A Pale Glow in the East 41 



There is, moreover, a great deal of misinterpretation or frank mis- 

 translation in our versions of the Bible: the word used for leviathan, 

 for instance, would be better translated as crocodile, and behemoth 

 means a hippopotamus. 



If the whole story was a fabrication to explain an awkward ab- 

 sence, there is no further necessity to wrangle about the business 

 of Jonah being swallowed by the whale, over wliich there has been 

 endless debate, and not only among theological purists. Most whales 

 have throats far too small to swallow even a salmon, let alone a 

 prominent Israelite. However, the sperm whale, which, as we have 

 seen, was probably the common species of the eastern Mediterranean 

 and the animal on which the local Phoenician whaling industry ap- 

 pears to have been founded, can swallow very large objects. 



Moreover, a story of a whale swallowing a man might well have 

 been current even in those days, for there are several modern re- 

 ports. One was published quite recently with due solemnity in the 

 trade journal of one of the biggest modern corporations. In 1758 a 

 man was said to have been swallowed by a large shark in the Medi- 

 terranean. The captain of the ship fired a cannon ball at the shark 

 and the man was vomited up alive and rescued. In a German book 

 published in 1895, ^ whaleman named James Bradley was said to 

 have been swallowed by a whale which was caught and killed the 

 next day. It was immediately opened and the luckless Bradley taken 

 out of its stomach, still alive but entirely comatose. It is said that he 

 lay in a swoon for hours and was found hard to revive, though this 

 is not difficult to imagine, and was out of his mind for three months 

 afterwards. According to the account, he then revived completely 

 and was entirely normal. 



You may make what you like of such accounts, but if they are 

 current today, they were probably rife in the time of the worthy 

 Jonah, and whether he underwent such duress himself or not, they 

 could certainly have provided him with a perfectly classic explana- 

 nation for his temporary disappearance. 



