Was it a whale? People ask it at every age, sometimes because a teacher has said no whale could swallow a man. The book of Jonah says “a great fish” and never names the kind. In the King James, the whale appears in Jonah’s story once, in a single verse of Matthew.
Three verses in Jonah
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.
Jonah 1:17 (KJV)
A great fish, and “the LORD had prepared” it. Beyond “great”, it is never described: no kind, no color, no shape. It is in three verses. It swallows Jonah, Jonah prays “out of the fish’s belly” in 2:1, and in 2:10 “the LORD spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land.”
That word “prepared” matters for the question behind the question. Jonah uses it four times, for the fish and then for a gourd, a worm and an east wind: in this book God prepares things, and the fish is one of them, something God prepared and spoke to. The book does not tell it as a lesson in marine biology, so an argument about what a whale’s throat can manage is answering a claim the book does not make.
One verse in Matthew
In Jonah’s story you meet the word whale only in the New Testament, when Jesus uses it. The King James spells his name Jonas, the Greek form of Jonah.
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.
Matthew 12:40 (KJV)
Set that beside Jonah 1:17 and you can hear Jesus echoing it: “in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.” The King James puts “whale” in his mouth. The World English Bible says “huge fish” in both places, in Jonah and in Matthew, which keeps the two verses saying the same thing.
The King James translators used the word in other places too. “Whale” or “whales” is in four verses of the Old and New Testaments, Genesis 1:21, Job 7:12, Ezekiel 32:2 and Matthew 12:40, and in two more in the extra books the King James printed between the Testaments. The book of Jonah is not one of them.
What Jesus was pointing at
The sign Jesus offers is the three days and three nights. How those days were counted is its own question, and the Bible’s inclusive way of counting days answers it. In the next verse he leaves the fish behind.
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.
Matthew 12:41 (KJV)
The people asking him for a sign were scribes and Pharisees. He holds up a pagan city that turned at the preaching of a reluctant prophet. Nineveh turned at a lesser man’s word, and a greater was standing in front of them.
A city that turned
The book of Jonah spends its words there as well. The fish gets three verses, and the city’s turning gets five.
“So the people of Nineveh believed God, and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them even to the least of them.” The king steps down from his throne and sends a decree through the city: “let them turn every one from his evil way, and from the violence that is in their hands.” And then:
And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not.
Jonah 3:10 (KJV)
Jonah is furious, and he tells God why he ran in the first place: “for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil.” He knew what God was like, and it made him angry. The book ends on God’s question to him, about a city of “more than sixscore thousand persons”, a hundred and twenty thousand, “that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle.”
So the fish carried a prophet who ran because he knew God would spare the city, and God spared it. Even a great city with violence in its hands could turn and be spared. When Jesus told the story, he went on from the fish to the city, and from Jonah to himself.