That the Book of Jonah is no allegory, no parable, is as certain as anything in literature can be.   For (1)the book is obviously meant by its author to be a straightforward historical narrative. (2) The People of God--the only people guided by inspired prophets--so regarded it for a thousand years. (3) No writer in the sacred Canon ever introduces prodigious miracles, or miracles at all, into a parable. (4) The psalm uttered by Jonah from the depths of the seas would be totally out of place in an allegory, and is only consistent with a plain narrative of historical fact. (5) Nor would any Jew, composing a fiction, select a well-known Prophet--at that time the greatest in Israel--on whom to hang a disobedient, fickle, irascible character; that the great Jonah is so depicted can only be accounted for by the fact that such was Jonah.  Above all (6) the seal of our Lord is so set on its literalism and absolute truthfulness that none who believe the Lord can doubt the Book.  He states that "Jonah was in the belly of the whale" (Math. xii. 40).  Nor (7) is it conceivable that the Son of God, uttering a warning of the utmost solemnity (Luke xi. 32) to souls that would be actually summoned to His bar, should depict the Pharisees as condemned by a people who never existed, for sin greater than a sin that was never committed, and unrepentant under a miraculous sign far vaster than an older miracle which never happened.

     For generations Rationalism countered the miracle by pointing to the gullet of a whale--a few inches across--as proving the miracle fabulously grotesque.   For decades this passed as science.  Even as lately as 1867 a warm defender of the miracle, Dr. Alexander Raleigh, says: "That a whale could not swallow a man, without miraculous expansion of its narrow throat, is certain." Yet what are the facts?  It is true of the Greenland Whale, but it is not true of the Spermaceti Whale found in the Mediterranean, and it was in the Mediterranean that Jonah was cast.  Mr. Frank Bullen, speaking of a cachelot, or sperm whale, which came under his own eyes, says: "The lower jaw of this whale measured exactly nineteen feet in length from the opening of the mouth.  Its ejected food was in masses of enormous size, some of them being estimated to be of the size of the hatch-house, viz., eight feet by six feet into six feet," so that this whale, in dying, vomited out a mass equal to six stout men rolled into one.

    In view of the fact that Ketos, the word used both by the Septuagint and by our Lord, meant originally a sea-monster, and only later a whale, the narrative of a leviathan, neither whale nor mammal, caught off Florida, is very illuminating.

    In 1912 Capt. C. H. Thompson, of Miami, Florida, harpooned a huge fish from a lifeboat (with three men in it) launched from his steam yacht.  For 39 hours the lifeboat was dragged at lightning speed, with no pauses for sleep or food.  They threw into the fish five harpoons, and fired 151 bullets.    The men then hooked the yacht's anchor chain through the fish's jaws, thinking it dead, when with a blow of its tail it smashed the rudder and propeller of the steamer.  When the monster, with the aid of a steam tug, was towed miles into Miami, and hauled by a steam crane onto the dock, it still had sufficient life to demolish the dockhouse and break a man's leg with one bang of its tail.  It weighed 30,000 pounds (15 American tons), was 45 feet long, and 8 feet 3 inches high, and its mouth was three feet across.  Its skin, three inches thick, was barely pierced by the bullets.  It had in its stomach a whole fish weighing 1,500 lbs., besides an octopus.  A full-grown man could stand upright in its stomach; it could have swallowed ten Jonahs.  The U.S. Government has embalmed it and housed it in Washington. It is most illuminating of the miracle to know what God thinks of Leviathan.  In the creation of ocean no other of the enormous population of the sea is even named: "and God created the great sea monsters " (Gen. i., 21); yet the Most High has devoted a whole chapter of the Bible (Job xli.) to a marvellous description of what the Creator Himself calls "the king over all the sons of pride." In what a chariot Jonah rode!

    The miracle consisted in the preservation of Jonah; " God prepared a great fish" (Jon. i., 17)--not by exceptional creation, but by supernatural adjustment.

    But the whole heart of the miracle is its spiritual import, and it is finally corroborative of its truth, and of a value beyond all price, that we have our Lord's own profound and detailed exposition.  "If it could be shown," says Dean Farrar, "that Jesus intended to stamp the story as literally true, every Christian would at once, and as a matter of course, accept it." Now our Lord evidently considered the miracle of the greatest importance, and in answer to the challenge for "a sign from heaven"--a direct, open, vivid miracle from God--He says that the miracle of Jonah was such.  He says: "Jonah became "--for he was not originally such-- "a sign"--a 'sign' is a miracle viewed as evidence, something supernatural to authenticate a truth unto the Ninevites (Luke xi, 30)--that is, an embodied miracle because of what he had passed through.  "And the people of Nineveh believed God" (Jon. iii, 5): the moral marvel of an entire city prostrate before God because of one man come up out of Death, not only was as prodigious in the moral sphere as the disgorged Prophet in the physical, but foreshadowed a Messiah disgorged by Death, and believed on far and wide among the great Gentile cities of the world.

      So our Lord proceeds: "Jonah"--not his corpse--"was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale"(Matt. xii, 40); whether in swoon, or conscious, or actually dead, is not stated, but his prayer implies consciousness. The fact of the miracle could not be stated in words simpler or plainer: Jesus assumes and endorses it. For He who multiplied fish, for the mouths of thousands, could equally prepare a fish, for one man's lodgement--incomparably the lesser miracle: He who could shut the lion's mouth, while He opened, could also restrain, a whale's devouring maw; He who located a coin inside a fish down in the glimmering depths, could manifestly find, and deliver, an entombed prophet in the heart of the seas. All the miracles of the Jehovah-Christ are woven of one tissue, and utter one revelation.

     For the very prodigiousness of the miracle which, through all the ages, has been its stumbling block, ought to have been its principal clue. For God works in cycles, and history is again and again a forecast of prophecy--the past is the future in little, and a type bulks large in proportion to the importance of the antitype. The Florentines said of Dante: "There goes the man who has walked in Hell"; much more must the Ninevites have said of Jonah, still dripping, as it were, from his plunge to the roots of the mountains, "There goes the man who has recrossed the bourne from which no traveller returns." So our Lord's comment is the unveiling of the heart of God in the miracle. As Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale--and so became an accepted marvel to the whole family of Semitic peoples, possibly to all nations--so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (Matt. xii, 40). Jonah's was the huge moon of the Old Testament's most startling miracle cast by its far vaster and unrisen sun, the supreme miracle of all the ages.

     So the three days and three nights exactly delimit the parallel and reveal God's design in a miracle not so great in quality--the preservation of the youths in fire was a more intense miracle--as huge in its panorama, for it depicted the Lord's marvellous underworld experience for the redemption of the race.  A storm raised by the wrath of God, and threatening all on board with instant destruction; both outcast, both flung, as the reason of the wrath, to the raging tempest; the storm centering on One--Christ made sin, and sacrificed for all on board; a great peace following at once on a great sacrifice; drowned in the depths--"all Thy waves and Thy billows," cried both in identical words (Ps. xlii, 7) in the Hebrew, "have gone over me" --wrath-billows for sin, swallowed by death, and actually in Sheol--"out of the belly of Sheol," Jonah says, "cried I." Resident in Hades for three days and three nights--the three greatest days of the prophet's life, in which he got his power to revolutionize vast Nineveh, as the Lord, the world; emerging, at last, perfectly delivered--wrath-free, sin-free, death-free; both embodied miracles from the grave; each no longer now a minister of the Circumcision, but moving over the world for salvation among surging, sobbing, praying multitudes of the Gentiles.   So was this enormous miracle none too huge to shadow forth the transcendent experiences of the Son of God in the salvation of the world.

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