Difficulties in the Bible: 17. Jonah and the Whale
The story of Jonah and "the whale" has for many years been a butt of ridicule with unbelievers, and the cause of not a little perplexity with those who are "unlearned and unstable." The story is quite generally discredited by the destructive critics as being unhistorical. They attempt to explain it as allegory or parable. Those who desire to discredit the full inspiration and absolute veracity of the Bible have again and again assured us with a great show of scientific knowledge that such is the structure of a whale's mouth and the configuration of his throat that it would be impossible for a fullgrown man either to pass through the sieve in its mouth or the narrow orifice of its throat, to say nothing of his coming out again alive and whole.
What shall we say to all this?
First of all, let us notice the fact that the Bible nowhere says that Jonah was swallowed by a whale. In Jonah 1:17 we are told that Jehovah "prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights." There is no mention here whatever of this great fish being a whale, with its peculiarly constructed mouth and throat. It may have been either a fish altogether prepared for the occasion, or a fish already existing providentially sent around for the purpose God had in view. It is true that in Jesus' reference to this historical event in Matthew 12:40 in the Authorized and the Revised versions He said that Jonah was three days and three nights in "the whale's belly"; but we read in the margin of the Revised Version that the Greek of the word rendered "whale" is "sea monster." One cannot help wondering why the translators should continue to put "whale" in the text if the Greek word means "sea monster," and it certainly does. In the Septuagint translation of the book of Jonah, "a great fish" is rendered by a Greek adjective meaning "great" and by the same word that is used in Matthew 12:40 and translated "whale." The word whale was in the mind of the translators and not in the word spoken by Jesus, so in neither the Old Testament nor the New Testament account is it said that Jonah was swallowed by a whale, but by a great fish or sea monster. These scholarly critics have spent much labor in proving the absurdity of something God did not say.
