ANNOUNCER: Was Jonah really swallowed by a whale? Or is the Old Testament Book of Jonah just a parable? Hello, friend. Thank you for joining us today. This is Grace in Focus, a ministry of the Grace Evangelical Society. Our website is faithalone.org. Please go there to find out more about us. We have hundreds of articles there for you to read and research, and we have an online seminary, Grace Evangelical Theological Seminary, where you can earn an MDiv degree. We are right now in the application and registration windows for the fall semester. Applicants who are accepted can receive and maintain full scholarship because of our generous donors. So get on our website and get your application approved today, if you want to study with us in the fall. Once again, that’s faithalone.org. 

And now with today’s discussion, here’s Bob Wilkin along with David Renfro. 

BOB: Well, today, David, we’re going to follow up on the last show we did. Well, remember we talked about Jonah and Job, and we talked about how some people say that Jonah is a parable and that Job is a morality play? I thought it would be important to discuss the question: was Jonah really swallowed by a whale? And so we’ll look particularly at Jonah in this one, and we’ll talk about the whale, and we’ll talk about why this is so important.

So let’s dig into this subject. Was Jonah really swallowed by a whale? And I asked that question to ask the bigger question, was Jonah really a person? I mean, was he really a prophet? Did these four chapters in Jonah? Did he really get on a ship? Did they really throw them overboard? Did he really get swallowed by a whale or a great fish? Did he really end up on land? Did he really end up going to Nineveh? Did he really preach judgment to the Ninevites? And did they really repent? And then did the result is that God spared the city of Nineveh? And the people of Nineveh? And then at the end there’s did this plant really grow up and then die overnight? Is all of this, I mean, there’s a lot of miracles in Jonah, right? 

DAVID: Absolutely. In fact, I’m glad you didn’t ask, was the whale a person? If that was the case, you and I have to have a long talk. No, it’s interesting how the trends in some Christianity or Christian circles is to make those things a myth or kind of a myth. 

BOB: Or a big parable. A lot of people—

DAVID: A parable. To teach a lesson to the readers. 

BOB: I mentioned it here before, but I was at the Evangelical Theological Society one year, which is a group designed to defend the fact that Bible has no errors in it. 

DAVID: Hence the word Evangelical. 

BOB: Yeah, and as a result, I heard one, I mean, not as a result, but I heard one guy, I was talking to one guy who was a friend of one of my friends. And so we went out to eat together, and we were talking, and he told me he thought Jonah was a parable. And I was like, well, how can you be at this group that defends inerrancy? 

DAVID: I would have asked, what planet are you from? 

BOB: And he was like, well, there’s nothing in the text that indicates this actually happened. And I’m like, yes, but Jesus referred to Jonah. And yeah, and said as he was three days in the belly of this great fish, so the son of man be three days in the earth, it seems, you know, in the belly of the earth, it seems to me that the resurrection of Jesus is tied to the historicity of Jonah. And he was like, no, I don’t see it that way. Jesus was just referring to a biblical book and a biblical story. He was referring to a biblical parable, but He could do that. And of course, Jesus also referred to the fact that the Ninevites repented at the preaching of Jonah, Matthew 12:41. 

DAVID: Right, is that a parable too? 

BOB: Yeah, that’s a parable too, I guess. And so, and I’ve heard our other people, Bible scholars, New Testament scholars, Old Testament scholars, who either say that we don’t know if Jonah really was a person, if this is meant to be, or they will say it wasn’t, or they will say, we think it probably was a real person, but they definitely say that you don’t have to affirm the historicity of Jonah in order to believe the Bible is without error.

Well, to me, that’s kind of crazy, but let’s talk for a minute about the Jonah and the whale. The Hebrew doesn’t say anything about a whale does it? 

DAVID: It’s a fish. I think the reason they think it’s a whale is because it literally talks about a big fish. My take on that is, you know, you’re talking about being in the Mediterranean, because remember, he’s on that ship leaving going the opposite way from where Nineveh was. And I think that the Lord created that fish just for this purpose. I mean, he created the universe out of nothing. Why can’t he create a big fish for a specific purpose? And I take that as part of God’s plan in Jonah’s life and, see to me also, the fact that it’s literal gives it way more significance. 

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DAVID: It is also my opinion that when you allow these interpretations of these miracles being allegorical or parable or whatever, you open it up toward the fact that it can be, the Bible can have errors. Also, if you have a parable, you can interpret it any way you want to, you know? And that’s a problem. I think Jonah is meant to be taken a certain way by the writer, and the only way that that’s going to happen is if these things occurred in time, space, and history. 

BOB: Right, and you know, the last time when we talked about Jonah and Job, we talked about the fact that the New Testament helps us understand the Old Testament, and if the New Testament helps us understand the Old Testament, then when the Son of God, the Messiah, the King of Israel, the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, God in the flesh, when He tells us that Jonah was three days in a great fish, then Jonah was three days in a great fish. When He tells us that the Ninevites repented at the preaching of Jonah, then the Ninevites repented at the preaching of Jonah, you can take that to the bank. 

DAVID: Right, like I say, it happened literally in time, space, and history, and I don’t see any other way to take it because the Lord, our Lord, took it literally. 

BOB: And by the way, there have been accounts—I remember I’ve read some things of back when we used to do more whaling than we do today. There were examples of whalers who went overboard, were swallowed by whales, and then the whale was harpooned, and when they cut the whale open, they found the sailor alive inside the whale. So there have been examples of that, and that led some people to say, well, this great fish was a whale. Of course, a whale is not actually a fish, a whale is a mammal. But the Hebrew word there doesn’t, and in the New Testament, when Jesus referred to it, don’t necessarily mean we’re talking fish. It could be any aquatic animal, so it could include a mammal in the sea. 

But I’m inclined to the view that this probably wasn’t a whale, but it was a huge fish. It could have been one that God simply created to grab him, but we know there’s all kinds of mysteries of the deep, right? You’ve had stories of fishermen in Japan, for example, bringing up this 40, 50, 60 foot fish that they didn’t, they don’t even know what species it is. 

DAVID: Yeah, the thing that gets me to think that it’s a special creation is the Mediterranean is not as deep as the Pacific Ocean like you’re talking about because, based on my knowledge, which is limited, but I would think that those big creatures are super deep.

BOB: Right, like thousands of feet. 

DAVID: Yeah, and Mediterranean’s not thousands of feet. It’s deep. but it’s not that deep. And that’s why I think that the fish or the whale or whatever in Jonah was a special creation. 

BOB: And a lot of people, they don’t have trouble saying, that God has done some miracles over the course of time. But yet when they look at miracles in the Bible, like Jonah, they say, oh, no, no, that’s probably a parable, right? They say, well, that’s pretty fantastic. And yet those same people will say, well, yes, but Jesus did rise from the dead. Yes, we’re going to rise from the dead one day. Aren’t those miracles? 

DAVID: Of course they are. 

BOB: And in fact, creation itself is a miracle. And even if you argue, even if you’re an atheist and you say everything we see around us occurred by chance and there was nothing and then there was something that’s a miracle because according to biology, and I was a biology major in college, non-life can never give rise to life, except it did once. And by the way, you know, some theories, one of the theories is the big bang theory, that originally there was matter and energy and the matter and energy exploded and resulted in all the planets and the stars and ultimately life on earth. Well, if that’s the case, where did the matter and energy come from? They’re eternal, right? 

DAVID: You know, it’s funny, the evolutionary scientists don’t have an answer for that.

BOB: No. And they don’t care. They just say, well, because something is, therefore, there had to be a first cause. We agree. But wouldn’t the first cause be personal? Why would an impersonal first cause, an inanimate first cause, a non-living first cause, how could that ever give rise to life? 

DAVID: Well, let me correct you on the word life there. I would call it existence. Because I don’t think based on their theories, what we have is not life. It’s existence. 

BOB: Right. Because it’s purposeless. 

DAVID: Well, the way I describe it is, all we are is a bundle of electrochemical processes that have been brought together through a process of infinite time and completely random chance. 

BOB: And by the way, this leads to what’s called nihilism. And it’s basically the philosophy of Hollywood today and of universities and colleges and nihilism teaches life makes no sense. There is no purpose. 

DAVID: Life is nothing. 

BOB: Life is nothing. There’s no meaning. And then you die. That’s it. There’s really, you can try to infuse some meaning in it. But there is no big picture. There is no life after death. There is nothing. 

Well, thanks so much, David and you all. And remember, let’s keep grace in focus. 

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On our next episode: shouldn’t the four Gospels really be considered Old Testament literature? Join us for that. In the meantime, let’s keep grace in focus.