What’s really eating Jonah?

Was Jonah swallowed by a fish or a whale? 

As far as the sailors were concerned, Jonah had drowned. For the narrator, however, it is the drowned man who remains the chief interest. So he leaves the mariners to worship—not their old gods which had proved helpless, but Yahweh, the God of the prophet who had saved them—and turns our attention back to Jonah.

And the LORD appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. (v. 17)

In the same way that human beings designate people for particular tasks, so the Lord is said to ‘designate’ or ‘appoint’ a great fish to swallow Jonah. Yahweh as king deploys a creature which obeys him unquestioningly in order to save a rebellious man from drowning.

This same word, ‘appoint’, which could equally be translated ‘employ’ or ‘nominate’, is found also in 4:6, referring to the plant, in 4:7, referring to the worm, and in 4:8, referring to the sultry east wind. On each occasion, the creature responds obediently to the voice of its Creator. The contrast with Jonah’s response is clear, and the irony plain.




Animal obedience

The obedience of animals contrasting with the disobedience of humankind is a theme frequently mentioned in Scripture. The prophet in Isaiah 1:3, for example, contrasts the domestic animals who know their owner with God’s people who fail to know him:

               The ox knows its owner,
                  and the ass its master’s crib;
               but Israel does not know,
                  my people do not understand.

In his, Gospel Luke reflects early Christian traditions. Building on this verse from Isaiah, the evangelist speaks of Jesus Christ being laid in a manger.3 Christian tradition has it that he was born in the place where ox and ass were kept and fed, for they, at least, knew who he was.

Another example of the creation being obedient to the word of its Creator can be found in Jeremiah 8:7:

               Even the stork in the heavens
                  knows her times;
               and the turtledove, swallow and crane
                  keep the time of their coming;
               but my people know not
                  the ordinance of the LORD.

Even the mighty ocean knows its bounds:

           Do you not fear me? says the LORD;
             Do you not tremble before me?
           I placed the sand as the bound for the sea,
             a perpetual barrier which it cannot pass;
           though the waves toss, they cannot prevail,
             though they roar, they cannot pass over it.

There is a similar passage in Job 38:8–11:

           Or who shut in the sea with doors,
             when it burst forth from the womb;
           when I made clouds its garment,
             and thick darkness its swaddling band,
           and prescribed bounds for it,
             and set bars and doors,
           and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther,
             and here shall your proud waves be stayed’?

In other stories, we meet an ass more accustomed to recognizing God’s word than a prophet, birds serving as messengers of God, and lions being obedient to the heavenly messenger.

In the book of Jonah, the story-teller shows us a God who, in appointing the fish, the plant, the worm and the wind, intends to remain in dialogue with his wayward creature, Jonah. In the depths of the fish’s belly, the belly of Sheol, Jonah is protected from the noise and clamour of all that had threatened him. His safe haven is not unlike the place he sought in the bowels of the ship, a place of refuge far away (he hoped) from the demands of the world and the call of God.

As we shall see, the wriggling prophet is not going to be let off the hook of God’s call. But might there be a reason why God chose a great fish to swallow him? Had he been rescued by a heavenly chariot, for example, such as the one in which Elijah had been taken to heaven, the wrong signal would have been given.

We can see that Elijah’s circumstances at this point were entirely different from Jonah’s. The Lord could have appointed a great bird to transport him to dry land; instead, he appointed the great fish. The Lord does not usually protect us from the consequences of our own choices and actions. In his faithfulness and graciousness towards us, Yahweh comes with us into the consequences of our choices in order to save us there. Jonah had chosen the sea as his escape route; it is there that the Lord awaits him.

The narrator is careful to focus on Jonah’s command to be thrown headlong into the sea. His disobedience in the face of God’s call was guaranteed to propel him in a downward direction. This time, however, as if to indicate that his descent had been halted, he is not described as going ‘down’ but as being unceremoniously ‘swallowed’ by a mysterious fish. Jonah had lost the initiative and God had yet more cards to play.

Jonah was to discover for himself the impossibility of escaping God’s presence. To learn this he needed to be in the place of human powerlessness, ultimately the place of death. Salvation is not, in the first instance, the Lord God taking us ‘out’ of our mess, but God meeting us ‘within’ it. Jonah will find salvation within his watery grave, for there, in the place which eloquently speaks of death, God will meet him.

An attractive rabbinical interpretation of God ‘preparing’ or ‘appointing’ a great fish to rescue Jonah is that the fish had been prepared for this moment during the six days of creation. God was preparing, not only to save Jonah’s life but also to teach him some of the ultimate secrets of God’s ways with his creation. Salvation is his design for all creatures, whether for a nation whose evil had come up before him or a prophet whose evil resulted in his descent from the presence of God.




The great fish

 And this is the tragedy of the Book of Jonah, that a Book which is made the means of one of the most sublime revelations of truth in the Old Testament should be known to most only for its connection with a whale.

Although the text speaks not of a whale but of a ‘great fish’ (1:17; 2:1, 10), it is surely the case that Jonah has become one of the best-known characters in the Bible because he was swallowed by a great fish which spewed him out after three days and three nights in its belly. In some respects, there are similarities between this story and others such as Daniel in the lions’ den and Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego being thrown into the fiery furnace. These are all very threatening places to be! From ancient Babylonian sources, we know that both incarceration with lions and being thrown into the fiery furnace were forms of punishment used by powerful regimes to enforce their will.

There are, however, no known instances of a person being swallowed by a great fish and spewed out alive three days later. It is well known that some fish will eat human flesh, that others are capable of swallowing large objects and that some large fish has swallowed a human being.

On such rare occasions when the poor victim has been removed from their fishy grave, they have been either horribly dead or unconscious and near to death. This contrasts sharply with Jonah, who is portrayed throughout his ordeal as fully conscious and coherent, both mentally and emotionally, being able both to recite or compose a penitential psalm and offer thanksgiving in the worship of the Lord, before being vomited up by the huge creature.




In ancient folklore, the theme of individuals being swallowed by great sea monsters and surviving is commonly found. Those heroes who miraculously escape death gain new status among human beings. Nonetheless, such survival is unparalleled in known human history. Humankind has long yearned for power to overcome death as such folklore testifies. Indeed, Jonah’s sojourn in the belly of the fish soon became linked in Jewish thought with the hope of resurrection:

 For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so will the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nin’eveh will arise at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here.




When Jesus used this episode from Jonah as an image of his own death and resurrection, it is clearly in the context that he himself was the One ‘greater than Jonah’. The whole tenor of Jonah’s story is very different from that of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus came to fulfil the word of God while, as we have seen all too clearly, Jonah seeks to flee from it.

Having elected the sea as his escape route, it is the great fish which becomes the place of encounter between Jonah and the God he is afraid of meeting. Ultimately, the prophet’s flight becomes a route to discovering that he had set himself an even more impossible task than the one to which he had been called.
God pursues him to the very gates of death and beyond as if to say that by virtue of his presence alone the gates of repentance are always open. In the absence of God repentance is illusory, and without repentance and forgiveness, there is no new creation. It is from within the ‘belly of Sheol’, in the depths of the sea, that Jonah first speaks to his Lord. At his weakest point, he now discovers that God’s presence embraces even death itself. He cannot divest himself of Yahweh, the great ‘I AM’.

Remarkable though the story of Jonah is, as with other Old Testament characters it is the Lord’s gracious forgiveness of him which leads to his restoration. There are pale reflections in the Scriptures of the One who is to come, but the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ is of a wholly different order from the restoration of Jonah.



Was the ‘great fish’ historical?

Generally speaking, as we read the Bible we may have a sense that what we read is historically reliable. That being said, ‘It is safe to say that the ancient world did not regard historical writing in the same way that we view it in the modern era, where history is a large scientific record of verifiable events, governed by evidence and proof.’

This obliges us to dig a little deeper into the kind of history we read in the Bible. In terms of this ‘modern’ understanding of history, facts and events in themselves are neutral; they have no meaning in themselves. Their meaning is derived from how people perceive and interpret them. How we interpret facts or events depends on our perspective, beliefs and presuppositions.




For example, the various ways in which the actual historical events of the Second World War are presented to schoolchildren in England, France, Germany, Israel, Russia, Japan and America will vary. What is more, the interpretation of these events may be challenged within living memory. Modern ‘history’ may even be rewritten or denied when a new political regime comes to the fore.
On the other hand, the recording of the history we encounter in the Bible is not motivated by political, economic or social factors, but is always theologically and morally orientated.

History is viewed in the Bible as being under God’s control. Biblical history is therefore confessional; it acknowledges God’s intervention and leads, first, to praise for what he has done and, second, to faith in the God who is revealed in the event. Scripture itself, however, asserts that the Creator God is greater than human history. He engages with it, intervenes in it and reveals himself through it; he shapes it and uses it as an instrument of his saving purposes for individuals and nations. But this God is not limited by human history, for, ultimately, history will end when the creative and redemptive work of the Lord God is complete.

The Lord God is the beginning and the end of history, the Alpha and the Omega. This theological statement urges us to see human history as dependent on and relative to the ultimate purposes of the Creator.

It is not the prime purpose of sacred Scripture to provide a modern historical record of events in the Ancient Near East. That Scripture can be a reliable source of historical events is not here in dispute, but, more importantly, its pages witness the hand of God in the things that happen to people and nations. The discernment of this is less connected to a meticulous knowledge of the events in question than it is to the eye of faith. What does the prophetic writer ‘see’ or perceive of God’s hand at work in this or that circumstance? What does the Spirit of God reveal in this or that event? God’s call will inform the prophetic writer’s perception and shape his understanding. Thus the authority of Scripture derives less from the historicity of all it contains and more from the divinely inspired interpretations of events in which the nature of Yahweh is discerned. ‘God is his own interpreter.’



Much has been written concerning the ‘great fish’. From the early Christian period, there were different views surrounding the nature of this little book. While some scholars such as Origen (AD 185–254) favoured an allegorical approach, others such as Augustine (AD 354–430) favoured a more literal approach. Both approaches are grounded in profound reverence for sacred Scripture as the Word of God.

Perhaps it is this shared belief in sacred Scripture which can offer us a clue. The infinite, divine word to human beings must be presented in terms which finite human beings of all generations, cultures and languages can approach, comprehend and relate to. We may, therefore, expect it to reflect the gloriously rich diversity of human culture and literary form. In its written form the Word of God is for all people at all times and of all cultures. It does not belong exclusively to one particular social or religious group. While, therefore, the written Word of God will contain, among many other things, both history and allegory, even these two great literary forms are inadequate to the task of revealing the eternal, sacred Word of our Creator. Ultimately, Jesus Christ, is the Word made flesh.

It is in the face of this greater reality that we hold our magnifying glass over the verses in Jonah which tell us of the great fish. Of the forty-eight verses in this little book, it is the three verses in which the fish is mentioned which have exercised and dominated interpreters’ minds for centuries.

The division of opinion between the historicists and allegorists can be sharp, each finding evidence to support their case. Nonetheless, in our shared call not only to hear but to obey the word of God, we need, perhaps, to remind ourselves that the book of Jonah does not reach its climax by asking the reader, ‘Do you believe that the great fish was historical or allegorical?’ Rather, God asks, ‘And should not I pity Nin’eveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?’ (4:11). Centuries later Jesus would demonstrate that God’s pity for the great city of Jerusalem was the key question for his people.


Canaanite mythology

There is a significant irony in the provision of the ‘great fish’ which we need to look at before moving on. Canaanite mythology, which was prevalent in Israel in the eighth century BC, contains stories of the god Baal in combat with the great sea monster called Leviathan.

The stories speak of a primaeval conflict surrounding the creation of the cosmos. There is evidence in Scripture that Isaiah, for example, obviously knew these ancient stories and made use of them in such a way as to link Yahweh’s redemptive acts of the exodus event with God’s creation of his people Israel.

Images from this familiar mythology were used to speak of the incomparability of Yahweh’s supreme creative and redemptive power to save. It is true that the specific Hebrew terms associated with this Ancient Near Eastern mythology, for example, the words ‘Rahab’ and ‘Leviathan’, are not found in the text of Jonah, but without doubt, the theme of Yahweh’s incomparable power is evident throughout.

Whereas the pagan mythologies show the forces of the sea, the great sea monsters like Rahab and the power of death threatening not only humankind but even the gods themselves, in Jonah we find God playing with these forces of chaos. In this most incredibly wonderful short story God is not in combat with hostile mythological forces. Neither the sea nor the great fish is hostile to God’s will: they are wholly subservient to his call. They are his obedient servants in the struggle to bring the prophet, who in his own person embodied hostility and rebellion towards God, to new birth.

The great fish had long since served or worshipped Yahweh. An old rabbinic saying runs like this: ‘God spends eight hours administering the universe, eight hours reading the Torah and eight hours playing with Leviathan.’


The sea

The influence of Canaanite mythology concerning the sea is also seen in Scripture. In so far as it was the home of the sea monster, Leviathan, the sea symbolized the threat of the re-emergence of chaos.

In biblical terms, that threat of chaos and evil is ultimately hollow. The parting of the Red Sea, allowing God’s people an escape route out of slavery in Egypt, demonstrates God’s ultimate authority over the power of evil and chaos to oppose his will. The great fish in the book of Jonah was not Leviathan. Ironically, the one who was hostile to God’s creative goodness was Jonah, the ‘dove’! Far from threatening God’s purposes, it was the great sea monster which was to be the means of the prophet’s salvation.

Cast into the sea, Jonah was lost in a morass of chaos and evil. By accumulating the images of storm and sea, the story-teller is saying that things were as bad as they possibly could be for Jonah. He was lost. Moreover, he had brought all this evil upon himself. The prophet Micah speaks of God’s delight in steadfast love and compassion, and his unwillingness to retain his anger forever.

He refers to forgiveness as God casting ‘all our sins into the depths of the sea’.16 Jonah sank into the depths of the sea weighted down by his sin. But even in the face of all this, the writer asserts that God is in control of all the evil forces mustered against the prophet, including his own disobedience.

Indeed, God plays with these very forces, using them to affect his will. In the depths of the ocean, the great fish will prove to be the very place where Jonah will meet his God. Can Jonah, perhaps symbolizing God’s people and storming in all his chaotic hostility against God, now be tamed? Centuries later Paul would write,

 For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Swallowed

The word ‘swallow’ or ‘gulp’ emphasizes the speed of the action: Jonah disappeared in an instant. At this point, the reader is by no means intended to think in terms of his survival. Elsewhere, the same imagery is used in the glorious city of Samaria. She was gulped down as if by a person eating a ripe fig.18 In the language of the Psalms the word is often rendered ‘swallowed up’ or ‘devoured’, and means annihilated.19 The Hebrew word can also mean ‘destroyed’.

When describing the horror of the Babylonian invasion of Jerusalem in 587 BC and the subsequent exile, the prophet Jeremiah uses a striking metaphor:

      Nebuchadrez’zar the king of Babylon has devoured me,
         he has crushed me;
      he has made me an empty vessel,
         he has swallowed me like a monster;
      he has filled his belly with my delicacies,
         he has rinsed me out.

And
         … I will punish Bel in Babylon,
           and take out of his mouth what he has swallowed.
         The nations shall no longer flow to him

As in a fairy story where the monstrous dragon devours the heroine, Babylon had swallowed Israel. In the way, a person might empty a container full of delicious delicacies, so Babylon had wiped Jerusalem clean off the face of the earth. Using the language of Babylonian and Canaanite mythology, Jeremiah speaks of Babylon as tannîn, translated as ‘dragon’ (RV), ‘serpent’ (NIV) and ‘monster’ (RSV) on account of her cruel destruction of both people and land during the period of exile (597–582 BC). But, he claims, God would cause the dragon to spew out Israel. Then the little nations would no more flow to Babylon like plankton into the jaws of a huge sea creature.

This is the powerful language of imagery and metaphor. Babylon is not literally a great monster and she does not literally swallow Israel, but the imagery vividly focused the horror of exile. Something fundamentally disordered was destroying creation. The metaphor of Babylon as a dragon highlights the inhuman and terrifying cruelty of her triumph over little nations.

Devastation and exile had been actual, literal, historical events. Graphic poetic imagery colours the language used here by Jeremiah to describe these events, offering a different kind of perspective from that provided by a historical account. The language gives a feeling of the sheer horror and fear experienced in those cruel days.

As we have already seen, no date is given in the book by which we may be certain of its provenance, but God’s call and Jonah’s response to God were real. God calls men and women to love and serve him is abundantly plain from Scripture and personal experience.

Equally plain is the reality that many of us resist or are simply deaf to God’s call. The fact that we do not always hear God does not mean that we are not being called by him. It simply means that humankind is most often either deaf or resistant to God’s word. When speaking of people’s sheer stubbornness, north-country folk often say, ‘There’s none so deaf as them as winna hear!’

Jonah is a powerful image of our resistance to God. At first sight, being devoured by the great fish could appear to be a punishment. After all, what kind of God would tolerate such open opposition? But the narrator twinkles with humour, for this great fish was actually appointed by God as part of his rescue operation. Unlike Jonah, the gigantic fish meekly obeys the call of its Creator. We read that the prophet was swallowed by the fish, but we know that before being consumed by the fish, he was consumed by opposition to God on the matter of the pagans.

His hostility towards the Lord on this matter called into question his capacity to be faithful to God in any other way, for it betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of Yahweh. Most especially, being swallowed by opposition to God’s call and consumed by the fish refer to his journey towards death reaching its climax. God’s call had invited Jonah to expand his heart. His refusal signifies his sin and rebellion. Jonah’s descent to Sheol in the belly of the fish speaks of his death.


Three days and three nights

Particular stress is laid on the phrase ‘three days and three nights’ as if to emphasize the length of Jonah’s internment. The only other place where this exact expression is used in Scripture is Samuel 30:12. Here, an Egyptian is found by the wayside.

He had not eaten bread or drunk water for ‘three days and three nights’. He was approaching death and his survival was in doubt. In realistic terms, ‘three days and three nights’ in the belly of the fish denoted death. The longer Jonah remained inside the fish, the less was his likelihood of survival. When John tells us of Jesus going to Bethany and finding that his friend, Lazarus, had been in the tomb for four days, he is underscoring the fact that Lazarus was dead. A similar point is made by Luke: since it was three days since Jesus had been crucified, any hopes of deliverance were dashed.

The prophet Hosea depicts the shallowness of Israel’s hope that their repentance would persuade God to revive them after two days, by raising them up on the third day. The context shows that the prophet was referring to Israel’s complete misapprehension of the depth of her need for radical repentance.

The people were unaware of the extent of their alienation from God and, while Yahweh longed to restore them, he could not be manipulated by acts of repentance which had no depth.

In Jonah, the expression ‘three days and three nights’ could simply mean ‘a few days’. On the other hand, the link with ‘Sheol’ in 2:2 might suggest that the phrase echoed a mythological idea concerning the length of time a journey took to get from the land of the living to Sheol. Taken together, this combination of images associated with death in 1:17 points to the prophet’s death. Yet the actual words are missing; it does not say, ‘And Jonah died.’ Instead this omission, combined with the phrase ‘three days and three nights’, creates an expectation: death is not the end of Jonah.


Nixon, R. A. (2003). The Message of Jonah: Presence in the Storm. (A. Motyer, Derek Tidball, Eds.) (pp. 124–135). England: Inter-Varsity Press.