr. Jones’s plan to use modern English pronouns, since Tolkien wrote in the same letter, “I think that this writing down, flattening, Bible-in-basic-English attitude is responsible for the fact that so many older children and younger people have little respect and no love for words, and very limited vocabularies – and alas! little desire left (even when they had the gift which has been stultified) to refine or enlarge them.”
[8] Jason Fisher, “Jonah and the Colocynth,” Lingwë – Musings of a Fish, November 3, 2014, https://lingwe.blogspot.com/2014/11/jonah-and-colocynth.html.
[9] Wolfe, “Tolkien’s Jonah,” 21.
[10] Except when Christ mentions it in Matthew 12:40, where the Douay translates St. Jerome’s Latin “ventre ceti” as “whale’s belly”, a usage that inspired the name for the science of whales, cetology.
[11] Peter Bekins, “The Study of Classical Hebrew Poetry: Meter,” balshanut: Resources for the Study of the Bible and Linguistics, January 23, 2009, https://balshanut.wordpress.com/2009/01/23/the-study-of-classical-hebrew-poetry-meter/.
[12] John Bergsma and Brant Pitre, The Old Testament, vol. 1 of A Catholic Introduction to the Bible (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2018), 922.
[13] Bergsma and Pitre, The Old Testament, 858-859.
[14] Origen, Jonah 3:4, The Twelve Prophets.
[15] Tolkien, Letters, letter 196a.
[16] John Chrysostom, Jonah 1:12-13, The Twelve Prophets.
[17] Tolkien, Letters, letter 213.
[18] Ambrose of Milan, Jonah 3:5, The Twelve Prophets.
[19] Tolkien, Letters, letter 191.
[20] Maximus of Turin, Jonah 3:7, The Twelve Prophets.
[21] Gregory of Nazianzus, Jonah 1:1-3, The Twelve Prophets.
[22] Jerome, Jonah 1:4, The Twelve Prophets.
[23] Harriman, “Biblical and Theological Commentary on Tolkien’s Translation of Jonah.”
[24] Wolfe, “Tolkien’s Jonah,” 23-24.
[25] Jones, ed., The Jerusalem Bible, 1141.
[26] J. R. R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories, ed. Verlyn Flieger (HarperCollins, 2008), 75.
[27] Harriman, “Biblical and Theological Commentary on Tolkien’s Translation of Jonah.”
[28] Tolkien, Letters, letter 246.
[29] J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (Mariner Books, 2004), 59.
[30] Salvian the Presbyter, Jonah 4:11, The Twelve Prophets.
[31] Quoted in Joseph Pronechen, “How to Recognize False Mercy, According to Ven. Fulton Sheen,” National Catholic Register, March 16, 2019, https://www.ncregister.com/blog/how-to-recognize-false-mercy-according-to-ven-fulton-sheen.
[32] Gregory of Nazianzus, Jonah 1:1-3, The Twelve Prophets; cf. Tertullian, Jonah 1:17, Chrysostom, Jonah 4:1-2.
[33] Jerome, Jonah, 1:1-3, The Twelve Prophets.
[34] John Chrysostom, Jonah 3:4, The Twelve Prophets.
[35] Augustine of Hippo, Jonah 4:5-7, The Twelve Prophets.
[36] Although Tolkien’s translation strongly points to Christ’s Resurrection, he does not explicitly say that Jonah died in the belly of the fish, and this interpretation seems to be somewhat more modern (e.g. Bergsma and Pitre, The Old Testament, 922), as the Fathers tend to believe that he was protected in the belly of the fish, not that he died. For example, Tertullian wrote, “God found him not on land or on sea but in the belly of a beast, where for three days he could not die” (Jonah 1:1-3, The Twelve Prophets; cf. Theodoret of Cyr, Jonah 2:1-2; Cyril of Jerusalem, Jonah 2:6). The Fathers see Christ’s preservation in the tomb as the primary typological fulfillment of the “Sign of Jonah” (e.g. Gregory of Nazianzus, Jonah 1:1-3; nevertheless, Theodore of Mopsuestia’s statement that “Christ the Lord… was kept incorrupt for the same number of days”, could still indicate resurrection, since Christ although “safe” from corruption still truly died – introduction to Jonah, The Twelve Prophets). Cassiodorus seems to allude to Jonah’s resurrection but in a unique way, describing Jonah as “set in the whale’s belly and… [having] entered hell alive”, yet he still explains the manner of Jonah’s preservation as “[in] a wondrous and novel precedent the beast’s belly yielded up its food unharmed, rather than consumed by the normally damaging process of digestion” (Jonah 2:1-2), thus again pointing to Christ’s preservation from corruption more so than Jonah’s literal resurrection.
[37] Augustine of Hippo, Jonah 1:17, The Twelve Prophets.
[38] Tolkien, Letters, letter 96.
[39] Mark Giszczak, “Are Tolkien’s Dwarves Lurking in the Book of Job?” Catholic Exchange, December 19, 2016, https://catholicexchange.com/tolkiens-dwarves-lurking-book-job/.
[40] Wolfe, “Tolkien’s Jonah,” 19.
[41] Also, as John D. Rateliff observes, “the translation/adaptation of JONAH Tolkien was probably most familiar with, the Gawain-poet’s PATIENCE, opts for the familiar and homey over the exotic and strange, calling [the colocynth] a wodbynde (woodbine, a kind of honeysuckle)”, and Patience itself was alliterative. John D. Rateliff, “Tolkien’s Jonah,” Sacnoth’s Scriptorium, November 20, 2014, https://sacnoths.blogspot.com/2014/11/tolkiens-jonah.html.
[42] Anthony Maas, “Jehovah (Yahweh),” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, ed. Kevin Knight, vol. 8 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910), New Advent, https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08329a.htm.
[43] Tolkien, Letters, letter 310.
[44] Giszczak, “Are Tolkien’s Dwarves Lurking in the Book of Job?”
[45] Tolkien, Letters, letter 142.
