Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

The Book of Jonah Introduced

After a brief pause, the preacher slowly turns the leaves of the Bible and fixes his hand upon the proper page. He addresses his “beloved shipmates” and cites the last verse of the first chapter of Jonah: “And God had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.” He introduces the Book of Jonah—containing only four chapters—as one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures, yet one that sounds the depths of the soul with its deep sealine.

The Lesson of Jonah’s Sin

Father Mapple declares that the Book of Jonah teaches a two-stranded lesson: one to all sinful men, and a more personal one to himself as a pilot of the living God. The lesson for all men is a story of sin, hard-heartedness, awakened fears, swift punishment, repentance, prayers, and final deliverance and joy. The sin of Jonah, son of Amittai, lay in his wilful disobedience of God’s command, a hard command. Father Mapple emphasizes that all things God would have us do are hard to do, and so He oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade. To obey God, we must disobey ourselves; the hardness of obeying God consists in this disobeying of ourselves.

Jonah Flees Toward Tarshish

With this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah further flouts God by seeking to flee from Him. He imagines that a ship made by men can carry him into countries where God does not reign, but only the captains of this earth. He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, seeking a ship bound for Tarshish—identified with the modern Cadiz in Spain, more than two thousand miles westward from Joppa across an almost unknown Atlantic. Thus Jonah sought to flee world-wide from God: a miserable, contemptible fugitive prowling the shipping like a vile burglar, with no baggage and no friends to see him off, his guilty eye and disordered look betraying his self-condemning conscience.

Boarding the Tarshish Ship

After much searching, Jonah finds the Tarshish ship receiving her last cargo. As he steps aboard to see the Captain in the cabin, all the sailors pause from hoisting in the goods to mark his evil eye. Though Jonah attempts a confident smile, the mariners’ strong intuitions assure them he is no innocent man. They whisper suspicions of robbery, bigamy, or worse, and one even compares him to a murderer wanted in Sodom or Gomorrah. Jonah, terrified, summons boldness to his face but only looks the more a coward. When the sailors find he is not the man described on a wanted bill offering five hundred gold coins for a parricide, they let him pass, and he descends into the cabin.

The Captain’s Suspicion

The Captain, busy at his desk with Customs papers, cries “Who’s there?”—a harmless question that nearly causes Jonah to flee again. Rallying, Jonah requests passage to Tarshish. The Captain slowly looks up and scrutinizes him with a glance. When the Captain mentions sailing with the next tide, the shipmate comments that this is soon enough for any honest man who goes as a passenger, another stab at Jonah. Jonah swiftly diverts suspicion by asking the passage money and offering to pay now. Father Mapple notes that the text particularly records that Jonah paid the fare before the craft did sail, a detail full of meaning.

The Crooked Lamp of Conscience

In his state-room, Jonah encounters a swinging lamp that, though itself permanently straight, hangs at a crooked obliquity because the ship heels toward the wharf. The lamp alarms and frightens Jonah, revealing the false, lying levels of his surroundings. He groans that his conscience hangs in him straight upwards like the lamp, while the chambers of his soul are all in crookedness. Like a man reeling from drunken revelry whose conscience still pricks him, Jonah turns in giddy anguish, praying God for annihilation until the fit passes. At last, a deep stupor steals over him—conscience is the wound with naught to staunch it—and Jonah’s ponderous misery drags him drowning down to sleep.