1907] HAUPT— JONAH'S WHALE. 153 



the Son of j\Ian^ be three days and three nights in the heart of the 

 earth. The men of Nineveh shall rise" in judgment with this gen- 

 eration, and shall condemn it ,^ because they repented at the preach- 

 ing of Jonas; and behold a greater tJian Jonas is here. That is, 

 the Ninevites had more faith than the present generation : when 

 a prophet of Israel preached in a foreign land to the heathen in- 

 habitants of Nineveh, they believed him and turned to God; Jesus, 

 a greater prophet than Jonah, came unto His ozvn home, and His 

 ozvji people received Him not (John i, 11).* Alatt. xii, 41 is the 

 immediate sequel of v. 39; the intervening verse is a later insertion.^ 

 Even if these words were authentic, they would not prove that 

 Jesus regarded the history of Jonah as actual history. We may il- 

 lustrate a point by referring to King Lear without committing our- 

 selves as to the historical accuracy of Shakespeare's tragedy. An 

 astronomer who speaks of a beautiful sunset does not contest the 

 Copernican system. 



The Greek text has in Matt, xii, 40 z^ro? (Lat. cetiis, which 

 means sea-monster,^ hwt not necessarily whale). Any huge marine 

 animal might be called cetns, not only a cetacean, but also a large 

 cuttle-fish, or a huge shark, or the enormous sea-serpent, which is 

 said to have been repeatedly seen at sea.'' 



^ Son of Man means simply man in Aramaic; see the translation of 

 Esekiel, in the Polychrome Bible, p. 96, 1. 51; cf. Wellhausen, Israelitische 

 und judische Geschichte (Berlin, 1904) p. 387, below. 



2 In the Revised Version : stand- up. For the phrase to stand in the 

 judgment see Psalm i and my explanation in The American Journal of 

 Semitic Languages, Vol. XIX., p. 132. 



^ That is, if the Ninevites were tried together with this generation for 

 disbelief in revealed religion, they would be acquitted, and you would be 

 found guilty : they would stand the test, and you would be found wanting. 



*Cf. GuStav Frenssen's Hilligenlei, chapter XXVL, p. 523. 



5 In Luke xi, 29-32, there is no reference to Jonah in the belly of the 

 whale; cf. Wellhausen, Das Evangeliuni Matthm (Berlin, 1904) p. 64. 



^ The Revised Version gives sea-monster in the margin. In Gen. i, 21; 

 Job vii, 12, on the other hand, the R. V. substitutes sea-monster for the 

 rendering whale in the Authorized Version. 



'The accounts given of the appearance of the so-called sea-serpent can- 

 not all be based on inaccurate observations, though it is not certain that this 

 unknown sea-monster is an animal of serpentine form. The President of 

 the Deutsche Oricnt-Gesellschaft, Admiral Hollmann saw a large sea- 

 serpent on July 26, 1883; cf. A. C. Oudemans, The great sea-serpent 

 (London, 1892) and the article, Das Problem der grossen Seeschlange by Dr. 

 R. Henning in the Berlin weekly Dahcim (1906) No. 49. 



