The book of Jonah tells the story of a disobedient prophet who, being swallowed by a whale (or a “big fish”) and spewing up on the shore, reluctantly brought the reprobate city of Nineveh to repentance. The clear teaching of the Bible is that, yes, Jonah was indeed swallowed by a whale (or a large fish).
The biblical account of Jonah is often criticized by skeptics for its miraculous content. These miracles include the following events:
• God summons and dissipates a storm (1:4–16).
• A huge fish swallows the prophet after his ship’s crew throws him into the sea (1:17).
• Jonah survives in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights, or dies and is resurrected, depending on how you interpret the text (1:17).
• The fish vomits Jonah onto the shore at God’s command (2:10).
• God appoints a pumpkin to grow quickly to provide shade for Jonah (4:6).
• A worm is appointed by God to attack and wither the gourd (4:7).
• God summons a scorching wind to make Jonah uncomfortable (4:8).
God’s use of a whale or a large fish as Jonah’s means of transportation would surely catch Nineveh’s attention, given the prominence of Dagon worship in that particular area of the ancient world. Dagon was a fish-god who enjoyed popularity among the pantheons of Mesopotamia and the eastern Mediterranean coast. He is mentioned several times in the Bible in connection with the Philistines (Judges 16:23–24; 1 Samuel 5:1–7; 1 Chronicles 10:8–12). Images of Dagon have been found in palaces and temples in Nineveh and throughout the region. In some cases he was represented as a man dressed with a fish. In others, he was part man, part fish, a kind of newt.
Orientalist Henry Clay Trumbull observes: “What better omen, as a divinely sent messenger to Nineveh, could Jonah have had than to be thrown out of the mouth of a great fish, in the presence of witnesses, say on the coast of Phoenicia. where the fish-god was a favorite object of worship? Such an incident would inevitably have awakened the mercurial nature of Eastern observers, so that a crowd would be ready to follow the seemingly new avatar of the fish-god, proclaiming the story of his rising from the sea, as he headed on his mission to the city where the fish-god had his own center of worship” (“Jonah at Nineveh”, Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 2, No.1, 1892, p. 56).
Some scholars have speculated that Jonah’s appearance, bleached by the fish’s digestive acids, would have been a boon to their cause. It could be that the Ninevites had been greeted by a man whose skin, hair, and clothing were dyed a ghostly white, a man accompanied by a crowd of frenzied followers, many of whom had witnessed him being vomited into the water by a large fish. bank. Given the pooled nature of Jonah’s arrival, Nineveh’s repentance follows a logical progression.
Aside from the Bible, there is no conclusive historical proof that Jonah was ever swallowed by a fish and lived to tell the tale; however, there is some provocative corroborating evidence. In the third century a. C., a Babylonian priest/historian named Berosus wrote about a mythical creature named Oannes who, according to Berosus, emerged from the sea to give divine wisdom to men. Scholars generally identify this mysterious fish-man as an avatar of the Babylonian water god Ea (also known as Enki). The curious thing about Berosus’ account is the name he used: Oannes.
Berosus wrote in Greek during the Hellenistic period. Oannes is just a letter dropped from the Greek name Ioannes, which happens to be used in the Greek New Testament for Jonah. Regarding the removal of the I from Ioannes, Professor Trumbull writes: “In Assyrian inscriptions the J of foreign words becomes I, or disappears altogether; therefore Joannes, as the Greek representative of Jona, would appear in Assyrian as either Ioannes or Oannes” (ibid., p. 58).
Nineveh was an Assyrian city. What this essentially means is that Berosus wrote of a fish-man named Jonah who emerged from the sea to give man divine wisdom, a remarkable corroboration of the Hebrew account.
Berosus claimed to have relied on official Babylonian sources for his information. Nineveh was conquered by the Babylonians under King Nabopolassar in 612 BC. C., more than 300 years before Berosus. It is quite conceivable that the record of Jonah’s success at Nineveh was preserved in the writings available to Berossus. If so, it appears that Jonah was deified and mythologized over a period of three centuries, first by the Assyrians, who no doubt associated him with their fish-god, Dagon, and later by the Babylonians, who seem to have hybridized him with their own god. of the water, Ea.
Jonah was not an imaginary figure invented to play the role of a disobedient prophet, swallowed by a fish. He was part of the prophetic history of Israel. Jonah appears in the chronicles of Israel as the prophet who foretold Jeroboam II’s military successes against Syria (2 Kings 14:25). He is said to be the son of Amitai (cf. Jonah 1:1) from the town of Gath-hefer in lower Galilee. Flavius Josephus reiterates these details in his Antiquities of the Jews (chapter 10, paragraph 2).
The city of Nineveh was rediscovered after more than 2,500 years of darkness. It is now believed to have been the largest city in the world at the time of its demise (see Tertius Chandler’s Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth: An Historical Census). According to Sir Austen Henry Layard, who recounted the rediscovery of Nineveh, the circumference of Great Nineveh was “a journey of exactly three days,” as recorded in Jonah 3:3 (A Popular Account of Discoveries at Nineveh, New York: JC Derby, 1854, p 314). Before its rediscovery, skeptics scoffed at the possibility that such a large city could have existed in the ancient world. In fact, some skeptics denied the existence of Nineveh altogether. Its rediscovery in the mid-19th century proved to be a remarkable vindication of the Bible, which mentions Nineveh by name eighteen times and dedicates two entire books (Jonah and Nahum) to its fate.
It is interesting to note where the lost city of Nineveh was rediscovered. He was found buried under a pair of beads in the vicinity of Mosul in present-day Iraq. These mounds are known by their local names, Kuyunjik and Nabi Yunus. Nabi Yunus happens to be Arabic for “the prophet Jonah.”
As for the whale or great fish that swallowed Jonah, the Bible does not specify what kind of sea animal it was. The Hebrew phrase used in the Old Testament, gadowl dag, literally means “big fish.” The Greek used in the New Testament is këtos, which simply means “sea creature.” There are at least two species of Mediterranean marine life that are capable of swallowing a man whole. These are the sperm whale (also known as a sperm whale) and the great white shark. Both creatures are known to roam the Mediterranean and have been known to sailors since ancient times. Aristotle described both species in his 4th century BC Historia Animalium
Skeptics scoff at the miracles described in the book of Jonah as if there is no mechanism by which such events could occur. That is your bias. We are inclined, however, to believe that there is One who is capable of manipulating natural phenomena in such supernatural ways. We believe that He is the Creator of the natural realm and is therefore not circumscribed by it. We believe that God sent Jonah to Nineveh to bring about his repentance and that, in the process, Jonah was swallowed by a whale or a large fish.
Jesus spoke of Jonah’s trial as an actual historical event. He used it as a typological metaphor for his own crucifixion and resurrection: “As Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a great fish, so will the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. . The men of Nineveh will rise up in judgment with this generation and condemn it; for at the preaching of Jonah they repented, and now something greater than Jonah is here” (Matthew 12:40–41).
The evidence is such that any Christian should have confidence to believe that Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale, and any skeptic should think twice about dismissing the Jonah story as a fairy tale.