This charts the mutations of a particularly buoyant sliver of Bible text - the book of Jonah - as it latches onto Christian and Jewish motifs and anxieties, passes through highbrow and lowbrow culture, and finally becomes something of a scavenger among the ruins, as, in its most resourceful move to date, it begins to live off the demise of faith. Written at a point between cultural studies, Jewish studies, literature and art, this book is concerned with those versions of the biblical that escape proper disciplinary boundaries: it shifts the focus from mainstream to backwater interpretation. It is less a navigation of interpretative history and more an interrogation of larger political/cultural issues: anti-Judaism in biblical studies; the secularization of the Bible, and the projection of the Bible as credulous ingenu, naive other to our savvy post-Enlightenment selves.
