Jonah and the Whale

 “The Words of the Lord are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. Thou shalt keep them, O Lord, thou shalt preserve them from this generation forever.”-Psalm 12:6,7

The story of Jonah is a very popular Bible story with children, and often repeated. Kids love stories with animals! But this story also has points of controversy with adults that are really are not needed.

When we read the account in Jonah 1:17, it simply reads that God had prepared “a great fish” to swallow up Jonah. Jonah was likely telling his story to a scribe. But the questions arise from Jesus' account of it in Matthew 12:40, which reads;

“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.”

And so the problem arises for us today because we have been taught that whales are not fish, they are mammals. I'm certain it didn't matter much to Jonah at the time! Yet this really is easy to understand, for the term “mammal” was first coined in 1752, long after the Bible was written. So it really was no problem for a whale to be considered a big fish, or a big fish a whale. Today we even have a whale shark which is very much a fish, but is the size of a whale.

But there is more of a problem due to the Bible revisions, when the accounts in Jonah & Matthew were CHANGED to make them match. Much worse still is the fact that the revisionists chose to change Jesus' words, not Jonah's! This was never honest re-translation, and shows a good measure of contempt toward the person of Jesus Christ.

Now you are aware of the Bible alterations regarding the story of Jonah. It is a grief, yet it also fulfills prophecy about last days' men, taken from Romans 1:25 when it reads, “Who changed the truth of God into a lie...” And the truth of this matter is that it was a whale; which could also be looked at as the type of fish that swallowed Jonah, because mammals were not yet present.

“Every word of God is pure: he is a shield unto them that put their trust in him.” -Proverbs 30:5