152 HAUPT— JONAH'S WHALE. [April 20, 



and not to India. ^ The prophet Jonah was commanded to go to 

 the East, to preach repentance in Nineveh ; but he boarded a vessel 

 at Joppah, and tried to go West, to Tarshish, i. e., southern Spain. 



In the present paper I shall discuss a zoological problem, vi^. 

 Jonah's whale. Geo. A. Smith has prefixed to his remarks on 

 the Book of Jonah the quotation :^ And this is the tragedy of the 

 Book of Jonah, that a Book zvhich is made the means of one of the 

 most sublime revelations of truth in the Old Testament should he 

 knoivn to most only for its connection zvith a zvhale. Jonah's whale 

 is the sea-monster which szvallozved up the disobedient prophet and 

 vomited him out again upon the dry land, after Jonah had been in 

 the bowels of the monster three days and three nights. The original 

 text speaks only of a great Ush,'^ just as the legend of the Fall of 

 Man speaks only of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good 

 and evil, not of an apple ."^ Not to know good and evil {i. e., what is 

 wholesome and injurious) means in Hebrew to be like a child. 

 He who eats of the forbidden fruit loses his childlike innocence. 

 The Fall of Man is the first coitus — an explanation which was given 

 by the great English philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his Levia- 

 than (London, 1651).^ 



The popular conception that Jonah was swallowed by a whale 

 is based on the passage Matt, xii, 39-41, where Jesus says: An 

 evil and adulterous^ generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall 

 no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas J For as 

 Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly; so shall 



^ See p. 119 of the Critical Notes on the Hebrew text of the Book of 

 Kings in the Polychrome Bible. 



2 In Vol. II. of The Book of The Tzuehe Prophets (London, 1898) p. 

 492 (The Expositor's Bible). 



^ The preceding verb does not mean prepared but detailed, appointed; 

 cf. Haupt, Purim (Leipzig, 1906) p. 17, 1. Z7- 



*The Hebrew word for apple seems to denote the large yellow berries 

 of the mandrake; see Haupt, Bihl. Liebeslieder, p. 64; cf. the American 

 Journal of Semitic Languages, Vol. XVIII. , p. 232, n. 5. 



^ See my remarks in the Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. XXI., p. 66. 



^That is, idolatrous. 



^The wonderful message of God transmitted by Jonah and Jesus is 

 sufficient ; cf. Luke xi, 30 ; xvi, 31 ; also Mark, viii, 12. 



