Was Jonah swallowed by a whale?

What the book of Jonah says

God sends Jonah to Nineveh, the great city of feared Assyria. Jonah runs the other way, boarding a ship at Joppa for Tarshish. A storm hits, the sailors throw him overboard, and the sea goes calm. Then this:

Yahweh prepared a huge fish to swallow up Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.

That is all the text says about the animal. The Hebrew is dag gadol, a great fish. The book calls it a fish four times and never a whale, and it shows no interest in what kind of creature it was. What it cares about is what Jonah does inside it. He prays.

So where did the whale come from?

From translation. When Jewish scholars put the Bible into Greek, they called the creature a kētos, a sea monster. Matthew’s Gospel uses the same Greek word when Jesus speaks about Jonah. In 1611 the King James Bible rendered that verse like this:

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.

For centuries that was the Bible most English speakers knew, so the whale swam into Sunday schools, sermons and picture books. Modern translations, including the World English Bible, say “huge fish” in Matthew too. Still, the text never names a species. Whale, shark or something no one has seen is a guess.

The prayer from inside

Jonah’s prayer is a poem full of phrases from the Psalms. “Out of the belly of Sheol I cried. You heard my voice” (Jonah 2:2). Sheol is the place of the dead, and Jonah speaks like a man already there. Strangely, he doesn’t beg to be rescued. He gives thanks as if he already has been, and ends: “Salvation belongs to Yahweh.” Then God speaks to the fish, and it vomits Jonah onto dry land.

Could anyone survive it?

In 1891 newspapers told of a sailor named James Bartley, swallowed by a whale and found alive. Later research found no Bartley in the ship’s records, and the captain’s wife said there was not a word of truth in it. The book of Jonah doesn’t argue the point. Jesus used it as “the sign of Jonah” (Matthew 12:39), and the Quran calls Jonah the Companion of the Fish.

The fish swims on through culture. In Moby-Dick, Father Mapple preaches on Jonah before the whalers sail. Pinocchio finds his father inside a giant sea creature. And sailors still call an unlucky shipmate “a Jonah.”