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Some Christians appear to believe that the Bible contains nothing but exact quotations of the people it describes. In other words, everything you see between quotation marks in the Bible is exactly what the person said. There’s not one word of difference.
It’s easy for modern Christians to think this since we live in a world of audio and video recorders and stenographers and transcriptionists. Exact quotations come easy to us.
However, the attitude of ancient audiences was different. They lived before any recording devices had been invented, few people were literate, and of those who were literate, only a very few were trained in stenography and capable of taking down exactly what someone said in real time.
As a result, they did not expect exact quotations the way that we do. Instead, they expected texts to convey the gist or basic meaning of what someone said, but not the exact words.
They also recognized that authors would, at times, need to reconstruct the dialogue or conversations that people had.
No Recording Devices
Think about it: Without recorders and transcribers of such conversations, how would anybody remember exactly what had been said on a particular occasion? They might remember the gist of what was said, but likely not the exact words—especially after a long space of time.
Of course, in divinely inspired texts like the books of the Bible, God could reveal the exact words that had been used on a particular occasion. That’s possible. But it’s not what the ancient audience was expecting. They were used to reading books of history that used the convention of reconstructed dialogue, and so that’s what they would have assumed books of Scripture also contained—unless the text said otherwise.
A key principle of good biblical exegesis is reading the text the way the ancient audience would have, and so we also should understand the Bible as using reconstructed dialogue. We should not introduce the added assumption—not shared by the original audience—that God miraculously revealed what was said by minor players in the narrative, like the exact words used by every person who approached Jesus for a miracle.
Nobody would have written down the exact words of a healing request at the time, but the gist would have been remembered (e.g., a blind man asked Jesus for his sight back), and so we would expect the exact words to be reconstructed.
This much we can establish based on a knowledge of how ancient literature worked, but can we find evidence supporting this view in the text itself?
We can! And one way we can do this is by comparing different accounts of the same incident.
Synoptic Parallels
Let’s compare Mark’s and Matthew’s account of what the demons said to Jesus in the case of the Gerasene/Gadarene demoniacs.
Mark 5 presents us with Jesus exorcizing a single demoniac, and we read of the following exchange taking place between Jesus and the demons.
And pay particular attention to the words of the demons, because we’re going to compare them.
“What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.”
For he had said to him, “Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!”
And Jesus asked him, “What is your name?”
He replied, “My name is Legion; for we are many.”
And he begged him eagerly not to send them out of the country. Now a great herd of swine was feeding there on the hillside; and they begged him, “Send us to the swine, let us enter them” (Mark 5:7-12).
Now here’s the account of the same event from Matthew 8, where Matthew records that there were two demoniacs that Jesus exorcized:
“What have you to do with us, O Son of God? Have you come here to torment us before the time?”
Now a herd of many swine was feeding at some distance from them.
And the demons begged him, “If you cast us out, send us away into the herd of swine” (Matt. 8:29-31).
As you can see, Matthew omits the reference to “Legion,” but the gist is the same in both accounts—the demons ask what Jesus has to do with them, they’re concerned about being tormented, and they ask to go into the herd of pigs.
But the exact words used are different. In Mark the demons say, “What have you to do with me” (singular), because Mark is only mentioning one demoniac, while Matthew has “What have you to do with us” (plural), because Matthew mentions the second demoniac.
In Mark the demons identify Jesus as “Jesus, Son of the Most High God,” while in Matthew they just identify him as “Son of God.”
In Mark the demons make a request about torment—“I adjure you by God, do not torment me”—while in Matthew they ask a question—“Have you come here to torment us before the time?”
Finally, concerning the pigs, Mark’s demons make a simple request—“Send us to the swine, let us enter them”—while in Matthew they make a conditional request—“If you cast us out, send us away into the herd of swine.”
We thus see how the biblical authors Mark and Matthew both wanted to convey the gist of what happened on this occasion, but they don’t feel bound to use the same exact words of dialogue. There is dialogue reconstruction—in the form of paraphrase—happening in these texts.
A More Striking Example
An even more striking example of reconstructed dialogue occurs in Luke’s account of the day of Pentecost in Acts.
After the Holy Spirit descends on the disciples and they begin speaking in tongues, we read:
Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven. And at this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in his own language.
And they were amazed and wondered, saying,
“Are not all these who are speaking Galileans?
“And how is it that we hear, each of us in his own native language?
“Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians, we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God” (Acts 2:5-11).
Note carefully what Luke says: “they were amazed and wondered, saying.” This tells us that the words that follow represent what the crowd—a group of people—said.
Now—unless they’re chanting in unison—when a group of people speak, each person says something different. In real life, they would hold a conversation about the amazing event unfolding before them.
But instead of recording a conversation between individual speakers, Luke represents the crowd as if it is speaking in unison: “How is it that we hear, each of us in his native language? . . . We hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God.”
Interposed between these is a long list of places that the Jews came from, and there is no way in real life that a group of people speaking in unison—without a script—would name the same places in the same order.
What’s more, the list isn’t random. This may not be obvious to modern readers, who aren’t that familiar with ancient place names, but the list mentions places of Jewish settlement moving from east to west. It starts in the far east with Parthia (in modern Iran) and works its way westward through the Holy Land and North Africa before moving up to the capital of the empire—Rome—with Cretans (an island people) and Arabs (a nomadic people) thrown in at the end.
There is no way a crowd would spontaneously come up with this list. If they wanted to speak in unison, they’d need to first decide on the places to name and then figure out the sequence in which to name them.
A Greek Chorus
The way that Luke presents the crowd bursting into a common speech will be familiar to readers of ancient literature. What Luke depicts the crowd doing is functioning as a Greek chorus.
Greek choruses were made up of performers in ancient Greek plays. Choruses consisted of 12 to 50 actors, and they sang, danced, and spoke lines in unison. Their purpose was to represent the common people who were witnessing the events of the play, and they provided commentary on them.
They would say things that the main characters couldn’t (e.g., the chorus might comment on the main character’s faults or hidden fears and motives), they would comment in ways that would bring out the significance of events in the story, and they would underscore elements of the plot to make it easier for the audience to follow.
Here’s an example of a chorus speaking in Sophocles’s play Antigone—about the daughter of Oedipus the king. At this point in the play, Antigone has been sentenced to be buried alive in a tomb by the tyrant King Creon, and she has just compared her fate to a somewhat similar fate experienced by Niobe, the daughter of King Tantalus.
The chorus then speaks up and says:
Yet [Niobe] was a goddess, you know, and born of gods;
we are mortals, and of mortal race.
But ’tis great renown for a woman [you, Antigone] who has perished that she should have shared the doom of the godlike, in her life, and afterward in death.
You see how the chorus speaks in unison—“We are mortals, and of mortal race.” This kind of speaking in unison would not happen in real life unless people were reading from a script, which is exactly what happened in ancient Greek plays. The actors had a script to direct their speech.
The crowd on Pentecost had no script to read from, but Luke knows that his readers will have seen plays and be familiar with the literary device of a chorus, so he reconstructs dialogue-in-unison to reflect the thoughts and nature of the crowd and has them provide commentary on the miracle they have just witnessed.
No doubt, individual people in the crowd on Pentecost did say things like, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans?”, “How is it that we hear, each of us in his own native language?”, and “We hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God.” They probably didn’t use those exact words, but they convey the gist of what people in the crowd said.
Luke then fuses these remarks with a list of the places that the people came from to provide an overall commentary that conveyed to his readers a sense of the multiple languages represented in the miracle and the crowd’s reaction to it.
We thus find a real event being presented with a particularly clear case of reconstructed dialogue.
The Words of Jesus
A question that modern readers will want to ask is what all this says about the words of Jesus.
We can say basically two things: First, that the authors of the Gospels were concerned with accurately presenting the gist of Jesus’ teachings and interactions, and second, that they were at liberty to paraphrase and reconstruct dialogue.
This means that we would expect more exact representations of Jesus’ words in certain types of passages. Teachings were the most important things Jesus said (as opposed, for example, to where the group would be having dinner or spending the night), so they should most closely reflect his actual words.
Short Sayings
Also, shorter statements are easier to remember than longer ones, so teachings given in shorter form should convey more of the actual words.
Indeed, we have evidence that Jesus himself took these things into account, and many of his teachings are framed in short, vivid, easy-to-remember forms. An example is this statement:
The last will be first, and the first last (Matt. 20:16).
This saying uses a literary device known as a chiasm or chiasmus (in Greek chiasma means “crossing”). Chiasms involve a sequence of elements that reverse in order. If we label the word “last” as A and the word “first” as B, this chiasmus has an A B | B A structure.
Such structures make sayings easier to remember, and it appears Jesus used them to make his teachings more memorable.
Parables
Another literary device he used to do this was the parable. Jesus’ parables are short, memorable stories that teach spiritual lessons, and humans are wired for stories, so we remember the gist of them easily.
Some of Jesus’ longer discourses—like the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7)—are essentially collections of short, easily memorable sayings, and if you study the Sermon on the Mount, you can see that it’s organized around different collections of sayings that begin the same way (e.g., “Blessed are the X”, “You have heard X, but I say Y”, “When you do X, do not do Y”).
There is also the fact that—as a teacher—Jesus would have given the same teachings multiple times, to many different audiences, so his disciples would have heard his teachings many times and—as his disciples (i.e., students)—they would have made efforts to memorize them so they could preach them to others.
Conversational Dialogue
On the other hand, not everything Jesus said would have been remembered in this way. Things he said only once—like when he was having a conversation with someone—would not be expected to be as close to the original wording, so we would expect more reconstruction in one-off statements.
The same would be true of minor characters—people other than Jesus. Numerous people approached him for miracles of healing or exorcism during his ministry, and their exact words in making the request would not have been memorized. Consequently, we would expect the Evangelists to reconstruct what such people said, basing it on the kind of thing someone with a particular problem would say to Jesus in making a respectful request for relief.
So expect more reconstruction in conversational dialogue.
Long, One-Time Speeches?
Similarly, things that Jesus said that went on for a long time—very lengthy statements, especially those made only once—would be harder to memorize, and we would expect more paraphrase and reconstruction.
For example, Jesus gives some long speeches in the Gospel of John. One of them runs for five chapters (John 13-17)! And it was apparently given only once, on Holy Thursday. Even though John was an eyewitness (John 21:24), and even though he had supernatural assistance in remembering what Jesus said (John 14:26), the ancient audience would not have expected John to reproduce a word-for-word transcript of a lengthy speech he heard Jesus give only once.
Instead, they would expect the Holy Spirit to help John remember the gist of what was said, and then John would employ the normal reconstruction and paraphrase that was expected in ancient literature.
What we see is thus that the four Evangelists felt the need to accurately preserve the substance of what Jesus said, but not always the exact wording—as can be seen by comparing the Gospel accounts of the same sayings and noting the variation in the exact words used.
No Quotation Marks
Part of the problem modern readers have with the idea that quotations in the Bible may not be exact is because they are encased in quotation marks. When Jesus says something, modern Bibles put quotation marks around it.
However, the original Greek manuscripts of the New Testament (and the Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament) do not contain quotation marks. They are a later invention.
The ancestors of quotation marks were invented in the 2nd century B.C., but they had a different function back then. At the Library of Alexandria, they were used to signal erroneous or disputed portions of text.
Once the Christian age began, authors began using them to signal quotations, but they were a particular type of quotation—one that came from the Bible. Biblical passages would get quotation marks, regardless of whether someone was speaking or not. Thus when the author of Genesis writes “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” it would get quotation marks, and so would Jesus’ statement “The last will be first, and the first last.”
Later, quotation marks came to be used for quotations of the words another person used in saying something, which is their modern function. And they usually indicated exact quotations—the exact words someone said, with no paraphrase or reconstruction.
This is the connotation that they have today, and their use in modern editions of the Bible leads the reader to suppose that they are being given an exact quotation.
But the quotation marks aren’t in the originals. They are added by modern translation committees. There are even disputes—in some cases—about where a particular quotation begins and ends, because there aren’t any marks in the Greek telling you where it ends and where the author’s voice picks up again.
For example, a famous instance occurs in Galatians 2. It’s clear that in Galatians 2:14 Paul begins quoting something he once said to St. Peter, but it isn’t clear where the historic quotation ends and where Paul shifts back to giving his current thoughts rather than what he said to Peter in the past.
Direct and Indirect Discourse
The difference in how ancient writers quoted people and how modern, English-speaking ones do is illustrated by the difference between what are known as direct and indirect discourse.
In direct discourse, a modern English-language writer will be giving you what he believes were the exact words a person used—no paraphrasing allowed—as in this statement:
By contrast, indirect discourse doesn’t present you with a quotation, and so quotation marks are not used, as in the statement:
The way English writing works, you know that in the first statement the author is giving you what he thinks is an exact quotation of what John said, while in the second statement he is giving you a summary of what John said, but not necessarily his exact words (e.g., John might have literally said, “I’m famished!” or “I’m peckish” or “I haven’t eaten today,” but you could summarize all of those with “John said that he is hungry”).
Greek has equivalents of direct and indirect discourse, but they don’t work exactly the same way the English versions do. In particular, since ancient authors generally weren’t expected to give you exact quotations, this wasn’t normally part of what Greek direct discourse implied.
But when you add quotation marks to signal direct discourse in English, it tells the reader that what they have before them is supposed to be an exact quotation. This can mask the greater flexibility ancient authors had in presenting quotations. So when you read the statement:
It may actually mean something more like:
In other words, quotation marks work differently in the Bible than they do in things we write.
When you see quotation marks in the Bible, they only guarantee that the gist of what was said is accurate—not that these were the exact words.
This is not to say that a quotation doesn’t preserve the exact words of Jesus. It may or may not, but it will accurately preserve the gist of what he said.
Dei Verbum
So what can we say in light of all this? One of the things that the Second Vatican Council taught was the following:
Since, therefore, all that the inspired authors, or sacred writers, affirm should be regarded as affirmed by the Holy Spirit, we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture, firmly, faithfully and without error, teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the sacred Scriptures (Dei Verbum 11).
In other words, everything that the authors of the Bible intended to assert, properly speaking, is also asserted by the Holy Spirit and is thus true.
The authors of the Bible intended to assert the substance of Jesus’ actions and teachings. They didn’t intend to assert the exact words that he and others always used, because that kind of assertion wasn’t a standard part of ancient literature. However, they did intend to assert the gist—the substance—of what he said and did.
Therefore, that substance is guaranteed by the Holy Spirit to be transmitted by the Gospels “firmly, faithfully, and without error.”
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This version of The Weekly Francis covers material released in the last week, from 4 October 2024 to 31 October 2024.
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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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