Jonah 1:17

Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah,.... Not from the creation of the world, as say the Jews (p); for this is to be understood, not of the formation or making of it; but of the

Now the LORD had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.

Now, Heb. And. Prepared; created at first, say some; but what need that, when a mighty overgrown fish of a double age may do this; by God’ s will and appointment it attended the ship, and followed it in the storm, expecting a prey, and ready to receive the prisoner. A great fish; a whale, as we read, ; others say it was a shark, a fish common in those seas. To swallow up; not to chew upon him, but to take him down whole. Jonah was in the belly of the fish, in safe custody, three days and three nights, that he might rightly typify Christ’ s burial in the grave.

Jonah 1:17 Now the LORD had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.Ver. 17. Now the Lord had prepared a great fish] A whale, Matthew 12:40, which is a great fish indeed. Pliny tells of one taken that was six hundred feet in length, and three hundred and sixty in breadth; when they swim and show themselves above water, annare insulas putes, saith the same author, you would think them to be so many islands. So many mountains, saith another; who also addeth, that when they grow old they grow to that size and weight, that they stay long in a place. Insomuch as ex collectis et condensatis pulveribus frutices erumpere cernantur, the dust and filth gathered upon their backs seems to be an island, which while shipmen are mistaken and think to land at, they incur a great deal of danger (Sphinx Philid.). Such a great fish God prepared] Either at first, when in creating of whales, creavit vastitares et stupores, as one saith; or he now commanded this great fish to be ready to ship Jonah to the shore, and to afford him an oratory in the mean while. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish] Where interpreters note a concurrence of these four miracles. 1. That he was not there consumed, but that the concoctive faculty of the fish’ s stomach was so long time kept from doing its office. 2. That he could in such a close prison breathe and live without the common use of air and light. 3. That he was not killed up with intolerable stench in so loathsome an outhouse. 4. That he could there frame such an excellent prayer, or rather song of thanksgiving; for Jonah was the true Arion whom the poets feign to have been a minstrel cast into the sea by the mariners, and saved by a dolphin. Three days and three nights] Part of them at least; as Christ was in the grave, Matthew 12:40, where, in the history of Jonah, he descrieth the mystery of his own death, burial, and resurrection; teaching us thereby to search the Scriptures, to search them to the bottom (ερευνατε); as those that dig for gold content not themselves with the first or second ore that offers itself, but search on till they have all. The Rabbis have a saying that there is a mountain of sense hangs upon every apex of the word of God. And so great is the depth of the Holy Scriptures, saith Augustin, that I could profit daily in the knowledge thereof, though I should set myself to search them from my childhood to decrepit old age, at best leisure, with utmost study and a far better wit.

(17) Now the Lord.—In the Hebrew, Jonah 2 commences with this verse. Had prepared.—The pluperfect is misleading. Render appointed, and comp. Jonah 4:6-8, where the same word is used of the gourd, the worm, and the east wind. The Authorised version renders the word accurately in Job 7:3; Daniel 1:5-10. Previous special preparation is not implied, still less creation for the particular purpose. God employs existing agents to do His bidding. A great fish.—The Hebrew dag is derived from the prolific character of fish, and a great fish might stand for any one of the sea monsters. The notion that it was a whale rests on the LXX. and Matthew 12:40. But êῆ ?ôïò was a term for any large fish, such as dolphins, sharks, &c. (See Hom. Od. xii. 97.) And unless we have previously determined the question, whether the Book of Jonah is intended by the sacred writer to be a literal history, or an apologue founded on a history or a parable pure and simple, tota hœc de pisce Jonœ disquisitio, as an old commentator observes, vana videtur atque inutilis. The explanations given by commentators divide themselves into those of a strictly præternatural kind, as that a fish was created for the occasion; or into the natural or semi-natural, as that it was a ship, or an inn bearing the sign of the whale; or that it was a white shark. (For the last hypothesis see all that can be collected in Dr. Pusey’s commentary on Jonah.) In early Christian paintings the monster appears as a huge dragon. Three days and three nights.—See Matthew 12:40, New Testament Commentary.

Verse 17. Now the Lord had prepared a great fish] דג גדול dag gadol. This could not have been a whale, for the throat of that animal can scarcely admit a man's leg; but it might have been a shark, which abounds in the Mediterranean, and whose mouth and stomach are exceedingly capacious. In several cases they have been known to swallow a man when thrown overboard. See the note on Matthew 12:40, where the whole subject of this verse is considered at large. That days and nights do not, among the Hebrews, signify complete days and nights of twenty-four hours, see Es 4:16, compared with Es 5:1; Judges 14:17-18. Our Lord lay in the grave one natural day, and part of two others; and it is most likely that this was the precise time that Jonah was in the fish's belly.

17. had prepared] Rather: assigned, or appointed. (LXX. προσέταξε.) The same word and tense are used of the gourd, the worm, and the East wind, ch. Jonah 4:6-8. They do not necessarily imply any previous or special preparation, much less the creation of these various agents for the purpose to which they were put; but merely that they were appointed to it by Him, whom “all things serve.” He sent the fish there to do His bidding. The word is rendered “appointed” in Job 7:3, Daniel 1:5; Daniel 1:10; and “set” in Daniel 1:11. “By God’s immediate direction it was so arranged that the very moment when Jonah was thrown into the waves, the ‘great fish’ was on the spot to receive him; God charged the animal to perform this function, as He afterwards ‘spoke to’ it (Jonah 1:10), or commanded it, to vomit out the prophet on the dry land.”—Kalisch. a great fish] Probably a shark. See note A. NOTE A. THE GREAT FISH There is no reason to suppose that the fish which swallowed Jonah was not naturally capable of swallowing him whole. The old objection, that it is said to have been a whale, and that the gullet of a whale is not large enough to allow of the passage of a man, rests, as is now generally known, upon a mistake. Jonah’s fish is not really said to have been a whale. Even if it were, it might be urged that one kind of whale, “the sperm whale (Catodon macrocephalus) has a gullet sufficiently large to admit the body of a man” (Smith’s Bible Dict., Art. Whale), and that if whales are not now found in the Mediterranean, they may have been “frightened out of it” by the multiplication of ships, and may have been common there in Jonah’s time, when “navigation was in its infancy, ships were few and small, and they kept mostly along the shores, leaving the interior undisturbed.” (Thomson, The Land and the Book, pp. 68, 69.) But in fact the common idea of Jonah being swallowed by a whale has no real warrant in holy Scripture at all. Our Lord, indeed, is made to say in our English Bibles that Jonah was “in the whale’s belly” (Matthew 12:40); but the word (κῆτος) used by Him to denote Jonah’s fish is taken from the Greek translation of the Book of Jonah, with which He and His hearers were familiar, and cannot be restricted to a whale, or to any of the so-called Cetaceans. It means “any sea-monster, or huge fish,” and is used of a “seal, or sea-calf, and later especially of whales, sharks, and large tunnies.” (Liddell and Scott, Lex. s. v.). The Bible then does not say that Jonah was swallowed by a whale. The O. T. simply speaks of “a great fish,” and the N.T. employs a strictly equivalent term. Here we might be content to leave the question. We are not bound to show what the fish was.

Now the Lord had (literally “And the Lord”) prepared - Jonah (as appears from his thanksgiving) was not swallowed at once, but sank to the bottom of the sea, God preserving him in life there by