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and of the rebuilding of the house of God are written in the commentary on the Books of the Kings‖.

In Judaism therefore, Midrash is the body of the exegesis of Torah texts along with homiletic stories as taught by the Rabbinical Jewish sages of the post- Temple era that provide an intrinsic analysis to passages in the TaNakh. Thus Midrash is a method of interpreting biblical stories that goes beyond simple distillation of religious, legal, or moral teachings. As such it fills in the gaps left in the biblical narrative regarding events and personalities that are only mentioned. The purpose of midrash was to resolve problems in the interpretation of difficult passages of the text of the Hebrew Bible by using Rabbinic principles of hermeneutics and philology to align them with the religious and ethical values of religious teachers. It will be necessarily to see the importance of midrashim to help us appreciate its application in the book of Jonah.

because of their own anti-supernatural perspectives‖ (p.358). Many people think of midrashic exegesis as just a fanciful way of making Scripture say whatever one wants it to say which if that were true, would make it a hermeneutic that undermined biblical inspiration and authority.

However midrashic exegesis is actually dependent upon the verbal inspiration and inerrancy of the Old Testament. Pickup goes on to raise these issues that in recent years, a few evangelical scholars have reopened these questions:

Did New Testament authors employ midrashic techniques that derived meanings from beyond what the human author of an Old Testament passage intended to communicate? If so, did they employ these midrashic techniques not merely as accommodative, ad hominem arguments when addressing Jewish opponents, but as inherently valid ways of reading the Old Testament? Is such a hermeneutic legitimate, and does it truly comport with a high view of Scripture? Can we today employ this non-grammatical-historical method of reading the Old Testament, rather than seeing it as something confined to inspired interpreters of the first century? (p. 356).

We agree with Pickup‘s answer to the above question which is capital ―Yes‖. The only problem is with prior studies of the issue. Thus he states that:

In my opinion, the problem with the prior studies of the issue is that they have failed to fully appreciate the theological rationale of the midrashic method of exegesis that was assumed by Jews of the late antiquity. Far too many scholars explain midrashic hermeneutics as little more than the use of certain exegetical rules …, in particular, the practice of associating Old Testament verses that contain a common word. These features are certainly found in midrashic

exegesis, but reducing the hermeneutic to such matters is overly simplistic and fails to address its fundamental philosophy and purpose (p. 357).

The Jews approach their Scripture in a unique way. They read the Old Testament not merely as a collection of different books written by different human authors on different occasions, but as if it were all one book. The ancient Jew‘s have high regard for the inspiration, unity, and paradigmatic nature of God‘s revelation. This fact is made clearer in Pickup‘s explanation that:

The Jewish exegetes kept in mind something that we may tend to overlook: the fact that, from the perspective of God in eternity, the Scriptures are really a

―timeless unity in which each and every verse is simultaneously with the other, temporally and semantically‖. As a result, various contexts of Genesis through Malachi are ultimately all connected. So if a given verse is considered from that broader perspective, the words of the verse often call to mind additional truth when they are read in light of other contexts that God has revealed. Words are vehicle of thought, and context is largely what gives them meaning. So when a Jewish reader saw that the words of a passage expressed another truth if they were read in a different, divinely revealed context, he concluded that such a phenomenon could not be coincidental; all such intertextual connections – and therefore the fuller or multiple significations of the text that those connections brought to mind – must have been in the mind of God when he inspired the human author to state those words in the first place (p. 361).

It is this type of procedure of reading the words of one Old Testament context in the light of another that is graphically illustrated in the rabbinic literature particularly in midrash compilations such as Leviticus Rabbah and Genesis Rabbah. Whenever a Jewish reader

employed midrashic exegesis, a mere sentence or phrase within a psalm, prophetic oracle, strophe, pericope, or other section of Old Testament material could find relevance and new meaning when read in a related new context. It was not actually necessary for the entire section of the material to yield the midrashic reading.

Theologically speaking, as grammatical-historical exegesis seeks to understand what was in the mind of the human author of an Old Testament text, midrashic exegesis seeks to understand something much more significant: what was in the mind of God. Therefore, ―a midrashic reading of Old Testament is concerned not much with what a human writer was thinking, but with what he, as God‘s mouthpiece, was prophesying‖ (Pickup 2008, p. 362). What he prophesied were words expressing the thought of the Being who designed all of the interconnections running throughout Scripture. Therefore following from all these we gain a lot making use of midrashic exegesis. The points are made clearer by Brown, Perkins and Saldarini (2007) when they said that midrashic interpretation ―clarifies peculiarities and obscurities in the biblical text and more often uses such reflections to make the text relevant to the questions, needs and interests of its audience‖ (p. 1082).

The gains we acquire from midrashic exegesis cannot be over emphasized. The understanding of God‘s intended goal and intention in human life generally are some of the importance of midrashism in theological stand. Fruchtenbaum (2009) stressing the importance of midrash in theology says:

The search of the rabbinic sages was for the unity of human experience under God‘s rule. Hence they want to know what connections they could locate between scriptural stories, what lessons they could learn from one biblical teaching for the interpretation of another…They wanted time and again to prove that reason

without Scripture is not reliable, but that Scripture is reasonable: A common Midrashic activity is to refute a reasonable or logical conclusion merely by citing a verse from Scripture. The Midrashic activity was important, for without it, people might not act in proper ways and might misunderstand the realities of the world, man and God (p. 7).

Midrashic activity has great theological import in the lives of the rabbis and community of believers. For Stern (1993) the role midrash played for the Rabbis ―was to maintain the presence of Scripture and thereby of God in their lives‖ (p. 38). From the above we see the context of the message of Jonah and that could answer some questions lingering on in the mind of some researchers and authors. However, the consideration of Jonah as a midrash clears so much confusions. We shall consider Jonah now as theological midrash.