Today’s study has seven steps.
1. Pray. As on previous days, confess your sins, invite God to your study and into your heart and, if time permits, worship him in song.
2. Read Jonah 1 slowly and list all the conversations and other instances of verbal and non-verbal communication. Analyze each of them carefully, from the standpoint of each side/party involved. You can learn a lot about characters and their relationships by analyzing the following features of their communications:
A. Information they give or withhold.
B. Types of sentences they use: declarative, interrogative, imperative, or exclamatory.
C. Function of each sentence. For example, a declarative sentence can be used to encourage, to threat, to warn, to gossip, to praise, etc. An interrogative sentence can serve the purpose of asking for and obtaining information, giving information without expecting an answer, raising interest or awareness, and so on. An imperative sentence can be a command, a request, a plea, an instruction, some advice, etc. Exclamatory sentences can be used to express a wide range of emotions and attitudes, both positive and negative. Pay special attention to the function of each sentence of the conversation because each one can reveal a lot about the characters involved, especially about their relationships and their attitudes, motives and intentions. However, be careful not to force a function on a sentence if it is not absolutely clear that this was the speaker’s intention.
D. Types of conversation and the character’s role in them: dialogue, debate, questioning, arguing, giving and receiving commands, etc. For example, there is a clear difference between giving and taking commands or between questioning and being questioned, and such differences can give us clues about someone's status, current position, attitudes, etc.
E. Emotions involved (where discernible).
F. Attitude towards the other side/party.
G. Tone of each conversation (where discernible).
H. Other nonverbal elements of communication, such as appearance, body language, rhythm of speech, etc. (where discernible).
4. Take detailed notes.
5. Review your previous notes about God and about other characters and their relationships and think about them in the light of today’s findings.
6. If analyzing all the conversations takes more time than you have in one day, divide the study into two or more days, repeating steps 1 and 3–7 each day.
7. Pray. Talk to God about what you’ve learned from his Word. Prayer should always be the culmination of a Bible study because fellowship with God is one of the main goals of studying Scripture.
If you have any questions, you can write them in the comments below or send me an email to matej@pbsi.online. Subscribe to our newsletter to get notified whenever we publish a new post (you can do so at the bottom of the page). Please share this post if you found it helpful and if you think it would help other Christians you know.
See you on the next post. Until then, enjoy God and his Word.
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