Whenever the Gentile sailors and Nineveh’s non-Jewish king first refer to Jonah’s God, they initially use the title Elohim rather than the name Yahweh (1:6 3:9). Elohim, in Jonah, usually refers to God but is also used to describe other gods (1:5). Evans, “Wordplay in Jonah”, September 23, 2016, Bible Study Magazine, accessed September 20, 2019. The author, in his role as narrator, uses the name exclusively with the exception of chapter three verse ten when he switches to Elohim in agreement with the king of Nineveh’s conclusion in chapter three verse nine that “God (Elohim) may turn and relent…” Eli T. Built on the verb to be, the name Yahweh (the “I Am” of Exod 3:14) is the preferred title/name for God used by the writer of Jonah. Yahweh, of course, is the revealed name of Israel’s self-existent God. The first noticeable Hebrew words used repeatedly in Jonah are the divine names: Yahweh and Elohim. The repetitive words are used by the author to suggest the themes of the narrative. Jonah is a mere forty-eight verses, but it is loaded with rich theological and linguistic content. In the absence of variety, the biblical writers use repetition to make their points. So, the Old Testament uses relatively few words, over and over. Liz Steelman, “Do You Know More Words Than the Average American?”, August 16, 2016, Real Simple, accessed September 20, 2019. An average American adult over the age of twenty knows more than forty-two thousand unique vocabulary words, and our vocabularies continue to grow as we age. R.L.G., “Lexical facts”, May 29, 2013, The Economist, accessed September 19, 2019.
By the time an American child is eight years old, they will probably know ten thousand words. Let’s put the biblical word count in perspective. Hunter, “Bible Facts and Statistics.” In other words, the biblical writers use a lot of repetition. there are fewer than nine thousand unique vocabulary words used throughout all thirty-nine books. For instance, while there are just over six hundred thousand total words used from Genesis to Malachi in the Old Testament, Margaret Hunter, “Bible Facts and Statistics”, April 29, 2013, Amazing Bible Timeline with World History, accessed September 19, 2019. If we discount the names and multiple locations mentioned (sometimes only once), the number of unique words drops even more. Maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise when we learn how few unique vocabulary words there are in the Bible.
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