For the next few posts, BibleDig's getting fishy.
For a lot of people, the story about Jonah is hard to swallow. Hopping on a boat, being tossed overboard, and downed by a man-eating creature? C'mon.
So, I decided to do a little sleuthing and get to the bottom of this deep sea mystery and see what kind of evidence I could find about what scarfed the wayward prophet and whether it's feasible that a something like that could happen in real life.
To determine if a human being could be swallowed alive by a large sea creature, we have to ask what kind of creature did the swallowing in the first place. Details about the mysterious creature that ingested Jonah as he sank beneath the waters of the Mediterranean are tantalizingly scarce.
Start off by reading Jonah. It's short, and it's really funny. If you'd like to see a visual summary of the story, check out the BibleDig chart.
The Whale in the Bible
Only four short references to the reluctant prophet’s unlikely rescuer appear in the book of Jonah. All we are told is that God, “appointed a great fish to swallow Jonah” (1:17), that “Jonah was in the stomach of the fish three days and three nights” (1:17), that “Jonah prayed to the LORD his God from the stomach of the fish” (2:1), and that after those three days and nights God, “commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah up onto the dry land” (2:10).
Jesus makes an additional reference to this creature as he draws of an analogy between Jonah’s experience and his own impending death. Matthew records Christ saying that, “just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matt. 12:40).
Is the Whale the Tale?
When you think about Jonah, you think about the whale. But, making that automatic connection my distract us from the point of the story. Judging from these few mentions, Jonah has been clearly upstaged by the attention paid to this aquatic member of his supporting cast.
The scant references to this creature in the Jonah narrative and in Scripture as a whole indicate the relative insignificance of this creature to both the plot and the point of this story. In the story, the creature is merely one among many tools at God’s disposal for accomplishing his will. It is little more than a gigantic sea-born dog that the Lord dispatches to fetch his wayward prophet like a far-flung stick from a corner of his backyard.
The Lord appoints this underwater beast to swallow Jonah, then later orders it spit Jonah out on dry land. While the nations surrounding God’s people feared the sea and in some cases revered its inhabitants as gods, the God of Jonah commands both with unquestioned authority. The part of this man-eating creature is to underscore the power of “the LORD God of heaven who made the sea and the dry land” (1:9).
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Next time... clues from the Bible about what Jonah's underwater taxi might have been...
