Was Jonah Really Eaten by a Fish?

Jonah 2 is a prayer, where Jonah describes himself as being both in the belly of the fish and in the belly of Sheol, drawing on ancient biblical and Near Eastern imagery in which the sea represents death, chaos, and descent into the underworld. Swallowed by the depths, Jonah understands his situation as a descent—down from Jerusalem, down to Joppa, down into the ship, down into the sea, down to the roots of the mountains—yet he confesses that even there he remains under the sovereign rule of Yahweh, whose waves and billows pass over him, whose presence cannot be escaped, and whose power reaches even into the abyss. As Jonah remembers Yahweh, God “remembers” Jonah in an active, covenantal sense, bringing Jonah’s life up from the pit before the bars of death close forever. The prayer culminates in repentance, renewed allegiance, and thanksgiving, rejecting idolatry understood not only as false worship but as refusal to obey God’s positive commands, and affirming that salvation belongs to Yahweh alone. The great fish is the means of Jonah’s deliverance rather than destruction, Jonah is restored to life and vocation, and the text insists on speaking in the material, miraculous language of Scripture itself, resisting attempts to dematerialize or disenchant the narrative. Doing so ultimately erodes the coherence of biblical faith, prayer, and hope.

TRANSCRIPT:

Jonah 1 reads, “The Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.” But then in Jonah 2:2, he says that he prayed from the belly of Sheol, that is, from the grave or from the realm of the dead. Now, many careful Bible readers think Jonah did not survive the ocean at all. That the whole scene of Jonah being thrown into the ocean, tossed about by the waves, and swallowed by the fish is a poetic way of describing Jonah’s death in the sea. Jonah 3 then is a resurrection story in which his body washes up on dry land, and he is miraculously okay, either because he did not really die or perhaps because it is a resurrection moment. And so this is the debate. Was Jonah dead in the fish? Was he even eaten by the fish? Was the fish even a whale? Before we decide on any of that, we need to slow down and actually read the prayer.

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Alright, back to Jonah. The first thing I want to do is actually go over Jonah chapter 2 as quickly as is reasonably possible, just so that we can go over some of the themes of the book and talk about exactly what this means. I am going to assume you know the basic flow of the story in Jonah 1, with Jonah’s fleeing and disobedience, and Jonah 3, with Jonah’s obedience in going to Nineveh. We are going to take apart chapter 2 in light of its central context.

Jonah 2 is a prayer. Jonah is in the belly of the great fish. He has been thrown into the sea, and his life, we are going to see, is ebbing away. As his life is being depleted, he then prays this prayer. We are told, “Then Jonah prayed to the Lord God from the belly of the fish, saying, ‘I called out to the Lord.’” You will notice that is in all caps. That is “I called out to Yahweh.” It is the covenant name of God for the Israelites. This is identifying for us that Jonah is indeed an Israelite and, in fact, sees himself as a faithful Israelite in many ways. Even though he is fleeing, he knows that he is in covenant relationship with Yahweh, the Lord.

He says he called out to the Lord “out of my distress.” That is an interesting thing, because usually when you use a word like distress, you are not using it for things that you caused. When you make a really bad decision in life and then suffer the consequences for that decision, you are not usually saying, “Why me?” “Why me?” is for things that you cannot control or did not see coming, when you think the universe is out to get you, and you ask why God would allow this to happen to you. So he calls out in his distress, almost like we are supposed to read life circumstances into this on some level. He calls out in his distress, and he says that God answered him.

This is the really interesting part, and the part that is a little bit controversial for people. It says, “Out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice.” That is really important because in verse 17 of chapter 1, Jonah was in the belly of the fish, and now in 2:1 he is in the belly of Sheol. Sheol, as we have talked about, is the place of the dead. It is an interesting thing to talk about the belly of Sheol, and this is where we are going to plant for a few minutes and get into some of the weird things.

In the narrative of the Bible, we get hints at a counter-narrative. I have talked about this recently in a couple of videos. It is kind of funny how it keeps coming up in different places. I preached through Jude recently, and in those sermons I unpacked this idea that the devil is the death eater. I talked about that in a video on Jude 9 that I did recently. I will make sure I connect that video at the end of this one if you want to watch it and get another take on the devil as the death eater in another context.

The devil is often depicted as one who consumes death. That is based on the principle that you are what you eat, or perhaps, in biblical symbolism, that you eat what you are. The reason the devil eats death is because he is the one who has brought death into the world. He is, in a sense, death.

In many ancient Mesopotamian religions, we get this imagery. For example, in Ugarit, in the Baal Cycle, you get this image of Yam, who is the seas. Yam is a god, the god of the seas. You might think of something like Poseidon, but not exactly, because Yam is often depicted as what we would call a Leviathan, a great sea beast. Here, the great fish is not traditionally thought to be a whale, but to be a Leviathan, or perhaps the Leviathan. You can see in the book of Job that though Leviathan plays in the oceans, Leviathan is under the control of Yahweh. He can send the great fish, the great Leviathan, to swallow up Jonah and actually save him. He can use the beast to save him if he wants.

Yam is conflated with the seas. If you are in the Canaanite world and you are on the seas, and a storm blows in and is going to destroy your ship, not unlike Jonah 1, you could pray to Yam, the god of the seas, that the seas would be calmed so that you are not eaten by Yam the Leviathan.

All of these terms follow the same pattern. What is happening is that the seas themselves are either the hand of the god, or they are the god, or the god is the fish. When the waves are there, it is because Leviathan is attacking the ship. That is the way of thinking and how these images fit together.

So why does that matter here? If the great fish, and perhaps Jonah thinks, “I just got swallowed by a Leviathan. This is surely the end of my life,” then he sees himself as being swallowed by the fish and taken into death, into the underworld. To be eaten by Yam, eaten by the seas, which by the way, Yam is also the Hebrew word for seas, to be eaten by the seas, eaten by the waves, is to be eaten by Leviathan and to be taken into the belly.

You pass through the seas to get to Mot in the Canaanite myth. Mot is the god of the dead, and the realm of the dead is the underworld. So it could be said that in the great deep where the dead go, or in the earth where the dead go, under the earth, under the seas, all of these different ways of saying it, that is the belly of Mot. It is the belly of death. That is perhaps why Jonah can now say, “Out of the belly of Sheol I cried,” because he is crying out from death, though he knows he is also in the belly of the fish. He sees himself as in Sheol.

I am going to be one who says, on the grounds of the narrative, that Jonah is in the belly of the fish, and the trick to this is that he is actually still alive, but perhaps does not understand that the fish is there to save him. Now he knows that Yahweh can save him. He has already found out in chapter 1 that he cannot flee from God’s presence. This cosmic geography where he thinks, “I am going to run to Tarshish and get away from Yahweh,” and then he finds out that Yahweh is everywhere. Here he is in the belly of Sheol, and it is this really interesting moment where the second he remembers Yahweh, his prayer comes to the holy temple. We will get to that verse in a second. It is this striking idea that the moment you need God, no matter where you are, even in the belly of the great fish, you can pray.

We could argue about whether you can pray to Yahweh from the grave. I am going to say that does not fit the biblical paradigm. Some people think it does, but I think Jonah is using the idea of being in the belly of Sheol somewhat figuratively. He knows he is still conscious, and yet he prays.

Let’s go on. Verse 3: “You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas.” We are getting this image of Yahweh being the agent who acts upon Jonah. Jonah is in the sea, and yet he sees the sea as under the sovereign domain of Yahweh. He says, “Your waves and your billows passed over me.” Do not miss this. He understands that even in the sea, the waves belong to Yahweh.

Often we need to do this as well. Though we do not have a perfect connection between our life circumstances and the direct hand of Yahweh, we do understand that all things are under the purview of God’s sovereignty. When I encounter distress, those are your waves, God, and your billows that pass over me. They happen as he allows or as he enacts them. We should take them as discipline to refine us. However you take those ideas, they fall under Romans 8:28, that all things work together for good for those who love God. God uses waves and billows, whether he causes them or they are incidental, to form you, shape you, and refine you into the image of Christ. These are his waves and his billows.

Then verse 4: “I am driven away from your sight, yet I shall look again upon your holy temple.” Look at how good Jonah’s theology is here. He says he is driven away from God’s sight, thrown into the sea, pushed away by the waves, yet he knows he will look again upon God’s holy temple. Perhaps he is thinking of the temple in Jerusalem in very physical terms. He knows he will worship again. He knows he is in the hands of the great and powerful Yahweh, and that this will benefit him. He will live again. He will breathe again. He will enter the temple again.

That is a symbol of life, but it is also a symbol of true life. Not everyone enters the temple of Yahweh, especially in a spiritual sense. I think we should also take this metaphysically. Whether Jonah consciously thought this or not, it is right to see him saying that even if he were to die, as a Spirit-filled follower of Yahweh, he would enter the presence of God. I think that is a fair way to take this.

I am not one who takes this as Jonah having lived his whole life as a prophet and, because of a theological mistake and misunderstanding about who Yahweh is and what his purpose in the world is, namely to reconcile all people, even the Ninevites, that this means he does not enter into God’s heavenly temple when he dies. I think we can take this both ways, and it becomes something for the reader to observe, though Jonah himself may not have understood this entirely.

“The waters closed in over me to take my life; the deep surrounded me; weeds were wrapped around my head at the roots of the mountains.” Notice that “roots of the mountains” idea. I thought he was in the belly of a fish, but now he is talking about weeds. This is poetry. It does not need to be linear. We are thinking about the moment before the great fish swallows him up. He has gone all the way to the bottom of the ocean. That is what it means, at the roots of the mountains. He is all the way down to death.

I want to make a note here about this idea of going down. In Jonah 1, Jonah goes down to Joppa, which by the way, even if you orient the map the way ancient maps were oriented, Joppa is not actually down. He describes it as down because he is going down away from Jerusalem, the holy mountain. He is descending the mountain, down to Joppa. Then he gets on a ship and goes down into the belly of the ship. When the ship is crashing on the waves and they throw him overboard, he goes down to the roots of the mountains. You have to observe these constant descents that keep happening, because we are then going to see a reversal when he is vomited up onto dry land, where he begins to come back to life again.

We definitely see an image of going down, going down, going down. Think of Orpheus traveling down into the belly of Hades to find his true love, these stories where you go down to get to Sheol, you go down to get to Hades. Before the Lord saves him, he has gone down. There is only one more step before he is eternally in the grave.

“At the roots of the mountains I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever.” That is so interesting. Bars are a symbol of imprisonment. This is a final thing. He is about to die. The bars, the gates of Hades, are about to close and lock him into death. That is where he is when he enters the belly of the fish.

Then, in the same verse, and you can see the poetic parallelism, “I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever; yet you brought my life up from the pit.” The swallowing by the fish is an upward movement. He is taken from the bottom and brought up from the pit. If you go to the Greek translation of the Old Testament, that pit is abyssos. He is using interesting language here. The abyss is not Sheol. He sees himself as moments away from being locked into the pit.

Perhaps because he is a prophet of God and has rebelled, he is thinking of rebellious angels who get locked in the pit. Prophets do something like the work of angels, though they are human. An angel is a messenger, a divine prophet who delivers messages from God to God’s people. That is what Jonah is as a prophet. He is, in a sense, a human angel, delivering messages on behalf of Yahweh. Here he is thinking that he is moments away from inheriting the same fate as rebellious angels and being locked into the pit forever.

“Yet you brought my life up from the pit,” he says. He did not enter the pit forever. Then he says, “O Yahweh my God.” “O Yahweh my Elohim.” He is re-pledging allegiance. In English, this sounds like a flourish, something we hear in hymns, “O Lord, my Lord,” but this is Jonah reaffirming his vows. Yahweh is my Elohim. Yahweh is my God, the one I worship.

Verse 7: “When my life was fainting away, I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came to you, into your holy temple.” I jumped the gun on this earlier, but do not miss it. You cannot escape the Lord. Psalm 139 says, “If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.” The Lord is everywhere. Even the ethereal, even the underworld, nothing is outside the purview of God’s sovereignty.

If Jonah is entering the abyss, the abyss has no authority of its own. The abyss is Yahweh’s prison. It is not a place ruled by demons. It is Yahweh’s prison, and he can rescue Jonah out of it. Nothing is outside of his purview.

When Jonah prays, we get the language that Yahweh remembered him. It is not that Yahweh forgot Jonah or could not see him. Jonah never actually escapes. He flees, he goes down, he goes down again. In chapter 4, Jonah asks God to kill him multiple times because that is his answer for how to escape Yahweh. One of the points of the book of Jonah is that even in death, you cannot escape him.

So Jonah prays, and Yahweh remembers. That idea of remembrance in the biblical narrative is important. Think of Yahweh remembering Abraham, and then Sarah’s womb is opened.

It is an active remembrance. It is not that God somehow forgot or was unknowing of something, because nothing is outside of his sovereignty. Nothing in space, nothing in spiritual places, nothing even in time, not even the abyss. It is not that God forgot anything. It is that he remembers and he acts. When God remembers something, it is usually a statement that he is about to do something. He is about to act in someone’s life. That is what is happening here. He remembers, and now the prayer comes to the temple.

This time, I definitely do not think Jonah is thinking about the temple in Jerusalem. He is thinking about the temple of Revelation 4 and 5, God’s temple in heaven. I do not know if those images would have been fully developed or fluid for Jonah in his own day, but that is what I think is going on here.

Then he gives us what are probably my two favorite verses in the entire Bible. Yes, my favorite verses in the whole Bible come from Jonah. People say, “Shouldn’t your favorite verses be about Jesus or the gospel or the grace of God?” And the answer is yes, they are the gospel. Look at verses 8 and 9. He says, “Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love.”

First of all, this is a verse about idolatry and repentance. How did Jonah pay regard to worthless idols? It is not that he was actually worshiping idols, and that is probably the lie he was telling himself. He was thinking, it is not like I am going and worshiping idols of Baal. It is not like other prophets or other Israelites who did that. I am not doing that. I just do not want to do what God is saying. I am not disobeying any of his laws.

We have negative laws, the don’ts, and we have positive laws, the do’s. I see this in Christianity all the time today. We think we have liberty when it comes to what God tells us to do positively. We think we can say yes or no, like we are some kind of private contractor. God says, “Go share the gospel with that person,” and we say, “I do not have time today. Maybe next time. Get back to me. I will give you a quote. I will give you a bid.” That is how we treat God.

We understand the moral law, the don’ts, and we try to be good there. When we mess up, we repent and ask forgiveness. But we deal very strangely with God’s positive commands. What Jonah has learned is that God’s positive commands are not optional. They are no different from the negative commands. When God says, “I want you to go to Tarshish,” and you do not go, that is idolatry. That is rebellion against God. It is no different than entering the temple of Baal, offering sacrifices, engaging in sexual immorality, eating meat sacrificed to idols, drinking blood, and doing all the forbidden things. That is what we are doing when God calls us and we refuse to go.

Jonah recognizes his idolatry and says, “Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love.” Notice it does not say they forsake God’s steadfast love. It is not that God does not love the sinner. It is not that God does not love the Christian who is caught in sinful behavior, whether rejecting what they are called to do or accepting what they are called not to do. God’s love has not gone anywhere. It is that you lose your hope.

You can identify with this. Jonah constantly says, “I am not going to do that. I would rather die.” His disobedience has not removed God’s presence. God has not left him. Even if he makes his bed in Sheol, the Lord is there. God is right there with Jonah, but Jonah does not see him. He becomes hopeless, even to the point of death, over and over again. Even in chapter 4, he says, “Just kill me.” He cannot handle the Assyrians repenting. That is what is happening in Jonah. He has lost his hope.

But if you do not pay regard to vain idols, if you keep your focus on Christ, on his will, his purpose, and his plan, you have hope. Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love.

Then comes the gospel. “But I, with a voice of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you.” That word thanksgiving is where we get Eucharist from in the Lord’s Supper. It is a great thanksgiving, a sacrifice offered with thanksgiving. If that does not sound like the Eucharist today, I realize that calling the Eucharist a sacrifice is controversial, but the language is unmistakable.

I do not think the Eucharist is an actual sacrifice, but it is a participation in the sacrifice of Christ. I am a sacramentalist in how I think about the Lord’s Supper, and I think that because I see a pattern all over the Bible, Old Testament and New. You cannot miss this here. “With the voice of thanksgiving I will sacrifice to you.” It is a participation in the thanksgiving sacrifice that Jonah has here. “What I have vowed I will pay.” You have repentance. He sees Christ in his sacrifice.

You might say, Jonah does not see Christ. Jesus was not even born yet. But Jonah understands the heart of God and the hope that we have in him. Salvation has always been by the grace of Christ through faith. Jonah was saved by the same sacrifice of Christ that we are. “With the voice of thanksgiving I will sacrifice to you. What I have vowed I will pay.” He has made vows to Yahweh and he will fulfill them as Yahweh’s prophet, and he does that in chapter 3.

Then he says, “Salvation belongs to Yahweh.” That last statement is really interesting because we get statements like that all over the New Testament. There is a great one in Revelation, and I might mess up the chapter, I think it is Revelation 10, where it says salvation belongs to the Lord and to the Lamb. That is interesting because it is saying Yahweh and the Lamb, who is Christ, who is also the King in Revelation, who is also the Lord. You start to see Trinitarian themes playing out, where Jesus is Yahweh.

It is interesting because Revelation borrows this kind of language from the Old Testament. Where you put Yahweh, remember, that is Jesus. Salvation belongs to God and to the Lamb. That is the gospel in Jonah. Because of all of this, verse 10 says, “The Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out on dry land.”

So the question we asked at the beginning was, what do we do with this? Was Jonah really swallowed by a fish? Was he in the belly of the fish for three days? Was he in the belly of Sheol? Was he just in the ocean and washed up on land? I would challenge you to speak with the words of Scripture and not be tempted to dematerialize the text. My channel is called Biblical Re-Enchantment. Do not dematerialize Scripture based on what you think you understand from science.

My personal preference is not to answer the question, but to read Jonah and speak with the words Scripture uses. I am going to speak as Jonah being in the fish. Am I going to be surprised if one day I enter the Lord’s presence and say, “Jesus, remember when you said, ‘As Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days, so the Son of Man would be in the grave for three days’? Was he really in a big fish?” I do not think I will care much. It was good enough for Jesus to speak with the words Scripture used.

Here is the danger. If Jonah was not in a fish and it was all imagery, and Jesus used the imagery, that does not change my faith. I can speak with the words of Scripture and it does not change my faith. But if I take a position and say I cannot believe he was really in a fish, certainly not a whale, definitely not a Leviathan, then what do I do with the next miraculous text? What do I do with Jesus turning water into wine? Do I say someone brought it in the back door? What do I do with Lazarus being raised from the dead? Do I say he was just in a coma? Then what do I do with Jesus rising from the dead?

When you start to dematerialize and disenchant Scripture, you begin to disenchant your faith. You begin to liberalize your faith. What is beautiful and miraculous becomes nothing more than a trick, and then you start to deconstruct your faith. That is what I do not want you to do. I want you to let Scripture speak the way Scripture speaks.

That is why I talk about flat earth language and three-tiered cosmology. When I read Genesis, I say on the first day, on the second day, on the third day. I do not feel the need to argue about whether the flood was worldwide or local. The Bible speaks this way, so I speak this way. It does not matter if scientifically I think something else might be plausible, because my day-to-day focus is honoring Christ as he is revealed in Scripture.

That is why Jonah 2 is so important. It also teaches us a lot about prayer. Grab my book, God-Shaped Prayer. Jonah is an illustration in that book because this prayer is one of the most beautiful prayers in all of Scripture. It lands on the great thanksgiving, on the gospel. Pick that book up. It just came out last year, and it is a good time for people to renew their prayer life.

God bless you all today. Christ is king, and that changes everything.