Jonah—Fact or Fiction? (1957) is a collection of 21 radio messages themed around the Book of Jonah. The eye-catching title of the book is in fact only the title of one of the messages; he does defend a literal view of Jonah, but it is not the main thrust of the book. The messages are straightforward and brief, and nearly all conclude on an evangelistic note. Because they were spoken on the radio, the style is very informal and easy to read.

If you are interested in a Christ-centered take on Jonah, this book covers a lot of the important issues about how Jonah points forward to Christ. I enjoyed going through these little sermons, and the devotional material is good; but my reading of the Hebrew Bible and scholarship on the Hebrew Bible makes it difficult not to take issue with some of his interpretations.

For theologically conservative evangelicals, DeHaan as an interpreter is a conventional, safe choice. His treatment of Jonah is consistently Christocentric. He defends verbal inspiration with gusto. He is fundamentalist in defending “literal” interpretations: “Faith in the literal account of Jonah is indispensable to salvation. To deny the story of Jonah as a literal record is to deny the literal Death and Resurrection of Christ” (p.74–75). He also shows too much concern, in my opinion, with the question of whether a “fish” or a “whale” ate Jonah, and the rather odd question of where the physical locations are of hell and heaven.

He treats Jonah almost exclusively in the light of the New Covenant: “The central theme of Jonah is the Gospel of the Death and Resurrection of Christ.” As such, there is basically no mention of the Jewish context of the book, let alone Jewish interpreters. Because he treats Jonah mainly as a type of Christ, his treatment of Jonah himself is not very sympathetic: he is “The Backslidden Preacher” in chapter 2, “The Sleeping Prophet” in chapter 3, and a “religious bigot” in chapter 21.

Because he mainly views Jonah as a type, the author does not stay very close to the text of Jonah in this book. Many whole messages are taken up with issues of how Jonah represents Christ in minute and tangential aspects. Some half a dozen chapters are mainly about Jesus. These are good, but I didn’t feel that I got to know Jonah very much in this book. From the mere mention of Sheol (שְׁאוֹל‎) in Jonah 2:2, we turn to three whole messages about the afterlife (ch. 10–12).

On that point, there are two interpretive surprises in this book. The first is that DeHaan writes that Jonah literally died in the whale and rose again after three days.

I called to you from the land of the dead [Sheol],
and Lord, you heard me!

Jonah 2:2, NLT

I have not heard of another commentator saying that Jonah literally died and rose again. This would make Jonah less of a “type of Christ” and something more akin to a predecessor; types of Christ are usually figurative. David employs the word Sheol in describing what God had redeemed him from in Psalm 18:5 and Psalm 30:3.

Lest there be any doubt, commentators universally regard Jonah 2:2 as figurative language for a person being near to death, but not dead: “Sheol, the unseen world, which the belly of the fish resembled” (Jamieson-Fausset-Brown); Jonah was “was as shut up in the grave” (Poole); he cried from the belly of hell, “that is, out of the belly of the fish, which was as a grave to him, as Jarchi observes; where he lay . . . as one dead, and being given up for dead” (Gill); “he was now in the fishes belly as in a grave or place of darkness” (Geneva Study Bible); “The expression is a poetical figure used to denote the danger of death” (Keil and Delitzsch); “the place of the dead, amongst whom, when cast into the sea, he seemed already to be numbered” (Cambridge Bible).

The other surprise of the book is DeHaan’s strong opinion that Jesus died on Wednesday and rose on Saturday. Without getting much into his argument, he takes “three days and three nights” as literally denoting 72 hours, both for Jonah in the whale, and Jesus in his tomb. DeHaan dismisses outright the idea that partial days are treated as whole days, which is the usual explanation of why Jesus died on Friday, but rose on Sunday, the so-called “third day”. His grounds for dismissing this idea is that it comes from the Talmud, and is “not found in the Bible” (p.121). Surely this is a faulty way of dismissing Jewish culture which is not irrelevant as background for the Bible.

My last quibble is about DeHaan’s understanding of the social impact of the gospel, a tangent that comes up in a discussion of salvation. The positive social influence of the gospel was a Christian culture war concundrum during the twentieth century, at least in America: how much energy should Christians put into solving social problems? DeHaan writes, “It is no part of the mission of Christ to introduce social and political changes in the world” (p.131). The Christians in the Book of Acts, the Protestant Reformers, the radical reformation, the Methodist movement, and the Salvation Army had not “gone soft” on the gospel, but they had sweeping social and political impacts. Arguably, all of these movements also disproportionately impacted the poor. Our Christianity should benefit the needy both directly and indirectly—that is, both through our material efforts, and by means of spiritual transformation that improves their lives. DeHaan writes earlier in the book about sin, “We are social beings, inseparably interdependent upon each other, and even our personal acts have their social results. No man can sin by himself” (p.28). His position seems to be, then, that sin has social results, but the gospel doesn’t! The position is indefensible; rather, it should not be controversial to say that the gospel itself has a social impact. Christians in other nations do not apologize for taking care of the poor, the needy, the immigrants, the helpless, the forgotten, and it is a mark of our twisted conscience that American evangelicals feel the need to make excuse any time they give a beggar a dollar.