Mirror-Reading Parallel And Apocalyptic Books
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I had a post ready to go for the Book of Jonah, but on review, I decided it wasn't a very probable mirror-reading. It had already been one of the more difficult books I've tried to mirror-read, and it remains stubbornly so. Whether it's fictional or not is almost irrelevant when it comes to mirror-reading. Either way, I believe it's a parallel to a situation in Israel at the time it was written. The question is, what is the situation that it was parallel to? The internal evidence points in a few different directions and, as of right now, I don't feel I have a good enough grasp of the Old Testament in order to navigate those waters (no pun intended).
What makes parallel books like Jonah and perhaps Job, difficult is that there is an extra layer that you have to go through in order to mirror-read them. It's like the "charms" screen on Microsoft Windows. It's just a screen you have to go through in order to get to the desktop. Likewise, with Jonah, one must figure out what it is parallel to before figuring out the situational context.
I haven't mirror-read any apocalyptic books of the Bible yet, and I'm not keen on trying at this time either. The symbolic nature of them acts as an extra layer that I would have to go through in order to mirror-read them. I would take a stab at one in the New Testament but the only one in the NT is Revelation, which has more chapters than what I feel like tackling right now.
So, although I'm disappointed that my mirror-reading of Jonah was shattered, I enjoyed discovering the additional insight of how parallels and apocalyptic books relate to mirror-reading.