JONAH 2
“Jonah’s
prayer is a great affirmation of God’s faithfulness and availability. Jonah
realized that nothing could separate one of God’s own from Him, and no
situation could ever prevent a sincere prayer from being heard by God (cf. Rom
. 8:33-35; James 5:16).” – Key Word Study Bible
1 Then Jonah prayed unto the LORD his
God out of the fish's belly,
The Hebrew
word for “fish” definitely means fish, but remember that they had no formal
classifications for species as we do today.
2 And said,
I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the LORD, and he heard me; out of the
belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice.
I’m sure it
was very warm in the belly and the gastric acids must have burned Jonah’s skin.
The muscles of the fishes belly much have felt like that of a boa constrictor.
See: Psalm
120:1; 130:1; 139:7-10; 142:1; Lam. 3:56
3 For thou hadst cast me into the
deep, in the midst of the seas; and the floods compassed me about: all thy
billows and thy waves passed over me.
See: Lam.
3:55; Psalm 88:6; 42:7
Jonah
obviously knew the reason that he had been cast into the sea and the reason
that he wasn’t dead yet.
4 Then I said, I am cast out of thy
sight; yet I will look again toward thy holy temple.
To me this
shows Jonah’s faith that God didn’t save him from drowning just to be digested
by a great fish! Or, like Abraham believing God would raise Isaac from ash,
maybe Jonah believed if he died God would resurrect him.
5 The waters compassed me about, even
to the soul: the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my
head.
See: Psalm
69:1; Lam. 3:54
“The miracle
of the fish convinced Jonah that God wanted to save his life.”—Rashi
Jonah most
likely fasted those three days, but if not he had seaweed available to him,
which hints to me that this fish was not carnivorous.
6 I went
down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars was about me for
ever: yet hast thou brought up my life from corruption, O LORD my God.
See: Psalm
16:10
Here again
is hint of Jonah’s believe of rescue.
7 When my soul fainted within me I
remembered the LORD: and my prayer came in unto thee, into thine holy temple.
The Stones
Tanak says, “While plunging deep into the water Jonah thought that he was
“barred” from ever seeing dry land again.”
This must
have been an initial thought, but as he prayed he say that he was saved from
drowning for a purpose, and in the back of his mind I am sure he know what that
was.
To remember
the LORD is an idiom to remember His covenant and repent. Here Jonah repents.
8 They that observe lying vanities
forsake their own mercy.
A Midrash
seems to indicate that Jonah is not only thanking G-d for his rescue, but for
the souls that came to him on the boat that he was tossed from. “During the
storm, the sailors had observed the futility of praying to their gods, so they
vowed to turn to HaShem, and no longer bestow their kindness on idols.”
9 But I will sacrifice unto thee with
the voice of thanksgiving; I will pay that that I have vowed. Salvation is of
the LORD.
Jonah thanks
God in a voice of faith that believes he will be saved from this fleshy aquatic
coffin. He admits and recognized that he is helpless and whatever happens would
be the LORD’S doing.
Jonah seems
to be waxing very Poetically David like in these first nine verses of chapter
two.
10 And the LORD spake unto the fish,
and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land.
Three days
later, like after a hangover from a bad party the giant fish barfs and hurls
Jonah on the shores that lead to Nineveh.
Now we
rarely look at the scientific side of this because we are so wrapped up in the
story. Some say that, “The belly of a whale is too small to hold a man
therefore the Bible cannot be trusted.” The Sperm Whale has a large enough mouth
and esophagus to swallow a man whole. They are also known to vomit up large
pieces of food when dying and so Johan being vomited up on dry land is not a
stretch. Also, some whales will beach themselves when they are dying. Also
Sperm Whales inhabit the Mediterranean Sea where Jonah was. Marshall Jenkins,
was swallowed by a Sperm Whale in the South Seas. The Boston Post Boy, October
14, 1771, reported that an Edgartown (U.S.A.) whaling vessel struck a whale,
and that after the whale had bitten one of the boats in two, it took Jenkins in
its mouth and went under the water with him. After returning to the surface,
the whale vomited him on to the wreckage of the broken boat, "much bruised
but not seriously injured.... (http://www.grmi.org/renewal/Richard_Riss/evidences/8jonah.html)"
There is a story about a Japanese whaler that was swallowed by a whale. When
his co-workers landed the whale and were cutting it up, they found the man in
the stomach but was totally white in color. Amazingly he was barely alive but
did survive.
“The biblica1 story of Jonah and the
whale was repeated in Australian waters in 1820 when a crewman from the
American whaler Essex was lost overboard from a harpoon boat.
Two hours later, as the whale was
being stripped of its blubber, the crew noticed movement and slit open the
mammal’s stomach.
The man said he remembered passing
down a narrow passage and then he fainted inside a "large, noisome
space."” – “Modern Jonah?” Australasian Post, December 3, 1988
“I began to realize just what I had
found about four years later. In the meantime I had finished my doctoral work
on 17th century science and launched my career in college teaching. One day as
I was preparing a lecture on anti-evolutionism in the period between Scopes and
Henry Morris I pulled the old Winona volume off the shelf, whereupon the two
enclosures again fell out. This time I looked at them more closely. One, when I
had succeeded in unfolding it without adding to the several tears it already
possessed, revealed itself as an article on "Jonah and the Whale" by
Professor Albertus Pieters of Western Theological Seminary in Holland,
Michigan, published in the Moody Bible Institute Monthly in September, 1930. In
less than two pages the author considered whether it was in fact possible (it
was) for a man to live inside the belly of a whale for three days. In the
process he cited not only some accepted scientific authorities but also two
other sources that related a very curious story of a modern Jonah that was
repeated in the second enclosure, which was clearly a tract. "A SAILOR
SWALLOWED BY A WHALE," the tract proclaimed in large letters above a
poorly printed picture captioned, "A Sperm whale crushes a boat." The
tract bore no date, but pronounced discoloration of the two pages in Winona
Echoes between which it had been lodged indicated that it couldn't be much
younger than the book. It carried the by-line of one Fred T. Fuge, whoever he
was, but in fact quoted (apparently verbatim) at length from what Fuge
identified as "the well known book, Can A Young Man Trust His Bible?--;By
Arthur Cook, Missionary to Iceland." (I later learned that the correct
name was Gook, not Cook.) Fuge began by stating categorically that "[t]he
whole account has been sifted carefully by M. de Parville, editor of the famous
Journal des Débats, whose name and reputation as a scientist are a sufficient
answer to those who call the story of Jonah into question from a scientific
standpoint." What follows is a remarkable story, a whale of a tale that is
worth reproducing here in full:
The whaling ship Star of the East,
was in the vicinity of the Falkland Islands, searching for whales, which were
very scarce. One morning the lookout sighted a whale about three miles away on
the starboard quarter. Two boats were manned. In a short time one of the boats
was near enough to enable the harpooner to send a spear into the whale, which
proved to be an exceedingly large one. With the shaft in his side, the animal
sounded and then sped away, dragging the boat after him with terrible speed. He
swam straight away about five miles, when he turned and came back almost
directly towards the spot where he had been harpooned. The second boat waited
for him, and when but a short distance from it he rose to the surface. As soon
as his back showed above the surface of the water the harpooner in the second
boat drove another spear into him. The pain apparently crazed the whale, for it
threshed about fearfully, and it was feared that the boats would be swamped and
the crews drowned. Finally the whale swam away, dragging the two boats after
him. He went about three miles and sounded or sank, and his whereabouts could
not be exactly told. The lines attached to the harpooners were slack, and the
harpooners began slowly to draw them in and coil them in the tubes. As soon as
they were tauten, the whale arose to the surface and beat about with its tail
in the maddest fashion. The boats attempted to get beyond the reach of the animal,
which was apparently in its death agonies, and one of them succeeded, but the
other was less fortunate. The whale struck it with his nose and upset it. The
men were thrown into the water, and before the crew of the other boat could
pick them up one man drowned and James Bartley had disappeared. When the whale
became quiet from exhaustion the waters were searched for Bartley, but [he]
could not be found; and under the impression that he had been struck by the
whale's tail and sunk to the bottom, the survivors rowed back to the ship. The
whale was dead, and in a few hours the great body was lying by the ship's side,
and the men ere busy with axes and spades cutting through the flesh to secure
the fat. They worked all day and part of the night. They resumed operations the
next forenoon, and were soon down to the stomach, which was to be hoisted to
the deck. The workmen were startled while labouring to clear it and to fasten
the chain about it to discover something doubled up in it that gave spasmodic
signs of life. The vast pouch was hoisted to the deck and cut open, and inside
was found the missing sailor, doubled up and unconscious. He was laid out on
the deck and treated to a bath of sea-water, which soon revived him, but his
mind was not clear, and he was placed in the captain's quarters, where he
remained to [sic] weeks a raving lunatic. He was carefully treated by the
captain and officers of the ship, and he finally began to get possession of his
senses. At the end of the third week he had finally recovered from the shock,
and resumed his duties.
At this point the account shifts from
what might have been related by any member of the crew to what could only be
told by Bartley himself. What follows is a gruesome description of what Bartley
felt, heard, and thought as he slid down into the whale's stomach, where he
discovered that he could still breath, but where he was overcome by the intense
heat and the dread of his horrible, inevitable death.
During the brief sojourn in the
whale's belly, Bartley's skin, where it was exposed to the action of the
gastric juices, underwent a striking change. His face and hands were bleached
to a deadly whiteness, and the skin was wrinkled giving the man the appearance of
having been parboiled. Bartley affirms that he would probably have lived inside
his house of flesh until he starved, for he lost his senses through fright and
not from lack of air. He says that he remembers the sensation of being lifted
into the air by the nose of the whale and of dropping into the water. Then
there was a frightful rushing sound, which he believed to be the beating of the
water by the whale's tail, then he was encompassed by a fearful darkness, and
he felt himself slipping along a smooth passage of some sort that seemed to
move and carry him forward. This sensation lasted but an instant, then he felt
that he had more room. He felt about him, and his hands came in contact with a
yielding slimy substance that seemed to shrink from his touch. It finally
dawned upon him that he had been swallowed by a whale, and he was overcome by
horror at the situation. He could breath, but the heat was terrible. It was not
of a scorching, stifling nature, but it seemed to draw out his vitality. He
became very weak, and grew sick at the stomach. He knew that there was no hope
of escape from his strange prison. Death stared him in the face, and he tried
to look at it bravely but the awful quiet, the fearful darkness, the horrible
knowledge of his environments, and the terrible heat finally overcame him, and
he must have fainted, for the next he remembered was being in the captain's
cabin. Bartley is not a man of a timid nature, but he says that it was many
weeks before he could pass a night without having his sleep disturbed with
harrowing dreams of angry whales and the horrors of his fearful prison. The
skin on the face and hands of Bartley has never recovered its natural
appearance. It is yellow and wrinkled, and looks like old parchment. The health
of the man does not seem to have been affected by his terrible experience. He
is in splendid spirits, and apparently fully enjoys all the blessings of life
that come his way. The whaling captains say that they never remember a parallel
case to this before. They say that it frequently happens that men are swallowed
by whales who become infuriated by pain of the harpoon and attack the boats,
but they have never known a man to go through the ordeal that Bartley did and
come out alive.” -- http://www.asa3.org/aSA/PSCF/1991/PSCF12-91Davis.html
Some people claim that there is a
contradiction in the Bible because the Tanak calls the creature that swallowed
Jonah a "Great fish", while the Brit Chadasha calls it a
"whale." This is not a contradiction. Matthew 12:40 says that the
creature is a whale, but the original Greek from which it was translated calls
it a "sea monster." The supposed contradiction is nothing more than
perhaps a poorly chosen word by the English translators.
So which is it, a whale or a fish?
Nothing linguistically in the account
in the Book of Jonah demands that the creature be a whale. It could be an
extinct marine reptile or any one of the thousands of species of marine life
that has gone extinct in the last few thousand years. It may have even been a
fish. Some will say, "But fish don't get that big." If you believe
that, you should visit more museums. - In the Ann Arbor Museum of Natural
History there is a fossil skull of a fish named Dunkleosteus. The largest
Dunkleosteus skull is about four feet high. I am not saying that this was for
sure the fish that swallowed Jonah. I am merely saying that fish like this did
exist.
Nineteenth century scholar E B Pusey
(1886) cited examples of people found, dead in the stomachs of White Sharks. In
one instance a stomach contained a reindeer without horns. In another was a
horse.
A tiger shark was found near India
with a man's skeleton and clothes in it. -- http://www.probe.org/docs/jonah.html
The following is a good summary of
the facts that comes from “Answers in Genesis”:
“Jonah: A plausibility study
1.
Are there "great fish"
large enough to swallow a man whole?
o Of course! Keep in mind that modern
animal classification systems weren’t exactly in use at the time of Jonah. Any
aquatic creature could be referred to as a "fish." And we know that
there are whales (blue and sperm) and even sharks (great white and whale
sharks) that can swallow a man whole. The sperm whale grows to a length of up
to 70 feet. Its esophagus is approximately 50 cm (20") wide and
"sperm whales don’t have to chew their food - so Jonah could have been
swallowed whole." Two marine scientists from Sea World in San Diego hypothesize
that it was a great white shark that probably swallowed Jonah.
2.
Could someone survive three days and
three nights in a whale’s belly? o This is the difficult part of the question.
There are fish species that surface from the sea and gulp down air into their
lungs, like the lungfish for example. But there is no explanation for how air
might have been transferred to the stomach. 3. What about the digestive juices?
o The Encarta Encyclopedia reports,
"When whales swallow food, it travels through the esophagus to a
multi-chambered stomach that resembles the stomachs of ruminant hoofed animals
such as cattle, sheep and deer. In the first stomach chamber, a saclike
extension of the esophagus, food is crushed. In the second chamber, digestive
juices further break down food." If Jonah remained in this first chamber,
he only needed to be worried about being crushed rather than digested! Sharks,
however, have a much slower metabolism and a human body could last three days
without deterioration.
3.
What about other stories?
o There are a number of stories that
have been around for over 100 years about whales swallowing men whole. Perhaps
the most famous is the story of James Bartley, a whaler on the vessel Star of
the East, who reportedly was swallowed by a whale and survived. However, there
are a number of questions as to the authenticity of this story, and it should
not be used as a "proof" of any kind (just Google "James
Bartley" and you’ll see what we mean).
The bottom line:
1. God needed to discipline a runaway
prophet.
2. God did prepare a "great
fish" aquatic creature.
3. God brought the runaway prophet
and the "great fish" together for His glory and the salvation of a
large city.” – http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am/v1/n1/great-fish
I tend to
think, whether whale of fish, that it was a herbavoric type of sea creature, a
plant eater. Scientifically, carnivorous fish has digestive enzymes in its
stomach that works in the digestion of proteins. Jonah is a man, flesh and
blood which is mostly made up of protein. So we can safely assume that the fish
that swallowed Jonah was not of the meat eating sort. Recall the details of the
Scriptures (2:5) it has weeds in its belly. Its digestive enzymes are different
from those of carnivorous fish. So, what happened to Jonah is scientifically
possible while at the same time due to the rarity of such an event, miraculously
as well!
But think
about it, being in the belly of a fish for three days you know that the fish’s
digestive juices had to be working on Jonah’s body. You can’t expect Jonah to
be hurled on shore, stand up, slick back his hair and brush off the sand and
get started working on his sermon for Nineveh. No, most likely his skin was
bleached by the gasses in the fish’s stomach and probably burned, he probably
lost some hair, his clothes were probably half digested; he looked like he came
off the set of “Night of the Living Dead”.
So imagine
this splotchy, pasty, smelly stranger waltz into your city and say that God was
going to wipe out the city in 40 days. That would get my attention if I was a
Ninevites! “Boy if that is what God does to a guy whom he judges, we’d better
repent!”
Now I have
heard it preached all my life that Jonah preached a message of repentance. Not!
There is not one line of repentance preached in the book of Jonah. Rather Jonah
gave the people and ultimatum. “God’s getting ready to squash you guys like a
bug! You guys are toast, have a nice life, see ya!”
Regardless
if Jonah preached repentance or not the Ninevites got the message.
The
Spiritual application has been made all too clear in the Brit Chadasha which
portrays Jonah, at least what happened to him as a type of Messiah.
Matthew 12:38-41 Then certain of the
scribes and of the Pharisees answered, saying, Master, we would see a sign from
thee. But he answered and said unto them, An evil and adulterous generation
seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of
the prophet Jonas: For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's
belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of
the earth. The men of Nineveh shall rise in judgment with this generation, and
shall condemn it: because they repented at the preaching of Jonas; and, behold,
a greater than Jonas is here.
Luke 11:29-32 And when the people
were gathered thick together, he began to say, This is an evil generation: they
seek a sign; and there shall no sign be given it, but the sign of Jonas the
prophet. For as Jonas was a sign unto the Ninevites, so shall also the Son of
man be to this generation. The queen of the south shall rise up in the judgment
with the men of this generation, and condemn them: for she came from the utmost
parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and, behold, a greater than
Solomon is here. The men of Nineveh shall rise up in the judgment with this
generation, and shall condemn it: for they repented at the preaching of Jonas;
and, behold, a greater than Jonas is here.
