Was Jonah and the whale a true story?

Question 60096.

The book of Jonah divides readers more sharply than almost any other short piece of the Old Testament. A prophet runs from God, is thrown overboard, is swallowed by a great fish, survives three days inside it, and is vomited onto dry land to preach to a city that repents. Many scholars treat the whole thing as parable, satire or didactic fiction.

The question is not really about marine biology. It is about whether the text presents itself as history, whether the rest of Scripture treats it as history, and whether we are prepared to allow that God does things we cannot replicate.

What the Book of Jonah Claims for Itself

The book of Jonah opens exactly as the historical prophetic books do: the word of the LORD came to Jonah the son of Amittai. That is the standard formula, and it names a real man with a real father.

Jonah son of Amittai appears elsewhere, in 2 Kings 14:25, as a prophet from Gath-hepher who prophesied concerning the restoration of Israel’s borders under Jeroboam II. He is placed in the reign of an identifiable king in the eighth century before Christ. That is not how parables are introduced.

The narrative is also anchored in real geography. Joppa is a real port. Tarshish was a real destination. Nineveh was a real city, and its size and the length of a journey through it are given as concrete details. The book of Jonah reads like a report, not like the parable of the prodigal son, which begins with a certain man and names nobody.

What Jesus Said About It

For me this is decisive, and I would want anyone weighing the question to sit with it. In Matthew 12:39-41 Jesus says that no sign will be given except the sign of the prophet Jonah, and then draws the comparison: as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

He does not stop there. He adds that the men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgement with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at the preaching of Jonah. Jesus is placing the Ninevites in a future courtroom alongside His own hearers.

You cannot easily make that work if the Ninevites never existed. Jesus is using the book of Jonah as a historical precedent for a historical event, His own burial and resurrection, and the parallel loses its force if one side of it is fiction. Anyone who wants to treat Jonah as parable has to explain what Jesus thought He was doing here.

The Zoological Question

The Hebrew says a great fish, dag gadol, not a whale. The whale entered through the Greek ketos in Matthew, which means a large sea creature, and then through older English translations. So the standard schoolroom objection that whales are not fish misses the text entirely.

Could a large marine animal swallow a man? Sperm whales certainly can, and the anatomy of some large sharks makes it physically possible. Various nineteenth and twentieth century accounts of sailors surviving such an event circulate widely, and I would treat most of them with caution because the documentation is thin.

But this misses the point, and I want to say so plainly. The book of Jonah does not present the fish as a natural event that happened to work out. It says the LORD appointed a great fish, and it says the LORD spoke to the fish. The same book has God appointing a plant, a worm and a scorching east wind. This is a narrative about God’s direct action, and looking for a naturalistic mechanism is answering a question the text is not asking.

The Repentance of Nineveh

Critics often say that a mass repentance in the Assyrian capital is historically implausible, since Assyrian records do not mention it. That argument from silence is weak: Assyrian royal inscriptions were propaganda, and a king covering himself in sackcloth is not the sort of thing they recorded.

There is also a plausible historical setting. The reign of Ashur-dan III in the eighth century saw a total solar eclipse over Assyria in 763, along with plague and internal revolt. In a culture that read such things as divine anger, a foreign prophet arriving to announce forty days to destruction would have landed on prepared ground.

I would not build a case on that reconstruction, but it removes the objection that the repentance is unthinkable. And the book of Jonah itself notes that the repentance did not last, which fits the later prophecy of Nahum announcing Nineveh’s destruction a century and a half afterwards.

Why This Matters More Than It Looks

Someone will ask why a Baptist minister should care whether one short book is history. The answer is that the reasons usually given for making it fiction are not literary reasons. They are the assumption that miracles do not happen, applied to a book that contains several.

Once that assumption is admitted, it does not stay put. The same reasoning removes the plagues, the Red Sea, the virgin birth and the empty tomb, and it does so on identical grounds. The book of Jonah is a small hinge on a large door.

There is a second reason. If Jesus was mistaken about the historicity of Jonah, then He was mistaken about the Old Testament, and the question of what else He was mistaken about becomes unavoidable. I do not find that a comfortable road.

Taking the Other View Fairly

Some evangelicals do read the book as a didactic narrative and remain thoroughly orthodox, so let me state their case properly. The book has strong literary shaping, considerable irony, and a striking symmetry. The pagan sailors and the pagan city behave better than the prophet, which is clearly deliberate.

All of that is true, and none of it settles the genre question. Historical narrative can be shaped, ironic and beautifully structured without ceasing to be historical. The Gospel of Mark is superbly constructed and nobody thinks that makes it fiction.

So I accept the literary observations gladly and decline the conclusion drawn from them. The book of Jonah is a work of art about something that happened, which is what a great deal of Scripture is.

What the Book Is Actually About

For all the argument about the fish, the fish occupies three verses. The book is about a prophet who would rather die than see his enemies forgiven, and about a God who pursues both the city and the sulking man in the same chapter.

The last verse is a question, and God asks it: should I not pity Nineveh, 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? The book ends without recording Jonah’s answer, which leaves the reader holding it.

That is a far more searching book than the version we teach children with a felt whale. It is about racial and national hatred inside a believer’s heart, and about a mercy that offends him. See why antisemitism is wrong for a related application, and did the Red Sea part for the same question about another miracle.

The Structure of the Book of Jonah

Read the book of Jonah with an eye on its shape and something helpful appears. There are four chapters arranged in two matching halves. In each half God commissions Jonah, Jonah responds, pagans behave better than the prophet, and God shows mercy.

Chapter one has the sailors, who pray, throw cargo overboard reluctantly, and end up fearing the LORD and offering sacrifices. Chapter three has the Ninevites, who fast from the king down to the cattle. In both cases the outsiders come off considerably better than the man who had the word of God.

That structure is the argument of the book, and it is aimed squarely at Israel. A nation that possessed the covenants and the prophets is being shown two groups of pagans responding better to a fraction of the light. It is uncomfortable reading, and it was meant to be.

Jonah’s Prayer from Inside the Fish

Chapter two is the part of the book of Jonah most often skipped, and it is the theological centre. From inside the fish Jonah prays, and his prayer is stitched together almost entirely out of the Psalms, which tells you something about what he had been carrying in his memory.

He says he cried out from the belly of Sheol, that the waters closed in over him, that weeds were wrapped about his head, and that he went down to the land whose bars closed upon him for ever. Then the turn: yet you brought up my life from the pit.

The prayer ends with a line that carries the whole book: salvation belongs to the LORD. A man who ran from God’s mercy to Nineveh discovers that mercy is the only reason he is still breathing, and the fish becomes the place where he learns it. See Jonah 2:9.

So, now what?

Read the book of Jonah in one sitting; it takes about eight minutes. Then read Matthew 12 and notice what Jesus does with it. The historicity question is settled for me by that comparison, and I suspect it will be for you too if you look at the two passages side by side.

Then let the last question do its work. Somewhere there is a group of people whose repentance would irritate you, and Jonah is the story of a man who ran three hundred miles in the wrong direction to avoid preaching to them. Who is your Nineveh? See also can science contradict the Bible.

For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

Matthew 12:40 (ESV)