Was Jonah swallowed by a fish or a whale?

Hard question · Prophecy and its fulfilment · raised by 1 of the lists sceptics circulate

The meaning of a wordHow the New Testament quotes the Old

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The passages

Jonah 1:17

“The Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah”, and Jonah was in its belly three days and three nights.

Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.

Matthew 12:40

Jesus: “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”.

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.

The objection

Jonah 1:17 says that God prepared “a great fish” to swallow Jonah. In the King James Version, Jesus says that Jonah was in “the whale’s belly” (Matthew 12:40). A whale is not a fish, so critics say the two accounts disagree.

The answer

The difference arises in English translation, not in the Bible. The Hebrew of Jonah has dāg gādôl, ‘a great fish’. Matthew’s Greek has kētos, a word for any huge creature of the sea, a ‘sea monster’; it does not name a species. And Jesus’ words follow the Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint, which translates Jonah’s ‘great fish’ by kētos. Its wording at Jonah 2:1 (1:17 in English Bibles), ‘in the belly of the kētos three days and three nights’, is the very phrase of Matthew 12:40. So Matthew uses the word the Greek Bible already used for Jonah’s fish.

The King James translators rendered kētos as ‘whale’, and the WEB keeps that word, while the BSB has “the great fish”. Neither Hebrew nor Greek sorted sea creatures as modern biology does, so ‘fish’ in Jonah simply means a great creature of the sea. Both texts speak of the same animal, and neither tells us what kind it was.

Still open

What kind of creature swallowed Jonah is not known. Some suggest a sperm whale or a great shark; the text says only that God ‘prepared’, or appointed, it.

From the classic commentators

The fish in the book of Jonah is described merely as a "great fish," without specifying the kind. It is well known that the Greek word translated whale, in the New Testament, does not of necessity mean a whale, but may denote a large fish or sea-monster of any kind.Albert Barnes, Notes on the Bible, on Matthew 12:40 (1832)