A social-scientific research of any narrative should begin with questions about the production of the story in question. The central figure in the social construct of any story is the author. Various attempts to deconstruct authorship, however philosophically pleasing, fail to deal with the materialistic reality that someone composes literary texts even if the composer merely exists in a social miasma of words they did not create, social structures they do not control, and genres they can change only at the risk of being unintelligible. Someone wrote the story of Jonah and they had a social world surrounding them in which they composed a narrative that would be intelligible to others sharing that social world.

Why Assume a Scribe?

The author of the story of Jonah as known in Jewish and Christian tradition was a scribe, someone with an education, training in writing, and a sense of literary cleverness. From whence the motifs that make up the story itself might have derived is incapable of being discerned with any certainty at this remove from the time of composition. The written text exists; neither the thought process nor any oral editions of the work can be recovered save by assumptions based on the extant text.

It was a popular theory for many years that the stories in the Hebrew Bible had their origins in oral tradition. The notion was quite popular for a time that Israelite “commoners” sat around campfires in the evenings and spun tales of such importance for the community that their oral presentations were passed on orally from person to person and from generation to generation until finally the narrative was committed to writing.