What About Jonah?
Do we actually need to figure out how to accept a story about a dude inside a fish?
Some of my favorite passages in the Hebrew Bible occur in stories about serious error. One of these is Exodus 32:31, which takes place after Moses sees the Israelites worshipping the golden calf, when he smashes the stone tablets God gave him. God has delivered the Israelites from Egypt. God has descended in a dense cloud with trumpet blasts on Mount Sinai. Moses has been on the mountaintop, in communion with God for however long, learning about the plans for the nation of Israel. And at the sign of the Israelites’ transgressions, Moses has come back down in a hurry, and has flipped his lid, righteously, over the stunning rebellion of God’s people.
Exodus 32:32 begins, “So Moses went back to the Lord . . .” All this fanfare with God, then Moses goes down the mountain. And almost immediately, here’s Moses trudging back up the mountain again, pleading for mercy for the corrupt people of Israel.
But Moses isn’t fully above it, himself. I like to picture this beat occurring:
God: Wait. Where are the tablets I just gave you?
Moses: Ah, Lord, I had to smash those tablets . . .1
(Two chapters later, God has Moses chisel out new tablets, so God can replace the writing from the first tablets2.)
Another of my favorite stories of error is the story of Jonah, who does not waste any time at all with his error. The very first few lines of the Book of Jonah go like this:
The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai: “Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.”
But Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish. He went down to Joppa, where he found a ship bound for that port. After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the Lord.
Jonah has been called to be a prophet. A prophet! But he doesn’t want to do it. He decides to run from God instead. How does he run from God? He buys a boat ticket and he sails to Tarshish. Pretty clever, right?
Not so fast, Jonah! God’s not going to be outdone by someone sailing to Tarshish. God sends a storm that terrifies the people on the boat — and, as you may know, Jonah ends up in the belly of a fish for three days and three nights, at which point, he’s ready to submit to God. He prays for deliverance, and God has the fish spit Jonah out onto dry land.
When preachers incorporate Biblical stories into their sermons, I notice they often don’t dither with exactly how they attach to more a familiar day-to-day reality. They just start talking about them. This seems to me to be the way to go, for sure. There is an implication that these stories can be tied to historical reality in some way. Some more explicitly, like the story of Moses, or the story of David, and some more by association with other stories presented as history.
But Moses actually talking to God on a mountain? Jonah inside a fish?
I recently watched a video in which Rick Warren speculated that, because Jonah was explicitly in the belly of a fish, not in the belly of a whale, that he may have been in the belly of a whale shark, which can theoretically get large enough to hold a human body in its belly, while otherwise generally being harmless to humans. But this seems to me to tread somewhat lightly past the fact that the longest time3 a person has survived without oxygen underwater is 42 minutes, which was reported in 2015 when an Italian boy known as “Michael” got his leg trapped in a canal-diving accident. Forty-two minutes is a long time, but I notice that it is, by as much as two days, twenty-three hours, and eighteen minutes, a notably shorter time than Jonah was supposedly underwater in the belly of the fish, whether it was a whale shark or not.
It seems to me that the truth is that we don’t really know where Biblical stories come from. Some stories, we can suppose, are stylized, perhaps embellished accounts arising from some kernel of historical fact. Some appear to be iterations of stories that were common to the Biblical region in ancient times. Parts of Genesis resemble parts of an earlier Babylonian work called the Enuma Elish, for example (which you can read here). Similarly, the Book of Job resembles a fragments we have of work that we call the Babylonian Theodicy — though, like Genesis, the Book of Job is distinct from its Babylonian counterpart.
Also, my understanding is that a cadre of historical-critical scholars today is increasingly willing to regard an increasing number of Biblical stories as spiritual novellas. Some scholars think the Book of Daniel is a novella, for instance. Possibly the Book of Ruth. Some scholars see the Jacob and Joseph stories in the Book of Genesis as novellas. And some feel the same way the Book of Job. (Note that Job lives in the land of Uz, which appears to have been a real place, but it’s not where the Israelites lived, and that already puts some narrative distance between him and any anticipated reader.) Maybe some of these had a historical seed? And maybe not?
But also, uh, maybe Balaam didn’t talk to a donkey? And maybe Jonah didn’t spend three days in a fish?
If you can lay the problem of their origin aside, I think the stories do assert their value, though. Many Bible stories depict titanic problems and titanic time scales in radically reduced proportions — to potent effect. We see macro-level political movement, court intrigues, and personal plights and family problems of people at various tiers of society. And to some extent, we can control the scale of the detail. We can zoom out to macro-level discussion in books like 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah, and then we can zoom closer in and hear things on the ground in the books of the prophets, for instance. We can read sweeping sections quickly, and we can scour the language of short passages with a keen exegetic eye.
We experience these events atemporally, too: We can jump from one section to another. We can fast forward and rewind. We can experience the consequences of events, and then we can lay the stories aside focus on the five-sensory, temporal reality around us, and send those stories far, far away. From this perspective, and in this rendering, the lines of cause and effect are more clear; the moral landscape is more clear — even when the moral sensibility of a book differs from our own, which it sometimes will.
I think it can be argued that at this remove, we experience the stories from a little bit more of a divine perspective. I feel sure there is a conscious divine perspective that can hold all of the incredibly complex nuance of our actual lives, second by second, with the same facility that we can apprehend Biblical stories — and can move extra-dimensionally through the details of real life as easily as we peruse text. These simple stories allow us to imagine that perspective, by shrinking the complexities of human drama down to stylized simplicity. Imagining that divine perspective, we can begin to apply a higher perspective to our own lives — as the cultivated divine eye in us starts working on the muddier parts of our being, and as we bring this process into the light of higher divine help.
I also think that just the iteration of these stories over time may have had a significant, divinizing effect. You can see hints of this iteration process at work today in one of the primary domains of modern mythmaking: the world of superheroes. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman in their youth, and since his comic book debut in 1939, the mythos has been revised repeatedly. In cinema alone, he’s been a Christ-like figure in 1979, a brooding Homeland Security problem in 2013, and a charmingly noble Average Joe in 2025. Bob Kane’s Batman has gone through similar revisions. Originally a pulpy Dashiell-Hammett-like detective in a cape in 1940, Batman has evolved into an increasingly psychologically complex figure as one mind after another turns him over. These evolutions have occurred in just eighty years, and they involve relatively pulpy superhuman personages; the Bible has been a primary text that people of all tiers of society have used to understand reality, and parts of it may have been iterated for thousands of years.
You can also see some of this work directly in the texts of antiquity. The god of the Enuma Elish brings the flood because humans are noisy, for instance, while YHWH brings the flood because humans are morally corrupt and don’t seek relationship with him. The sufferer in the Babylonian Theodicy is having a conversation with a fellow noble, but after Job spends the most of his book longing for an audience with God in the relatively familiar quarters of a courtroom, God eventually appears to speak to Job personally. In these cases, where the Hebrew scriptures have begun with a pre-existing template, and they have infused the template with a new resonance — a seeking, personal God. For Christians, this is a God who eventually sends a Son, who calls God father, intimately — abba, papa — and restores us to this relationship also.
It seems likely to me that the telling and retelling of spiritual stories — most of which, if it has occurred, is now lost from our view — may have metaphysically burnished them in significant ways. Much like an assembled body of people can create a mosaic-like, crowd-sourced impression of Christ, I think the iteration of Biblical stories through diverse minds contemplating God could have made the stories more and more reflective of the actual nature of spiritual realities and even the actual character of God — which, I believe, they are. (Though, I would continually argue, Iron-age artifacts remain.)
It’s important to allow Biblical stories and academic/scientific narratives of history to be somewhat categorically different things, I feel — and to honor them that way, not just consider one flimsy and the other real (or one spiritual and the other corrupt). We can definitely tell stories about the birth of stars and the coalescing of dust fields into planets; about natural selection, and hominids, and the dawn of agriculture — because that’s what keen rational process suggests is real, and that ought not be denied.
But also we can’t escape the fact that, no matter how we try, we can only say so much about where we come from — either historically or ontologically. And as such, it seems to me that we’re burdened to consider that, no matter how scientific we’ve gotten, maybe we are still inescapably creatures that tell their foundational stories in this historio-mythological, Biblical way, too. It’s worth considering that, somehow, there is still something as resonant about Adam and Eve in a garden as there is about the idea that Neanderthals and modern humans coexisted. There is still something as resonant about the idea that God is in the law as there is in the idea that law precipitates from the arduous work of human reason. There is still something resonant in the idea the conscious ground of reality has a will for us at any given moment in our lives, and that if we try to wrestle out of our lane, we can be swallowed up and replaced on the path — when we surrender.
If we comfortably locate our home in Judeo-Christian culture to any degree, it seems to me that to turn our backs on Biblical stories is, at the very least, something akin to saying that our grandparents have no relevance. It isn’t true, and it so clearly cheapens us to even consider it.
What do we stand to lose? In just these scenes with Moses and Jonah, we stand to lose the very idea that God playing both a finite and an infinite game with us (å la James Carse). In Carse’s terms, the Bible suggests God is playing a finite game with us because the ultimate outcome of the game is that God wins, and we surrender to God’s will and all that that asks of us in the complicated journey of life. So God will put you in the belly of the fish, for the sake of depositing you on dry land, so that you can complete your missions. But it’s also clear that God is playing an infinite game with us — because God will pursue us for infinite time, as God’s children, and God will wait or infinite time for us, as well. You smash the tablets, and if it’s truly necessary, God will give you more. God is never giving up.
Consider that this is actually how reality works. The ground of being has a personal aspect, and that personal aspect is lovingly and fiercely engaged with us at all levels of our lives — forever — if we will but let that it in. If so, this reality is perhaps nowhere expressed more robustly in language than it is in the Bible. In fact, for many people the Bible remains the most significant textual portal to this reality that exists.
Quite clearly, one of the worst scourges modernity has wrought on the industrialized mind is the suggestion that anything that is valid can eventually be verified empirically — which is to no small extent (and bizarrely) to say that anything that is valid will eventually be convertible to numbers. So, no Jonah, because nobody goes in a fish for three days and comes out alive. No Moses, because there are no trumpet blasts on mountains. And no Adam and Eve, and no garden, because how do you get all of humanity from two people? These stories are not materially plausible, ergo, they’re invalid. Q.E.D.
What has been tiled over, and what needs to be rediscovered, I believe, is a simple counter thesis:
Biblical stories have not been held as sacred because earlier humans were dumb and prone to being duped.
They’ve been held as sacred because they are sacred.
And their value will prove itself, if we let it.
Not in the Bible.
This is in the Bible.
According to what I learned from considerably less than 42 minutes of Googling.
One of my deepest criticisms of American evangelism is the need for the Bible to be 100% historically accurate for it to be true and valid. In my opinion, though, you lose out on the richness when you try to rationalize mystery. That isn’t to say we simply brush off these things as “miracles,” because that also cheapens the text. The tension is where you find beauty and depth.