Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Time-locked applied to Jonah

Ok, I've given you all enough time to sort through at least part of Jonah, so here's the next installment of my study on Jonah.


Time-locked Perspective Applied to Jonah

Now that we have a good idea of how we are going about our study of Jonah from a time-locked perspective, let's dig into the process.

Information on Jonah is sparse. Outside of the actual book of Jonah, he is only mentioned once in the Old Testament. Even New Testament mentions do not shed any light on him other than to verify that Jesus viewed him as an actual historical figure and the events of the book to be historical.

Because information is nearly nonexistent, there is a lot of estimating, conjecturing, and uncertainty when trying to nail down just when Jonah prophesied, when the book was written, and who the original target audience was. Thankfully, the window that appears to be the time for all of this, does not greatly affect the time-locked message as the original target audience's spiritual condition remains constant throughout the whole window.

The questions to ask about Jonah, before even starting with verse 1:1, include:
1. Who was the author of Jonah?
2. Is Jonah (the prophet or the book) mentioned anywhere else in the Old Testament?
3. When was Jonah written?
4. When did the events of Jonah take place?
5. To whom was it written?
6. What was the spiritual condition of the original audience?
7. What Scripture was available to the original audience for interpretation?

Without giving away too much, I can confidently say that the time-locked message from Jonah depended greatly upon getting the date of the book right because of the original target audience. Now, the right date is actually a window of around 78 or so years, but we can safely place the book's writing after certain kings and before the exile. But, first the questions.

I'm going to break the section here so as to give anyone that is interested time to research the questions above. I will try to give you all a week before posting what I discovered.

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