Big Ideas · 20 · Jonah
Survivors bear witness
Primo Levi wrote to testify for those who didn't survive. Moby-Dick is told by its lone survivor, rescued by a ship called the Rachel, an echo of Jeremiah's Rachel weeping for her children.
The whole biblical narrative is survivor literature.
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Both Levi and Melville drew deeply on the Bible and saw their works as a kind of new Bible. Isaiah was told to seal his teaching among his disciples. The prophetic writings became testimony that the disaster was foretold, and so the prophets could be trusted.
Bible reference: Jeremiah 31:15; Isaiah 8:16
Source: Why the Bible Began, pp. 327–329
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