Chapter Two

1–11. The swallowing of the prophet Jonah by the great whale and Jonah’s prayer.

Jonah 2:1. And the Lord appointed a great whale to swallow Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of the whale three days and three nights. The fact of the prophet Jonah’s three-day stay in the belly of the great whale is the central point of his book, around which all the rest of its content is grouped; at the same time, because of its nature, this event appears to extend beyond all bounds of belief. Met with perplexity or fierce attack, it has been subjected to various kinds of reinterpretation and distortion perhaps more than any other place in Scripture. In light of this, we shall dwell upon it at greater length. The chief efforts of critics are directed toward demonstrating the impossibility of the fact of the three-day stay of Jonah in the belly of the whale as an actually historical event, and to prove that it must be considered a fiction. To achieve this goal, attempts are made to present the whole book as a fictional work with some moral purpose, and to equate it in literary form sometimes to a parable, sometimes to a fable, sometimes to an allegory. Without pausing to discuss how successfully Jonah’s book can be identified with the above-mentioned and biblically occurring forms of creative fiction (see the Introduction for that), we shall first point out that to call the account of Jonah’s three-day stay in the belly of the whale a fiction does not settle the question. One must still say whence this fiction came. A fiction does not appear from nothing; even the richest imagination takes its images and pictures, or rather the elements of fiction, from reality; it is impossible to invent something that would not appear in reality in any form or resemblance whatsoever. This principle is difficult to dispute, so the theory of pure fiction has in recent times found few defenders. Another view is beginning to prevail, according to which it is considered necessary to place the content of Jonah’s book in some relationship to reality, and making this concession, the narrative of Jonah’s book is called a legend or myth. In this case, it is supposed that some real historical event lies at its base, or some phenomenon, but remaining for a long time in oral tradition, it has been so embellished and distorted by popular imagination that about this historical foundation of the narrative one can only with difficulty guess. To not be making unsupported claims, defenders of this view attempt to free the content of Jonah’s book from later layers of imagination and to find its historical kernel, with some pointing to the life of the prophet Jonah or generally to Hebrew history for this historical basis, while others turn to the narratives of pagan mythology. According to the opinion expressed even by Jewish rabbis and then by Protestant exegetes, one has only to free Jonah’s book from miraculous details, and before us appears the authentic history. Jonah, they say, was truly sent to preach in Nineveh, but disobeyed God and sailed to Tarshish; during the voyage, a storm truly did occur, but no miracle happened, but simply the ship suffered wreck, and Jonah unexpectedly for himself was saved. This shipwreck and deliverance were understood by Jonah as a warning from above, and he turned toward Nineveh. To represent the manner of Jonah’s deliverance more closely resembling the narrative of his book, it is said that another ship, called “The Whale,” saved Jonah, and he remained on it (inside it) for three days, and then was put ashore and set out for Nineveh, or that after the shipwreck Jonah seized a dead whale that happened to be floating on the surface, and together with it was cast by the waves onto the shore. Other commentators remove the miraculous elements from Jonah’s book by relating them to the realm of dreams: Jonah, they say, while sailing to Tarshish on a ship, fell asleep (Jonah 1:5), a storm occurred. As often in sleep we react to impressions of the surrounding reality, so Jonah from the noise of the waves and the rocking began to see the same storm in sleep. Conscious of his guilt before God, he in sleep sees that they seek the culprit of the storm, cast lots, the lot falls on him, they throw him in the water, and lo, a terrifying sea monster seems to swallow him, but to his surprise, he lives within this monster and in desperate prayer begs God for deliverance, then the monster throws him out onto the shore. Then Jonah wakes up. The storm continued to rage on the sea, there was confusion aboard the ship; this intensified the impression of Jonah’s terrible dream, and he repented of his disobedience to God. Besides the ones cited, there exist other attempts to simply and naturally present the plot of Jonah’s book. We need not cite them all; we can confine ourselves to two cited as the most successful. What is their value as attempts at explaining Jonah’s book? Undoubtedly, they can be appealing in their simplicity and naturalness, but this is insufficient: simplified representation of a fact often becomes its distortion. It is necessary that these simplifications have some basis other than simple unwillingness toward the miraculous. Meanwhile, defenders of the legendary character of Jonah’s book, rejecting it as a historical witness, give no other basis in confirmation of their words. Thus their attempts to present matters differently themselves represent simple suppositions which they like. Many such suppositions have been made, and still more could be made, but they cannot bring us nearer to the truth, which is one. The unsatisfactory nature of attempts to find a historical basis for the book of the prophet Jonah in the circumstances of his life forces many commentators to seek sources for it even in pagan mythology. In this case, they most often point to the Greek myth of Heracles and Hesione, the Phoenician myth of Perseus and Andromeda, and the Babylonian myth of Ea-Oannes. It is said that the book of the prophet Jonah, and particularly the narrative of the three-day stay in the belly of the whale, is a reworking of one of these. However, if we compare the content of Jonah’s book with the indicated myths, we find very little in common between them. In particular, in the myth of Heracles as transmitted by the most ancient pagan writers—Apollodorus, Ovid, Diodorus Siculus, Homer (Iliad, XX)—there are no details that could serve as a basis for the narrative of Jonah being swallowed by a whale: Heracles’ struggle with the sea monster is presented as external, as single combat; moreover, with Greek myths the Hebrews could have become acquainted no earlier than the time of Alexander the Great, but Jonah’s book had entered the canon of sacred books more than a hundred years before this time. However, the chief objection against all attempts to point to a mythological basis for Jonah’s book lies not in the fact that between the indicated myths and the content of the prophet Jonah’s book there is little similarity, and not in the fact that some of the indicated myths turn out to be later in origin compared to Jonah’s book, but in the moral impossibility for a Hebrew writer to use pagan myths for reworking them into a narrative about the prophet of Jehovah. Although the Hebrews were attracted to paganism, this was an attraction to the forms of pagan worship and easy pagan ways; they never forgot the ideological opposition between pagan polytheism and faith in the One God. In particular, the author of the prophet Jonah’s book firmly believed in one God, Creator of the universe (Jonah 1:9), and considered pagan gods vain and false (Jonah 2:9); how then could such a person, with ideas and feelings opposed to all things pagan, take a narrative about pagan gods and rework it for the purposes of his religion. After attempts to point out sources for the narrative of the three-day stay of Jonah in the belly of the whale in popular tradition that allegedly adorned a simple event with miraculous details, and in pagan mythology have proven unconvincing, we are strengthened in the conviction that it must be considered a narrative of an actual event, and shall try, as far as possible, to clarify it to ourselves. “And the Lord appointed a great whale to swallow Jonah.” The sea animal which God appointed to swallow Jonah is called in the Hebrew text dag gadol, which means a great fish. To designate sea mammals, not fish, in Hebrew the words levijatan, tanijm are used (Job 40:20; Ps 103:26; Gen 1:21), but the word dag is not used, so in this case one cannot think that Jonah was swallowed by a whale. Thus falls the objection that the miracle of Jonah’s swallowing is unnatural, since the whale has a very narrow throat. As for the Greek and Church Slavonic translations, they use the word κητος (ketos), whale, because at that time this word was not connected with the concept of a particular species of mammal, and they understood it generally to mean a sea monster, including here a huge sea fish (“a miraculous fish-whale”). What fish swallowed Jonah the text does not specify, but it can be supposed that it was a shark. The species of shark called squalus carcharias—the man-eating shark, which lives in the Mediterranean Sea, reaches a length of 32 feet and is quite capable of swallowing a man whole. “And Jonah was in the belly of the whale three days and three nights.” The expression “three days and three nights” in biblical language does not necessarily mean three full days (1 Sam 30:12-13; Esth 4:16), but can mean a period of time even of 26–28 hours (Matt 27:46; Mark 15:34), if it borders on the end of the first day and the beginning of the third day. However, even if we limit the time of the prophet Jonah’s stay in the belly of the fish to 26–28 hours, this fact continues to remain a miracle, that is, an event inexplicable by natural forces alone in their ordinary operation. Therefore, the Savior calls this event a “sign,” similar to the miracle of His resurrection after three days’ death, and Jonah’s stay in the belly of the fish is compared with the Savior’s stay in the tomb and in Hades. Thus, in the belly of the fish Jonah was as it were buried; the natural conditions in which he found himself must inevitably lead to his death, and if he remained alive, then only by the extraordinary action of God’s Almightiness. “Where God wills, the natural order is overcome.” In what way God preserved Jonah’s life in the belly of the fish is not given to us to know; we cannot understand how God acts in working miracles, yet the human mind does not entirely refuse attempts to represent to itself the possibility of this or that miracle, to find analogies to it in natural phenomena, and thus in its knowledge to find support for faith. Such clarifying analogies for the miracle of staying in the belly of the fish can be the restoration to life of a person after staying under water, cases of apparent death (lethargy), and finally, the nine-month stay of an infant in the mother’s womb. From the cited facts it follows, first of all, that death may not occur at once when a person is deprived of air. It is true that the delay of death for a person under water is brief, but it is important that such a phenomenon no longer becomes absolutely impossible; and what is possible under natural conditions, though only for a moment, is easily imagined as continuing by the action of God’s Almightiness over a longer period. Such action will for us no longer be unnatural but only supernatural; the laws of nature are not violated by it, but God uses them for His providential purposes. Cases of lethargy, when the seemingly dead are buried in the earth and continue to live for some time afterward, testify that a person with reduced vital functions can go relatively long without the normal amount of air. If this is possible in the natural order, how much more is such an event imaginable in the miraculous order. Finally, the natural laws by which the life of an infant in the mother’s womb is preserved are, in their essence, for us no less incomprehensible and miraculous than the stay of Jonah in the belly of the fish. If the Creator created such laws by which the life of one being is preserved within another whole months, is it not in His power to direct and combine these laws so that the life of a man within the belly of a fish might be preserved three days.

Jonah 2:2. And Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the whale, Jonah 2:3. saying, I called to the Lord out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice. Jonah 2:4. For you cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me; all your waters and your waves passed over me. Jonah 2:5. Then I said, I am driven away from your sight; yet I shall again look upon your holy temple. Jonah 2:6. The waters closed in over me; the deep surrounded me; weeds were wrapped around my head. Jonah 2:7. I went down to the land whose bars closed behind me forever; yet you brought up my life from the Pit, O Lord my God. Jonah 2:8. When my life was fainting away, I remembered the Lord; and my prayer came to you, into your holy temple. Jonah 2:9. Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love, Jonah 2:10. but I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you; what I have vowed I will pay. Deliverance belongs to the Lord! The prayer of the prophet Jonah from the belly of the whale provides very many reasons for objections against its authenticity. Attention is drawn to the fact that it is in parts similar to various passages of the psalms, and from this is concluded that it is compilative in character and on this basis its origin is dated to the period of the decline of Hebrew letters. Indeed, the similarity of Jonah’s prayer to the psalms is undeniable: the third verse reminds one of Ps 17:7 and Ps 119:1; the fourth verse Ps 68:3; the fifth verse Ps 30:23; the sixth verse Ps 17:5-6 and Ps 68:15; the seventh verse Ps 17:16; the eighth verse Ps 142:4-7. But can one from this conclude that Jonah’s prayer is a later compilation? Is it not more natural to think that Jonah in the belly of the whale was expressing his feelings in images familiar to him from the psalms, for the state he was experiencing would not allow him to engage in creative work. He took from the psalms not phrases and words, as a compiler would do, but images and pictures, and specifically such as suited his state even more than the state of the psalmist (such are all the pictures of water hazards). Then it is pointed out that Jonah’s prayer by its content allegedly does not suit the spiritual state experienced by Jonah; the chief motive of it—thanksgiving for deliverance—while Jonah in the belly of the whale should not have been giving thanks, but begging God for deliverance from mortal danger. They explain this by saying it was so unsuccessfully composed by some later person. But besides thanksgiving, Jonah’s prayer contains also the portrayal of water hazards (verses 4, 6–7) and the cry to God for salvation in the peril being experienced (verses 3, 5, 8), in a word, all that is considered necessary for a prayer to be natural in Jonah’s mouth; only all this in the prayer is portrayed as moments already passed. The prophet experienced the chief fear for his life at the time when, thrown into the sea, he was sinking ever deeper into the abyss, descending to the foundation of the mountains, as if into Hades, felt how the seaweed was wrapping around his head, and the water was reaching as it were to his soul, and there he was calling to God for deliverance from death. When the fish swallowed him and he continued to live in it by the action of God’s almightiness, he began to feel himself already saved by God; where and how God was keeping him, he probably did not know at that time, but he only felt that he was alive, saved from death, hoped that God would deliver him to the end (“yet I shall again look upon your holy temple”), and therefore in his prayer he was giving thanks to Him. In this way we see that Jonah’s prayer by its content wholly suited the spiritual state experienced by Jonah. The main subject of it is a portrayal of Jonah’s stay in distress and his deliverance. This subject is developed in the prayer in strict sequence. First in it there correctly alternate pictures of the prophet’s external perils (verses 4, 6, 7) and descriptions of his spiritual state during this time (verses 3, 5, 7–8), and it concludes (verses 9–10) with thanksgiving for the deliverance that the prophet felt even in the belly of the fish. It is divided into four stanzas of two verses each and is constructed according to the laws of poetic parallelism, with verses describing the prophet’s external situation written in synthetic parallelism, while those depicting his spiritual state are written in antithetic parallelism. From this we see that Jonah’s prayer by its logical construction and literary form represents a harmonious and organically connected whole. By its pictorial language it, as a poetic work, essentially differs from the remaining parts of the book containing historical narrative.

Jonah 2:11. And the Lord spoke to the whale, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land. The place where Jonah was cast out is not indicated in the text, but from the connection of this verse with the beginning of chapter III, it is most likely here to understand the Palestinian shore of the Mediterranean.