Jonah 1:17

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 creationof 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 (κ ῆ τος) 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. It is, however, interesting to enquire whether any particular fish can with probability be fixed upon, and the rather because the choice of an agent ready to hand and naturally fitted for the work accords with that "economy" of the miraculous which is characteristic of holy Scripture. Now it has been satisfactorily proved that the common or white shark (Carcharias vulgaris) is found in the Mediterranean, and well-authenticated instances have been given of its having swallowed men and other large animals entire. "A natural historian of repute relates, -In 1758, in stormy weather, a sailor fell overboard from a frigate in the Mediterranean. A shark was close by, which, as he was swimming and crying for help, took him in his wide throat, so that he forthwith disappeared. Other sailors had leaped into the sloop, to help their comrade, while yet swimming; the captain had a gun which stood on the deck discharged at the fish, which struck it so, that it cast out the sailor which it had in its throat, who was taken up, alive and little injured, by the sloop which had now come up. The fish was harpooned, taken up on the frigate and dried. The captain made a present of the fish to the sailor who, by God's Providence, had been so wonderfully preserved. The sailor went round Europe exhibiting it. He came to Franconia, and it was publicly exhibited here in Erlangen, as also at Nurnberg and other places. The dried fish was delineated. It was 20 feet long, and, with expanded fins, nine feet wide, and weighed 3924 pounds. From all this, it is probable that this was the fish of Jonah." " (See Dr Pusey's Commentary on Jonah, Introd., pp. 257, 258; Smith's Bible Dict., Art. Whale, where other instances are given.) There is another fish, of which the Norwegian name is Rorqual, i.e. whale with folds, which from its peculiar internal construction is thought likely by some commentators to have been the receptacle of Jonah. "The distinguishing feature of the whole genus is the possession of -a number of longitudinal folds, nearly parallel, which commence under the lower lip, occupying the space between the two branches of the jaw, pass down the throat, covering the whole extent of the chest from one fin to the other, and terminate far down the abdomen;" in the Mediterranean species -reaching to the vent." " It has accordingly been suggested that "it may have been in the folds of a Rorqual's mouth, which in the case of an individual 75 feet long (such as was actually stranded at St Cyprien, Eastern Pyrenees, in 1828) would be a cavity of between 15 and 20 feet in length, that the prophet was imbedded." (Speaker's Commentaryin loc., and Encycl. Brit.quoted there.) It would seem, however, that this Rorqual's throat is not large enough to swallow a man, so that on the whole it is most likely that Jonah's fish was a shark.

three days and three nights At this point the transaction becomes clearly miraculous. The swallowing of Jonah by the fish may have been in the course of the ordinary working of divine Providence. His preservation within it for so long a time plainly belongs to that other working of Almighty God which, though it be no less after the counsel of that Will (Ephesians 1:11) which is the highest and only Law, appears to us to be extraordinary, and which we therefore call miraculous.

A comparison of 1 Corinthians 15:4 with Matthew 12:40 shows that the period of Jonah's incarceration in the fish was divinely ordered to be a type of our Lord's being "three days and three nights in the heart of the earth." This is the only passage in the O. T., if we except Hosea 6:2, in which there is any prophetical intimation of the length of time between our Lord's burial and resurrection.