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Jonah 1
We have lately shown, that at this time the Assyrians had made their power felt in Israel, and that certain relations subsisted between them and the Israelites, which must have made them well known to each other. Indeed, if Colonel Rawlinson’s interpretation of the black obelisk be correct, the figures of the Israelites and inscriptions regarding their gifts of homage, already existed among the sculptures of Nineveh, which “great city” was assuredly well known to most of them from report, and to many of them personally, from visits paid on political or commercial business.
It was not, therefore, from unacquaintance with the people, or from the idea of visiting a remote foreign city being strange to him, that Jonah received with dismay the command to repair to Nineveh, and proclaim its approaching destruction; but it may be that he feared peril to himself from delivering a message like this in the great metropolis of a proud and powerful people. He did not remonstrate, but, being a man apparently of a dogged and refractory temper, he determined in his own mind not to execute the command he had received. He left the country, indeed; but, instead of proceeding eastward, he hurried down to Joppa, and took his passage in the first ship that was to sail, in order to flee across the western sea. Flee from what? Avowedly, “from the presence of the Lord.” That he could entertain so gross a conception of the Lord, whose servant he was, affords most lamentable evidence of the lowered notions of the Divine character and attributes which were entertained by the best instructed minds, in the presence of the corrupted religion and maimed observances of the northern kingdom. He was, however, doomed to learn something more of God than he had known before. That God sent after the ship a tremendous storm; and the danger was so imminent, that, after doing all in their power to retain the mastery of the vessel, the sailors concluded, with a superstition still common among seafaring men, that they were pursued by an angry God, on account of some guilty person in the ship. Him they resolved to detect by lot; and when the lot fell upon Jonah, he confessed that he believed the storm to be sent upon them on his account, by the God from whose face he fled; and he advised them to rid the ship of him, by casting him into the sea. Although this had been their object in casting lots, the honest sailors were still unwilling to act upon it, and made one great effort more to bring the ship to land; but, finding all they could do unavailing, they cast the prophet into the sea, which forthwith ceased its raging. But the runaway prophet was not to be drowned. The Lord, who had prepared the storm, prepared also a great fish to swallow him up—not to destroy him, but to afford him refuge from the water, and to give him a passage to the shore from which he had embarked. Jonah remained three days and nights in the stomach of the fish, until he had, in that strange and comfortless position, been brought to a better state of mind; and then, but not before, the Lord impelled the fish to cast him up upon the sea-shore.
Now, we must not conceal that this circumstance of the fish has been treated with much scorn and some derision by unbelievers; and even believers have sometimes endeavored to avoid the difficulty by supposing the prophet was picked up by some ship that had a fish for its sign.
But where are these difficulties? Let us see.
The whale has not a swallow large enough for a man to pass through. Well, but the text does not say that the fish was a whale, but “a great fish;” and although a whale is mentioned in the reference to this passage which our Savior makes in Mat_12:40, this name, particularly when collated with the original narrative, is to be understood not as the name of any one fish in particular, but as a common name for all the larger inhabitants of the deep. Until, therefore, it shall be proved that there is no great fish capable of swallowing a man entire, the objection is equally puerile and unsound. Besides, as it strikes us, it has been too hastily assumed, from the dimensions of a fish’s throat in a state of collapse when dead; what it can or cannot swallow. The living throat is doubtless capable of much expansion. Indeed, we are certain this is the fact; for we have often seen taken from the bellies of large fish, other fish entire, and so large, that no one unacquainted with the fact, and seeing them apart, would be ready to believe that the latter had been swallowed by the former. Since the days of Bochart, it has generally been supposed that “the great fish” may have been some species of shark; and it is known that entire human bodies have been found in some fishes of this kind.
Under this explanation, the objection that there have been any whales in the Mediterranean, loses its force. But the alleged fact is, after all, not true. There is evidence of whales being sometimes found in the Mediterranean, though certainly far more rarely than in the ocean. At the very place from which Jonah sailed—Joppa, now Jaffa—there was displayed for many ages, in one of its pagan temples, the huge bones of a species of whale, which the local legends pretended to be those of the sea-monster which, at that place, was slain by Perseus for the deliverance of Andromeda. An eminent naturalist gives other instances: “Procopius mentions a huge sea-monster in the Propontis, taken during his prefecture of Constantinople, in the thirty-sixth year of Justinian (A.D. 562), after having destroyed vessels, at certain intervals, for more than fifty years. Rondoletius enumerates several whales stranded or taken on the coasts of the Mediterranean…. In the Syrian seas, the Belgian pilgrim Lavaers, on his passage from Malta to Palestine, incidentally mentions a ‘Tonynvisch,’ which he further denominates an ‘oil fish,’ longer than the vessel, leisurely swimming along, and which, the seamen said, prognosticated bad weather. On the island of Zerbi, close to the African coast, the late commander Davies, R.N., found the bones of a cachalot whale on the beach. Shaw mentions an orca more than sixty feet long, stranded at Algiers; and the late Admiral Ross Donelly saw one in the Mediterranean, near the island of Albaran. There are, besides, numerous sharks of the largest species in the seas of the Levant, and also in the Arabian Gulf and the Red Sea, as well as cetacea, and two species of halicore or dugong, which are herbivorous animals, intermediate between whales and seals.” Note: Colonel C. Hamilton Smith: Art. Whale, in Cyclopaedia of Biblical Literature. After this, and after what we have stated as to the swallow of fishes, Jonah’s fish might possibly be a whale, if any one wishes thus to limit the signification of the word employed. In that case, it may not have been necessary for the fish to swallow the prophet at all; for in the mouth of the common whale there is a cavity as large as a room, in which he might have been retained with less discomfort to himself than in the stomach of any fish.
Another objection—that a man could not live in the stomach of a fish—is answered by the fact, that the animal stomach has no power upon living substances; and one who received no injury from the fish before being swallowed, would remain alive for a considerable time, unless suffocated in so uncongenial a situation and element. In fact, suffocation in any case was the real danger; and to meet this, there is a sufficient answer in the fact, that the Lord prepared the fish, and provided such a fish as was suited to the purpose in view. It was the Lord’s doing, and evidently miraculous. If one disbelieves miracles altogether, it is useless to contend with him about this one; but if he does believe in any miracles, he will see nothing too hard for the Lord in all this; and he will not suppose it more difficult for Him to preserve Jonah from suffocation in the mouth or stomach of a fish, than to preserve the three Hebrew youths from harm “in the midst of the burning fiery furnace.”