Recently a number of individuals have advocated the idea that the prophet Jonah died and was resurrected while in the belly of the whale (or big fish).
This is a striking claim that is at odds with the historical interpretation of the book of Jonah, which is that he remained alive during his experience.
I have not been able to find any historic interpreters—Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish—who held that Jonah literally died. There may be some that I just haven’t found, but if so, they seem to have been quite small in number.
It’s possible that startling new insights can be discovered in familiar biblical passages with established interpretations, but the odds of this happening are not high, and there would need to be compelling arguments to overturn the way a passage has been historically understood.
So let’s look at some arguments that have been or might be proposed for the Jonah Death Hypothesis.
The Sign of Jonah
In Matthew 12, some scribes and Pharisees request a sign from Jesus, but he tells them:
An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign; but no sign shall be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.
For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so will the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.
The men of Nineveh will arise at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here (Matt. 12:39-41; cf. 16:4, Luke 11:30).
Taken by itself, this does not provide evidence that Jonah died and rose from the dead. Jesus does not say that he did.
However, one might suppose that we should understand Jonah that way on the grounds that it would provide a stronger parallel between Jonah and Jesus if they both died and rose from the dead.
A problem with this approach is that it reads a later, New Testament situation onto a text written centuries earlier, that was composed in a different situation, and that differs in numerous ways (the story of Jonah is not the same as the story of Jesus—e.g., Jesus wasn’t fleeing God the way Jonah was).
All that can be confidently concluded from what Jesus says is that there is an analogy between him and Jonah that involves Jonah being in the whale for three days and Jesus being in the earth for three days. What happened to Jonah thus serves as a sign of what will happen with Jesus.
But every analogy has its limits. When Jesus called Herod Antipas “that fox” (Luke 13:32), he meant that Herod and foxes have certain characteristics in common (e.g., being cunning), but we cannot infer from this that Herod was a red-furred quadruped of the canine family. We must distinguish between what the two elements of an analogy have in common and what they don’t.
In the sign of Jonah, Jesus has already told us what he and the prophet have in common: They both spend three days in something. We can’t infer from this that they both literally died and resurrected.
In fact, Jesus has warned us that there are things that he and Jonah don’t have in common, for he said “behold, something greater than Jonah is here.” Literally dying and rising has been one of the ways in which Jesus has historically been understood to be greater than Jonah.
Therefore, if we are to establish that Jonah died and rose again, we will have to do it from the text of the book of Jonah and not from the Gospels.
An Argument from Silence
Advocates of the Jonah Death Hypothesis have noted that the author of Jonah never says that the prophet was alive for three days and nights in the fish.
That’s true, but the narrator also doesn’t tell us that Jonah died and rose from the dead.
Fundamentally, this is an argument from silence, and arguments from silence are notoriously weak.
They are especially weak when an author is narrating events in someone’s life and fails to mention something as important as the person dying and rising.
Consider a parallel: The book of Ruth narrates events of the matriarch Ruth’s life, and the author never says that Ruth was alive for the entire course of the book. It’s thus hypothetically possible that she died and was raised back to life—say, just before she and Naomi arrived in Bethlehem (Ruth 1:19).
However, it would be a mistake to infer from the fact that the author never says Ruth was alive throughout the story that she must have died and been raised back to life at some point.
Death and resurrection are big things, and there is a compact between the author and the reader that the text will contain the important events of the story being told. If something as important as a death and resurrection took place, the author will tell us.
But that doesn’t happen—either in Ruth or in Jonah. Given that silence, we should presume that both figures were alive throughout the course of their own stories.
Sheol and the Pit
In chapter 2 of Jonah—after he has been swallowed by the whale—the prophet prays to God, and in the course of that prayer, Jonah (as opposed to the narrator) says things like:
I called to the Lord, out of my distress,
and he answered me;
out of the belly of Sheol I cried,
and you heard my voice
I went down to the land
whose bars closed upon me forever;
yet you brought up my life from the Pit,
O Lord my God.
When my soul fainted within me,
I remembered the Lord;
and my prayer came to you,
into your holy temple (Jonah 2:7).
Advocates of the Jonah Death Hypothesis have pointed out that “Sheol” and “the Pit” are references to the realm of the dead, and this is true.
It has also been claimed that “my soul fainted” is a reference to Jonah’s death. This is not true, as we’ll see in a bit. However, we’ll let that pass for the moment.
The fundamental problem with interpreting the above as indicating that Jonah literally died is that Jonah’s prayer is a poem, as you can see even in English since it is composed of couplets in parallel with each other.
Specifically, it’s what’s known as a psalm of thanksgiving, and biblical poems and psalms regularly use non-literal expressions. Often, these take the form of hyperbole, which is deliberate exaggeration used to heighten the emotional impact of the text or to make a point.
For example, when the Psalmist says, “Awake, O harp and lyre! I will awaken the dawn!” (Ps. 108:2), it doesn’t mean that harps, lyres, or the dawn are conscious beings that fall asleep and can then be woken up. This is a poetic way of saying that the psalmist is so excited about God that he’s going to stay up all night praising him with harp and lyre (and even that length of time may be hyperbole).
In the same way, referring to the realm of the dead in a poetic context does not mean that the person literally died. All it need mean is that the person was in danger of death or almost died.
Neither do descriptions in poetry of being rescued from Sheol mean that the person literally died and was resurrected. In Psalm 30, we read:
I will extol you, O Lord, for you have drawn me up,
and have not let my foes rejoice over me.
O Lord my God, I cried to you for help,
and you have healed me.
O Lord, you have brought up my soul from Sheol,
restored me to life from among those gone down to the Pit (Ps. 30:1-3).
This is a psalm for the dedication of the temple, and it is attributed to David. “You have brought up my soul from Sheol, restored me to life from among those gone down to the Pit” does not mean that David literally died and was resurrected. These are hyperbolic, poetic expressions used to give thanksgiving for deliverance from a serious illness (that’s why he says “you have healed me”), with the result that God has not “let my foes rejoice over me.”
In light of the non-literal language used in poetry, we can’t use the references in Jonah’s psalm of thanksgiving as proof he literally died—only that he was in danger of dying and God rescued him.
“Arise”
Advocates of the Jonah Death Hypothesis have noted that once the prophet is coughed up on the beach, we read:
Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time, saying, “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you” (Jonah 3:1-2).
They note that the term “Arise” in Hebrew is qum, and that this is “the same” Semitic word that Jesus uses when he raises Jairus’s daughter, saying “‘Talitha cumi’; which means, “Little girl, I say to you, arise” (Mark 5:41).
This is actually not true. Qum is a Hebrew word, and cumi (alternate spelling: qumi) is Aramaic. Hebrew is not the same language as Aramaic, but the words do come from the same root, and they both mean “stand up” or “arise.”
But here’s the problem: The basic and usual meaning of these terms is “stand up”—not “rise from the dead.” It may have the latter sense in Mark 5:41, but that is not its usual meaning. Normally, it refers to the physical act of standing.
And that’s what it means here. Advocates of the Jonah Death Hypothesis seem to overlook the context in which the command to stand up occurs. Notice that in Jonah 3:1-2 it says, “Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time.”
So when was the first time? It was at the beginning of the book, where we read:
Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness has come up before me” (Jonah 1:1-2).
There, Jonah is alive and well, and when the word of the Lord comes to him, “arise” has its normal meaning of “get up on your feet.” The reason Jonah is to get on his feet is so that he can go to Nineveh and prophecy. Instead, the prophet goes AWOL, and God has to reel him back in.
Thus, after Jonah has repented, appealed to God for deliverance, been rescued, and been coughed up on the beach, God’s word comes to him “the second time,” and the message is the same: Stand up and go to Nineveh.
Here—like the first time the word of God came to Jonah—“arise” means the physical act of getting to one’s feet. It does not mean “rise from the dead.”
The Conversion of the Ninevites
Some have also noted that, just as the Ninevites repented after Jonah was spit out by the fish, so the Gentiles repented after Jesus rose from the dead.
This is true. However, it does not give us reason to suppose that Jonah literally died and rose from the dead.
Jesus tells us what occasioned the Ninevites repenting: “They repented at the preaching of Jonah” (Matt. 12:41). And that’s the same thing indicated in the book of Jonah:
He cried, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them (Jonah 3:4-5).
There is nothing in either text about the Ninevites being impressed by how Jonah died and rose from the dead. They were impressed by his announcement of doom, and they hoped God would relent. Thus the king of Nineveh said, “Who knows, God may yet repent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we perish not” (Jonah 3:9).
One can draw a parallel between the conversion of the Ninevites and the later conversion of the Gentiles in general, but neither text says that the former was because of Jonah dying and rising.
The arguments favoring the Jonah Death Hypothesis thus are weak and unconvincing.
Why the Jonah Death Hypothesis Is Wrong
Now let’s look at the arguments against the Jonah Death Hypothesis.
There is a huge problem with the proposal, which is that it fundamentally misunderstands what is happening in the book of Jonah.
To see this, we need to walk through the key events, starting at the beginning of the book.
The Runaway Prophet
The word of the Lord comes to Jonah and tells him “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness has come up before me” (1:2).
However, Jonah disobeys and takes a ship bound for Tarshish, “away from the presence of the Lord” (v. 3).
Then “the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and there was a mighty tempest on the sea, so that the ship threatened to break up” (v. 4).
This causes the sailors to cry out to their gods, but they get no relief. Jonah is asleep in the hold of the ship, so the captain wakes him up and tells him to call on his God, who may pay attention to their plight and save them (v. 6). The sailors also decide to draw lots to find out who brought the calamity on them, and the lot falls on Jonah (v. 7). They then ask Jonah who is he and where he is from (v. 8).
And he said to them, “I am a Hebrew; and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.”
Then the men were exceedingly afraid, and said to him, “What is this that you have done!” For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord, because he had told them (vv. 9-10).
Jonah Expects to Drown!
They then ask what they need to do to him so that the sea will quiet, and he says, “Take me up and throw me into the sea; then the sea will quiet down for you” (v. 12).
At this point, Jonah knows nothing about the big fish, so when he tells the sailors to throw him into the sea, he is expecting to drown. They understand this, too, but they are reluctant to take human life, so “Nevertheless the men rowed hard to bring the ship back to land, but they could not, for the sea grew more and more tempestuous against them” (v. 13).
They then pray to God, saying, “We beg you, O Lord, let us not perish for this man’s life, and lay not on us innocent blood; for you, O Lord, have done as it pleased you” (v. 14). Notice that they ask not to be held guilty of Jonah’s blood, because God is doing as he pleases in this situation.
Having been thwarted in their attempt to get back to land, and with the sea growing worse, they then throw Jonah into it, and the sea quiets down. “Then the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows” (v. 16).
The Whale SAVES Jonah!
At this point, both the sailors and Jonah know that his fate is going to be death unless God does something miraculous. But the sailors have just prayed for God not to lay the guilt of Jonah’s blood on them, and perhaps in response to that prayer, we read:
And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights (1:17).
The fish is thus the means that God has “appointed” to save Jonah from drowning. Being in the whale is not what kills him. It’s what saves him.
The idea that Jonah died in the whale thus fundamentally misreads what the whale is doing in the book. It isn’t an agent of death but the means of God’s salvation for Jonah, as we’re about to see.
Jonah Gives Thanks to God for Sending the Whale
The next thing we read is, “Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish” (2:1), and what follows is a psalm of thanksgiving.
Psalms of thanksgiving have a common structure, and they frequently begin with a short statement that summarizes the whole psalm. This is what happens in Jonah’s prayer. It begins:
I called to the Lord, out of my distress,
and he answered me;
out of the belly of Sheol I cried,
and you heard my voice (2:2).
That’s a summary of the entire psalm we’re about to read: Jonah called out to God when he was in distress, and God responded. As we saw earlier, “out of the belly of Sheol I cried” is a hyperbolic, figurative way of illustrating the extreme danger of death that Jonah was in. It does not mean that he literally died, as we shall see.
Jonah Before the Whale
Psalms of thanksgiving then commonly back up in time and give a description of the kind of distress the person was in, which happens here:
For you cast me into the deep,
into the heart of the seas,
and the flood was round about me;
all your waves and your billows passed over me.
Then I said, ‘I am cast out
from your presence;
how shall I again look
upon your holy temple?’
The waters closed in over me,
the deep was round about me;
weeds were wrapped about my head
at the roots of the mountains (vv. 3-5).
Notice what this is describing. It is not Jonah’s experience in the whale. It is what happened before that. Jonah says God “cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas.” “The flood” surrounded him, and he was submerged by “all your waves and your billows.”
Jonah perceived himself as abandoned by God and despaired of seeing his temple again. He’s expecting to die.
He’s now covered by “the waters,” in the midst of “the deep,” and then he gets down to the bottom of the sea, “at the roots of the mountains,” where “weeds wrapped about my head.”
None of this is describing Jonah being dead. It’s describing what happened to him while he was alive in the waters—before the whale swallowed him.
God Saves Jonah with the Whale
We then get the statement:
I went down to the land
whose bars closed upon me forever (v. 6a).
This is an allusion to death, but it’s clearly meant hyperbolically, for the gates of death did not literally “close upon me forever,” because we then read:
yet you brought up my life from the Pit,
O LORD my God (v. 6b).
The message is that Jonah almost died, but he didn’t. Because God sent the whale, and that’s what “brought up my life from the Pit.” Jonah was down at the bottom of the sea, with his head entangled in seaweed, he was about to drown, and then the whale from God swooped in and saved him.
As we saw before, in poetic psalms like this, references to going down to and brought up from “Sheol” and “the Pit” do not mean someone literally dying and rising. Thus, King David expressed thanks to God for saving him from a dangerous illness by saying, “O Lord, you have brought up my soul from Sheol, restored me to life from among those gone down to the Pit” (Ps. 30:3).
When Jonah Prayed
After describing the individual’s great distress, thanksgiving psalms then give us a description of how the individual cried out to God, which is what we find here:
When my soul fainted within me,
I remembered the Lord;
and my prayer came to you,
into your holy temple (v. 7).
Notice when Jonah says he remembered the Lord and prayed to him: “When my soul fainted within me.”
Advocates of the Jonah Death Hypothesis have claimed this is a reference to his death, but it isn’t. The Hebrew word translated “fainted”—hit`attep—does not mean “died.” It means weakened or felt weak. This is the same meaning it has in other passages where it describes a person’s “spirit growing faint” or their “soul growing faint” (Ps. 77:4, 107:5, 142:4, 143:4).
This means Jonah was still alive! What he’s saying is that, when he was at the bottom of the sea, he was fainting (running out of oxygen!), and that’s when he remembered God and called out to him. That’s when God sent the whale to rescue him.
Concluding Praise of God
Psalms of thanksgiving then customarily end with things like praise, testimony to God as the true God, and a vow, which we find here:
Those who pay regard to vain idols
forsake their true loyalty.
But I with the voice of thanksgiving
will sacrifice to you;
what I have vowed I will pay.
Deliverance belongs to the Lord!” (vv. 8-9).
The last statement uses the word yeshu`ah and would be more familiarly translated “Salvation belongs to the Lord.” It is the point toward which the whole psalm has been driving, and it celebrates God sending the whale to rescue Jonah from drowning.
Jonah After the Whale
We then read:
And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land (v. 10).
What we see is that Jonah ran away from God by ship, this brought on a severe storm, and when Jonah was identified as the cause, he was willing to die by being thrown into the sea. The sailors resisted and tried to get to land, but the storm got worse. They then prayed to God not to let them be guilty of Jonah’s blood and threw him overboard.
Jonah then almost drowned, and he is described as getting as far down as the bottom of the sea, but—as he was running out of oxygen—he remembered God, prayed for salvation, and God sent a whale to rescue him. He then spent three days and nights in the whale and prayed a psalm of thanksgiving for the salvation God had provided, upon which God spoke to the whale, and it spit him out on dry land.
This is the natural reading of the text. The Jonah Death Hypothesis takes it in a very unnatural sense that does not recognize the function of the whale in the story. Being swallowed by the whale is not what caused Jonah to die; it’s what saved him from death.
When the References to Death Occur
Notice also that the references to the realm of the dead all occur in the description of his near-drowning in the sea. If he was dead at any point, it would have been before the whale swallowed him, not while he was in the whale.
But the text reveals that he was still alive at the bottom of the sea, “when my soul fainted within me” and he prayed to God. He also was alive inside the whale, when he prayed his hymn of thanksgiving, culminating with “Salvation belongs to the Lord!”
Indeed, the 1954 A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture (Bernard Orchard, ed.) notes: “As Jonas prayed in the belly of the fish, 2:2, it does not seem possible to hold that he died and was restored to life” (Jonah, §d 2:1–2).
Finally, if Jonah had died and resurrected, this would be an even more amazing miracle than being saved by a big fish, and the narrator would have told us about it explicitly—in the narrative.
He would not have done so merely in poetic allusions in a psalm. These are known for non-literal, hyperbolic speech, and would not have been understood as indicating literal death given both the statements Jonah was still alive at the bottom of the sea and in the whale and given the book’s portrayal of the whale as the means of his salvation from death.
Conclusion
As this example illustrates, every text must be read and understood on its own terms before trying to relate it to other texts. If not, we risk fundamentally misreading it, as advocates of the Jonah Death Hypothesis have done by incautiously applying things from the story of Jesus back onto it.
All we can safely say that the two had in common is what Jesus told us they did: “As Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so will the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matt. 12:40). Both of them were in something for three days, but beyond that, their experiences diverge.
Jonah almost died and was saved from death by the whale, while Jesus actually died and was saved from death by his resurrection. This was greater than the deliverance Jonah received, for—as Jesus said—“behold, something greater than Jonah is here” (Matt. 12:41).
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