The book of Yonah is unique for, alone of the Biblcal books, it revolves around the interactions of a Jewish prophet with the non-Jewish world. What's more, the prophet is obstinate and recalcitrant while the gentiles are uniformly good-hearted and obedient. This salient fact has not passed unnoticed by non-Jewish commentators and scholars, who, as much as they dislike the book of Esther, love the Book of Jonah. Many modern scholars are fond of the idea that along with Ruth, this book somehow represents a response to the narrow particularistic outlook that must have prevailed among the returning exiles as typified by Ezra's rejection of the Samaritans and his abhorrence of intermarriage. In their view Biblical works represent disparate and sometimes dueling schools of thought and it is up to the reader to adopt or reject them as basis for personal philosophy. In itself this approach is not new for it can be traced to the Church Fathers who detested the book of Esther for its "Judaising" tendencies while extolling Jonah for its supposed criticism of the Jews and exultation of Gentiles. Ephrem Syrus, (306-373), had this to say about Yonah, "Praise be to God who mortified the Jews by the means of Gentiles". They found Esther, on the other hand, too viscerally Jewish, so anti-Gentile that even adherents of the "new Israel" coud not stomach it. They much preferred the saccharine religiousity of the Septuagint apocryphal version of Esther.
They found the book of Esther, at least its Hebrew parts, insufficiently religious. From the Catholic Encyclopedia, a revisionist view: A great many of the early Fathers clearly considered the entire work as inspired, although no one among them found it to his purpose to write a commentary on it. Its omission in some of the early catalogues of the Scriptures was accidental or unimportant. The first to reject the book was Luther, who declared that he so hated it that he wished that it did not exist (Table Talk, 59). His first followers wished only to reject the deuterocanonical parts, whereupon these, as well as other deuterocanonical parts of the Scriptures, were declared by the Council of Trent (Sess. IV, de Can. Scripturæ) to be canonical and inspired. With the rise of rationalism the opinion of Luther found many supporters. When modern rationalists argue that the Book of Esther is irreligious in character, unlike the other books of the Old Testament, and therefore to be rejected, they have in mind only the first or protocanonical part, not the entire book (the chapters imported from the Septuagint), which is manifestly religious. But, although the first (Hebrew) part is not explicitly religious, it contains nothing unworthy of a place in the Sacred Scriptures. And any way, as Driver points out (Introduc. to the Lit. of the Testament), there is no reason why every part of the Biblical record should show the "same degree of subordination of human interests to the spirit of God".
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