A kayak on the ocean might’ve seemed to be a safe place during a pandemic. In November of 2020, however, two women ended up getting the Jonah treatment. While it happened some time ago, the story appeared in Slate just in August, so the world is learning about it after a few years. At least those of us who hadn’t seen the viral videos before. Julie McSorley tells how she and a friend were paddling out to see some humpback whales along the California coast. Then, like a scene from Finding Nemo, bubbles started to well up around them and they found themselves briefly in the whale’s mouth. They escaped unharmed since humpbacks don’t eat mammals, being baleen whales. Apart from the natural fascination of the story, what caught my attention was the reference to Jonah in the log line. As Heather Schwedel notes, few people “outside of storybooks and the Bible” have actually been inside a whale.
Image credit: Gustave Doré, Illustrations of Baron von Münchhausen, public domain via Wikimedia Commons
The typical biblical scholar response is generally somewhere along the lines of, “the Bible says ‘great fish,’ not whale.” This may be true but we don’t possess a biblical glossary for the animals, real and imaginary, in the Good Book. Ancient Israelites were neither great seafarers nor precise describers of nature. There are many strange references to animals in the Bible with no certain referents in the world we know. Not being oceanographically inclined, biblical authors wrote “great fish,” a term that was still used to describe whales up to Melville’s time. But we now know there are other big fish as well. Whale sharks, for example, and if you’ve ever watched River Monsters you’ve likely seen catfish large enough to send shivers down your spine.
The funny thing about the book of Jonah is that the point of the story is often overlooked for the splashy action. There’s a moral to the story. It’s all about not judging others because they don’t belong to your group. Jonah has already condemned the Ninevites as godless idolaters. The book teaches that such judgment isn’t a human prerogative. But we simply can’t get past that image of a whale, or great fish, swallowing a guy and digesting him for three days. Like Jonah, Julie was spit back out by the whale. It took only a matter of seconds since, despite what Pinocchio shows, the interior anatomy of most whales won’t allow living space for a long weekend away from home. Julie McSorley and her friend emerged relatively unharmed. McSorley even says it was a transformative experience. One might even suggest it could be a spiritual one.
