#Jonah and the Whale

[lionofchaeronea]

Jonah Spat Up by the Whale, Jan Sadeler, ca. 1582

[starkingdraws]

jonah and the whale 🐋 a series of rooms by aj barlowe

[rottenwormies]

Was this an escape fantasy to you, Jonah?

[peaceinthestorm]

James Tissot (1836-1902, French) ~ Jonah, 1896-1902

[Source: artvee.com]

[daily-plush]

2002 Big Idea Veggie Tales Jonah and the Whale Puppet Plush

[dailychristianblog]

[writethestory365]

We don’t have to understand everything God is doing in order to trust Him.

[scrawnyman]

Annotating and analysing ‘Introduction Jonah To The Whale’ by Everybody’s Worried About Owen

[jehovahwitless]

[thatrandomblogsays]

Whale Weekly MemeNotes Ch 9🐳

Ishmael: it’s a good thing I’m not a main character of a novel!

The priest sobbed at the end of the sermon. Anyways wonder why his sermon involved a whale, that keeps happening lol

[edmundpevensiesqueen]

i’ve just made a rather startling discovery which is that the beginning of the great war by taylor swift sounds almost exactly like the beginning of the credits song from veggie tales jonah and the whale

[eli-kittim]

The Sign of Jonah: Christ’s Death at Sea

By Eli Kittim

Jonah is the English form of the Hebrew name Yona, which is rendered as Ionas in the Greek. The Ionians were the ancient Greeks (see Josephus Antiquities I, 6). So Ionia means Greece, and an ancient citizen of Ion was called Ionas. So Jonah (Ionas), who is a type of Christ, is depicted as a Greek figure. Let us not forget that Jonah was going to Tarshish, which has been identified as Ancient Greece (see the undermentioned article).

What is more, it seems as if the sign of Jonah is a typological metaphor for Christ’s death and resurrection that is employed by the evangelists in order to demonstrate that Jesus is the Messiah. But, as I will show, it also represents an event in prophetic history, although this has not as yet taken place. In the gospel narrative, Matthew connects Jesus’ death to that of Jonah, after the latter’s body was cast into the sea. Matthew 12:39-40 (NASB) reads thusly:

“An evil and adulterous generation craves a

sign; and so no sign will be given to it except

the sign of Jonah the prophet; for just as

Jonah was in the stomach of the sea

monster for three days and three nights, so

will the Son of Man be in the heart of the

earth for three days and three nights.”

We find analogous parallels and motifs in the Psalms as well. For example, Psalm 69:1-2 reads:

“Save me, God, For the waters have

threatened my life. I have sunk in deep mud,

and there is no foothold; I have come into

deep waters, and a flood overflows me.”

Similarly, Psalm 18:16 says:

“He sent from on high, He took me;

He drew me out of many waters.”

Ephesians 4:9 says that Jesus “descended into the lower parts of the earth.” That is, he descended to the ocean floor. The average depth of the ocean floor is approximately 12,000 feet. So, Matthew is drawing comparative conclusions between Jonah’s and Jesus's death at sea. Let’s see what happened to Jonah. Jonah 1:15-17 says:

“So they picked up Jonah and hurled him

into the sea, and the sea stopped its raging.

… And the Lord designated a great fish to

swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the

stomach of the fish for three days and three

nights.”

The typological sign of the resurrection is suggested in Jonah 2:10:

“Then the Lord commanded the fish, and it

vomited Jonah up onto the dry land.”

This, then, is the sign of Jonah——which says in effect that God literally “drew … [him] out of many waters”——that Matthew applies to Jesus (cf. Isaiah 43:2)! This is reminiscent of another messianic type who was named “Moses” by Pharaoh's daughter “because … [she] drew him out of the water” (Exod. 2:10). It is also the sign of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. I will not focus on the phrase “three days and three nights” because it will divert us from the topic at hand. Suffice it to say that it need not refer to a literal three-day period. It seems to be a figure of speech that may signify the three-year great tribulation period.

At any rate, the so-called “sign of Jonah” is not simply a metaphor or a unique sign that would establish the deity of Christ, but it is also a factual event! And although I agree with C.S. Lewis who held that Jonah is ahistorical, nevertheless, I believe that the sign of Jonah, as a type, represents the literal, actual death of its antitype: the Messiah! We know that Jonah did not survive. The Book of Jonah 2:2-6 explicitly says that Jonah, after being hurled into the sea, cried out to God “from the depth of Sheol”:

“I called out of my distress to the Lord, And

He answered me. I called for help from the

depth of Sheol; You heard my voice. For You

threw me into the deep, Into the heart of the

seas, And the current flowed around me. All

Your breakers and waves passed over me.

So I said, ‘I have been cast out of Your

sight.’ … Water encompassed me to the

point of death. The deep flowed around me,

Seaweed was wrapped around my head. …

But You have brought up my life from the

pit, Lord my God.”

It’s important to note that the terms “pit” and “Sheol,” in the Hebrew Bible, are references to the realm of the dead (see e.g. Job 7:9; Ps. 49:14-15; 89:48). The resurrection is depicted in Jonah’s own words: “You have brought up my life from the pit, Lord my God.”

So it appears as if the sign of Jonah is also the sign of Christ’s death. Just as Tim Mackie (co-founder of the Bibleproject) explains in one of his sessions that there is a literary redundancy of the word “hurled” in the Jonah text, especially regarding its main character Jonah who is literally “hurled” into the water, I believe that Christ is similarly “hurled” into the water and eaten by a shark. Hence the symbolism of being born in a manger or a feeding trough. This, of course, is closely related to the last supper (i.e. the sacrament of the Eucharist), the idea that Jesus is literally consumed. There are also overtones of Noah's flood in this parallel (cf. Matthew 24:37), as well as of Osiris, who also drowned and whose coffin (like the Ark) floated in the sea (cf. the story of Perseus who was also cast into the sea in a wooden chest).

Another key point is that, according to the Hebrew text, Jonah's fish is not a whale but rather some kind of “great fish". Through special revelation, this appears to be a shark. And the term “swallow”——in the clause, “the Lord designated a great fish to swallow Jonah”——is a euphemism for a great fish feasting on Jonah and consequently fatally injuring him. This, of course, ties in with the idea that we die and are reborn by going under water (Immersion baptism), a symbolic ritual that is unique to Christianity! Hence why Immersion baptism is not only tied to Jonah but is also symbolic of Christ’s death, being re-enacted in the New Testament through the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist!

This study of Jonah takes us back to the origin of the Christian fish symbol, the so-called “ichthys” (ἰχθύς), which is now known as the Jesus fish. And despite the acrostic use of this word: Ἰησοῦς Χριστός, Θεοῦ Υἱός, Σωτήρ (i.e. Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour)—— nevertheless, the fish symbolism has a variety of other theological overtones in the New Testament, such as the Feeding of the 5,000 with 2 fishes and 5 loaves, as well as the Feeding of the 4,000 with seven loaves of bread and a few small fish, not to mention that Jesus calls his disciples "fishers of men." That is precisely why Immersion baptism in the early church signified a parallel between fish and converts (i.e. born again Christians). The early Christian theologian Tertullian explained it thusly:

“we, little fishes, after the image of our

Ichthys, Jesus Christ, are born in the water."

[peaceinthestorm]

Richard Eurich (1903-1992, British) ~ Jonah and the Whale, 1980

[Source: Christie's]

[mondfamilie]

Pieter Lastmann: Jona und der Wal, 1621

[julieschulerart]

James Bartley, A modern Jonah.  Original painting, acrylic on canvas board, 11" x 14", of the mythical figure, James Bartley. James Bartley was the man who never existed, a sailor who worked on a whaling ship, named the Star of the East in a late nineteenth-century. In the Falklands, he went overboard and was swallowed whole by a sperm whale. He was found days later in the stomach of the whale. He was blind, his hair had fallen out and his skin was bleached due to the activity of the whale's gastric acids.This story was later investigated and proven to be a hoax by historian Edward Davis.  https://www.etsy.com/listing/575721969

[jimintomystery]

As noted above, these pulpits are meant to represent the giant sea creature (Hebrew: דג גדול, "great fish") from the Book of Jonah. God told Jonah to preach to Nineveh, and when Jonah refused and fled, God sent the fish (commonly referred to as a whale) to swallow him up. Jonah repented, and the fish spat him up, whereupon he was a tad more obedient.

In a 2016 blog post, Magdalena Łanuszka observes that a priest standing in one of these pulpits would evoke the image of Jonah emerging from the fish to preach the word of God. There's also a specifically Christian element to the imagery, as Christians linked the three days Jonah spent in the belly of the fish with the three days between Jesus's death and resurrection.

The images above come from:

Kościół pw. św. Jadwigi (Dobroszów, Poland)

Kościół pw. św. Apostołów Piotra i Pawła (Duszniki-Zdrój, Poland)

Kostel sv. Martina (Bošilec, Czechia)

Kostel svatého Jakuba Většího (Kratonohy, Czechia)

This article has a gallery with a couple more.

Sea Serpent Baroque Pulpit from a parish church in Dobroszów, a village in in south-western Poland. It’s from around 1750 and was rebuilt in 1856