Jonah And The Whale Quotes

Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale..

Adam hid in the Garden of Eden. Moses tried to substitute his brother. Jonah jumped a boat and was swallowed by a whale...Man likes to run from God. It's a tradition.

Explore me,' you said and I collected my ropes, flasks and maps, expecting to be back home soon. I dropped into the mass of you and I cannot find the way out. Sometimes I think I’m free, coughed up like Jonah from the whale, but then I turn a corner and recognise myself again. Myself in your skin, myself lodged in your bones, myself floating in the cavities that decorate every surgeon’s wall. That is how I know you. You are what I know.

Solitary. But not in the sense of being alone. Not solitary in the way Thoreau was, for example, exiling himself in order to find out where he was; not solitary in the way Jonah was, praying for deliverance in the belly of the whale. Solitary in the sense of retreat. In the sense of not having to see himself, of not having to see himself being seen by anyone else.

Television screens saturated with commercials promote the utopian and childish idea that all problems have fast, simple, and technological solutions. You must banish from your mind the naive but commonplace notion that commercials are about products. They are about products in the same sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales.

I have spoken of Jonah, and of the story of him and the whale. — A fit story for ridicule, if it was written to be believed; or of laughter, if it was intended to try what credulity could swallow; for, if it could swallow Jonah and the whale it could swallow anything.

after all, the bible was always talking about miracles. i figured that if Daniel could get out of the lion's den alive and Jonah could come up unharmed from the belly of a whale, then surely ole T.j. could get out of going to prison.

Paradox /pera,daks/ noun 1. Being told to wake up and come back to reality by your family and friends, while being dragged to church to hear a lesson on Jonah and the whale, followed by a sermon on believing in things you can't see without faith.

A large section of the idling classes of England get their incomes by believing that Jesus was born of a virgin and that Jonah swallowed a whale; and with the progress of science they were naturally finding this more and more difficult. A school of ingenious Bible-twisters arose, to invent symbolical and literary meanings for fairy tales, in order that people who no longer believed could continue with good conscience to collect the salaries of belief.

Perhaps it was the word "God" that was inviting to me, a word I thought I knew too much about. The one who had tortured Job, who had Abraham lift the ax to his son, who, disguised as a whale, had swallowed Jonah. I know now that the name does not refer to any deity, but means simply to call out and pray, to summon.

I always wondered why it took "three days" for significant things to happen in the Bible--Jonah spent three days in the belly of the whale, Jesus spent three days in the tomb, Paul spent three days blind in Damascus--and now I know. From earliest times, people learned that was how long they had to wait in the dark before the sliver of the new moon appeared in the sky. For three days every month they practiced resurrection.

It doesna matter how many things ye do on a farm, there’s always more than ye can do. A wonder the place doesna rise up about my ears and swallow me, like Jonah and the whale.

Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there's a member-roll for you! What club but the whaleman's can head off like that?

Frighted Jonah trembles, and summoning all his boldness to his face, only looks so much the more a coward.

The television commercial is about products only in the sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales,

When you fall in love, when Love really does its worst, it gives you no cause. It swallows you whole. It allows no refusals. Like Jonah only after he had been inside the whale awhile, you may say, if asked, “Oh, this is why I am here.

In those jaws of swift destruction, like another Jonah (by which name they indeed called him), bustles a little withered old man, who, for their money, dearly sells the sailors deliriums and death. Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison.

Adam hid in the Garden of Eden. Moses tried to substitute his brother. Jonah jumped a boat and was swallowed by a whale. Man likes to run from God.

…The story of the Pledge of Allegiance and its National Socialist roots is a fascinating one. Dr. Rex Curry, a passionate libertarian, has made the issue his white whale.

Now, Jonah's Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects crime in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless. In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.

(Because Jonah’s real story is the one never told: never was he as stupendously happy as during those three days and three nights of eternity. He was granted an experience that women dream of: he lived when he was mature in the adored whale’s belly. In real paradise. How does one get there? By disobedience. By passion. Running away.)

As long as you are following God’s will, friend Kline. But even God sometimes becomes impatient. You know the story of Jonah, friend Kline? How many whales do you suppose God will deign send to swallow you? When does God run out of whales?

Within are shabby shelves, ranged round with old decanters, bottles, flasks; and in those jaws of swift destruction, like another cursed Jonah (by which name indeed they called him), bustles a little withered old man, who, for their money, dearly sells the sailors deliriums and death.

[The Devil] "This legend is about paradise. There was, they say, a certain thinker and philospher here on your earth, who 'rejected all--laws, conscience faith, and, above all, the future life. He died and thought he'd go straight into darkness and death, but no--there was the future life before him. He was amazed and indignant. 'This,' he said, 'goes against my convictions.' So for that he was sentenced...I mean, you see, I beg your pardon, I'm repeating what I heard, it's just a legend...you see, he was sentenced to walk in darkness a quadrillion kilometers (we also use kilometers now), and once he finished that quadrillion, the doors of paradise would be open to him and he would be forgiven everything...Well, so this man sentenced to the quadrillion stood a while, looked, and then lay down across the road: 'I dont want to go, I refuse to go on principle!' Take the soul of an enlightened Russian atheist and mix it with the soul of the prophet Jonah, who sulked in the belly of a whale for three days and three nights--you'll get the character of this thinker lying in the road...He lay there for nearly a thousand years, and then got up and started walking." "What an ass!" Ivan exclaimed, bursting into nervous laughter, still apparently trying hard to figure something out. "isn't it all the same whether he lies there forever or walks a quadrillion kilometers? It must be about a billion years' walk!" "Much more, even. If we had a pencil and paper, we could work it out. But he arrived long ago, and this is where the anecdote begins." "Arrived! But where did he get a billion years?" "You keep thinking about our present earth! But our present earth may have repeated itself a billion times; it died out, lets say, got covered with ice, cracked, fell to pieces, broke down into its original components, again there were the waters above the firmament, then again a comet, again the sun, again the earth from the sun--all this development may already have been repeated an infinite number of times, and always in the same way, to the last detail. A most unspeakable bore... "Go on, what happened when he arrived?" "The moment the doors of paradise were opened and he went in, before he had even been there two seconds--and that by the watch--before he had been there two seconds, he exclaimed that for those two seconds it would be worth walking not just a quadrillion kilometers, but a quadrillion quadrillion, even raised to the quadrillionth power! In short, he sang 'Hosannah' and oversweetened it so much that some persons there, of a nobler cast of mind, did not even want to shake hands with him at first: he jumped over to the conservatives a bit too precipitously. The Russian character. I repeat: it's a legend.

The traveler from Europe edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slipping past the straits of Belle Isle into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where five Canadian provinces surround him, for the most part invisible. Then he goes up the St. Lawrence and the inhabited country comes into view, mainly a French-speaking country with its own cultural traditions. To enter the United States is a matter of crossing an ocean; to enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien continent.

That you can blow a man & your voice speaks through his voice. Like Jonah through the whale.

Like Jonah in the belly of the whale, Tsukuru had fallen into the bowels of death, one untold day after another, lost in a dark, stagnant void.

Good Lord! is this the road that Jonah went?

Shipmates, I do not place Jonah before you to be copied for his sin but I do place him before you as a model for repentance. Sin not, but if you do, take heed to repent of it like Jonah.

For sinful as he is, Jonah does not weep and wail for direct deliverance. He feels that his dreadful punishment is just. He leaves all his deliverance to God, contenting himself with this, that spite of all his pains and pangs, he will still look towards His holy temple. And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment. Shipmates, I do not place Jonah before you to be copied for his sin, but I do place him before you as a model for repentance. Sin not; but if you do, take heed to repent of it like Jonah.

She thinks of Jonah in the belly of the whale and the little red witch inside the wolf and wonders if either of them felt a little relieved to be eaten, to be taken away from the world and permitted to curl in the suffocating black, alone.

I will never understand Christians. I have seen men and women whip themselves till their backs were nothing but strips of flesh hanging from exposed ribs, watched pilgrims limp on bleeding broken feet to worship the tooth of the whale that swallowed Jonah, and seen a man hammer nails through his own feet. What god wants such nonsense? And why prefer a god who wants you to torture yourself instead of worshipping Eostre who wants you to take a girl into the woods and make babies?

Out of the lions' den for Daniel, the prison for Peter, the whale's belly for Jonah, Goliath's shadow for David the storm for the disciples, disease for the lepers, doubt for Thomas, the grave for Lazarus, and the shackles for Paul. God gets us through stuff.

Now Jonah’s Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects crime in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless. In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.

Apropos of Eskimo, I once heard a missionary describe the extraordinary difficulty he had found in translating the Bible into Eskimo. It was useless to talk of corn or wine to a people who did not know even what they meant, so he had to use equivalents within their powers of comprehension. Thus in the Eskimo version of the Scriptures the miracle of Cana of Galilee is described as turning the water into blubber; the 8th verse of the 5th chapter of the First Epistle of St. Peter ran: ‘Your adversary the devil, as a roaring Polar bear walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.’ In the same way ‘A land flowing with milk and honey’ became ‘A land flowing with whale’s blubber,’ and throughout the New Testament the words ‘Lamb of God’ had to be translated ‘little Seal of God,’ as the nearest possible equivalent. The missionary added that his converts had the lowest opinion of Jonah for not having utilised his exceptional opportunities by killing and eating the whale.

You see, that will start, for instance, with the recognition that what you call good is very bad for other people, or what they call good is very bad for you. So you come to the conclusion that they are human beings too and they must have their point of view as you have yours. And then you are already out of it, already static, already au dessus de la mêlée. Of course you can take such a standpoint illegitimately before you have gone through the turmoil, just in order to avoid the conflict; people sometimes like to play that stunt, but that has no merit and they are tempted all the time to climb down into the turmoil. But if you have gone through the turmoil, if you cannot stand you any more, if the unconscious itself spits you out, then life itself spits you out as old Jonah was spit out by the whale; and then it islegitimate that you contentedly sit on the top of life, having a look at it. Then you can congeal the pairs of opposites in a beautiful static structure. Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 1110-1111). Princeton University Press.

See ye not then, shipmates, that Jonah sought to flee world-wide from God? Miserable man! Oh! Most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with slouched hat and guilty eye, skulking from his God; prowling among the shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the seas. So disordered, self-condemning is his look, that had there been policemen in those days, Jonah, on the mere suspicion of something wrong, had been arrested ere he touched a deck.

They believed in Black Power. They’d give it a trial anyway. Everything else had failed. What did they have to lose? And they might win. Who knew? The whale swallowed Jonah. Moses split the Red Sea. Christ rose from the dead. Lincoln freed the slaves. Hitler killed six million Jews. The Africans had got to rule – in some parts of Africa, anyway. The Americans and the Russians have shot the moon. Some joker has made a plastic heart. Anything is possible.

Not long ago, a whale biologist named Phillip Clapham sent me a photograph that illustrates the consequences of life without a doorman. Like most creatures that swallow their food whole, sperm whales have a limited-to-nonexistent sense of taste. The photo is a black-and-white still life of twenty-five objects recovered from sperm whale stomachs. It’s like Jonah set up housekeeping: a pitcher, a cup, a tube of toothpaste, a strainer, a wastebasket, a shoe, a decorative figurine.

Over this lip, as over a slippery threshold, we now slide into the mouth. Upon my word were I at Mackinaw, I should take this to be the inside of an Indian wigwam. Good Lord! is this the road that Jonah went? The roof is about twelve feet high, and runs to a pretty sharp angle, as if there were a regular ridge-pole there; while these ribbed, arched, hairy sides, present us with those wondrous, half vertical, scimitar-shaped slats of whalebone, say three hundred on a side, which depending from the upper part of the head or crown bone, form those Venetian blinds which have elsewhere been cursorily mentioned. The edges of these bones are fringed with hairy fibres, through which the Right Whale strains the water, and in whose intricacies he retains the small fish, when openmouthed he goes through the seas of brit in feeding time. In the central blinds of bone, as they stand in their natural order, there are certain curious marks, curves, hollows, and ridges, whereby some whalemen calculate the creature's age, as the age of an oak by its circular rings. Though

Tsukuru couldn't fathom why he had reached this point, where he was teetering over the precipice. There was an actual event that had led him to this place—this he knew all too well—but why should death have such a hold over him, enveloping him in its embrace for nearly half a year? Envelop—the word expressed it precisely. Like Jonah in the belly of the whale, Tsukuru had fallen into the bowels of death, one untold day after another, lost in a dark, stagnant void. It was as if he were sleepwalking through life, as if he had already died but not yet noticed it.

Casiopea did feel the train, though. It lumbered onward, away from the humid heat of the coast. She had never been on such a contraption. She felt as if she rested on the belly of a metal beast, like Jonah who was swallowed by the whale. This image in her family's Bible had often disconcerted her, the man sitting inside a fish, his face surprised. Now she sympathized with him. She could not see where they were headed, nor the place where they'd come from, and thus felt as though time and the world around her transmogrified, became unknowable; it was as if she were traveling in a dream.

10. What books would you recommend to an aspiring entrepreneur? Some quick favorites: The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk! by Al Ries and Jack Trout The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene The 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King by Rich Cohen Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism by Matt Mason Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals by Saul D. Alinsky The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story by Michael Lewis Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable by Seth Godin Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success by Phil Jackson and Hugh Delehanty Billion Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years by Paul B. Carroll and Chunka Mui Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices by Christopher Locke

Freud’s incest theory describes certain fantasies that accompany the regression of libido and are especially characteristic of the personal unconscious as found in hysterical patients. Up to a point they are infantile-sexual fantasies which show very clearly just where the hysterical attitude is defective and why it is so incongruous. They reveal the shadow. Obviously the language used by this compensation will be dramatic and exaggerated. The theory derived from it exactly matches the hysterical attitude that causes the patient to be neurotic. One should not, therefore, take this mode of expression quite as seriously as Freud himself took it. It is just as unconvincing as the ostensibly sexual traumata of hysterics. The neurotic sexual theory is further discomfited by the fact that the last act of the drama consists in a return to the mother’s body. This is usually effected not through the natural channels but through the mouth, through being devoured and swallowed (pl. LXII), thereby giving rise to an even more infantile theory which has been elaborated by Otto Rank. All these allegories are mere makeshifts. The real point is that the regression goes back to the deeper layer of the nutritive function, which is anterior to sexuality, and there clothes itself in the experiences of infancy. In other words, the sexual language of regression changes, on retreating still further back, into metaphors derived from the nutritive and digestive functions, and which cannot be taken as anything more than a façon de parler. The so-called Oedipus complex with its famous incest tendency changes at this level into a “Jonah-and-the-Whale” complex, which has any number of variants, for instance the witch who eats children, the wolf, the ogre, the dragon, and so on. Fear of incest turns into fear of being devoured by the mother. The regressing libido apparently desexualizes itself by retreating back step by step to the presexual stage of earliest infancy. Even there it does not make a halt, but in a manner of speaking continues right back to the intra-uterine, pre-natal condition and, leaving the sphere of personal psychology altogether, irrupts into the collective psyche where Jonah saw the “mysteries” (“représentations collectives”) in the whale’s belly. The libido thus reaches a kind of inchoate condition in which, like Theseus and Peirithous on their journey to the underworld, it may easily stick fast. But it can also tear itself loose from the maternal embrace and return to the surface with new possibilities of life.

Two things that weren’t even on the agenda survived every upheaval that followed. General Akhtar remained a general until the time he died, and all God’s names were slowly deleted from the national memory as if a wind had swept the land and blown them away. Innocuous, intimate names: Persian Khuda which had always been handy for ghazal poets as it rhymed with most of the operative verbs; Rab, which poor people invoked in their hour of distress; Maula, which Sufis shouted in their hashish sessions. Allah had given Himself ninety-nine names. His people had improvised many more. But all these names slowly started to disappear: from official stationery, from Friday sermons, from newspaper editorials, from mothers’ prayers, from greeting cards, from official memos, from the lips of television quiz-show hosts, from children’s storybooks, from lovers’ songs, from court orders, from telephone operators’ greetings, from habeas corpus applications, from inter-school debating competitions, from road inauguration speeches, from memorial services, from cricket players’ curses; even from beggars’ begging pleas. In the name of God, God was exiled from the land and replaced by the one and only Allah who, General Zia convinced himself, spoke only through him. But today, eleven years later, Allah was sending him signs that all pointed to a place so dark, so final, that General Zia wished he could muster up some doubts about the Book. He knew if you didn’t have Jonah’s optimism, the belly of the whale was your final resting place.

These words show that the libido has now sunk to a depth where “the danger is great” (Faust, “The Mothers”). There God is near, there man would find the maternal vessel of rebirth, the seeding-place where he could renew his life. For life goes on despite loss of youth; indeed it can be lived with the greatest intensity if looking back to what is already moribund does not hamper your step. Looking back would be perfectly all right if only it did not stop at externals, which cannot be brought back again in any case; instead, it ought to consider where the fascination of the past really springs from. The golden haze of childhood memories arises not so much from the objective facts as from the admixture of magical images which are more intuited than actually conscious. The parable of Jonah who was swallowed by the whale reproduces the situation exactly. A person sinks into his childhood memories and vanishes from the existing world. He finds himself apparently in deepest darkness, but then has unexpected visions of a world beyond. The “mystery” he beholds represents the stock of primordial images which everybody brings with him as his human birthright, the sum total of inborn forms peculiar to the instincts. I have called this “potential” psyche the collective unconscious. If this layer is activated by the regressive libido, there is a possibility of life being renewed, and also of its being destroyed. Regression carried to its logical conclusion means a linking back with the world of natural instincts, which in its formal or ideal aspect is a kind of prima materia. If this prima materia can be assimilated by the conscious mind it will bring about a reactivation and reorganization of its contents. But if the conscious mind proves incapable of assimilating the new contents pouring in from the unconscious, then a dangerous situation arises in which they keep their original, chaotic, and archaic form and consequently disrupt the unity of consciousness. The resultant mental disturbance is therefore advisedly called schizophrenia, since it is a madness due to the splitting of the mind.

Religion is hard. You either see Jonah in the belly of the whale or you don't, my dark sister. It's all on the inside.

Massa was also where British merchant James Grey Jackson once saw a pair of colossal whale jawbones arching up from the sand. A local informed him that they had always been there and that, when the whale had beached, a man named Jonah had emerged from it's belly. Jackson laughed at the tale. His earnest informant responded only that 'nobody but a Christian would doubt the fact.

Jonah being delivered from the whale.

so also, from the beginning, did God permit man to be swallowed up by the great whale, who was the author of transgression, not that he should perish altogether when so engulphed; but, arranging and preparing the plan of salvation, which was accomplished by the Word, through the sign of Jonah, for those who held the same opinion as Jonah regarding the Lord, and who confessed, and said, “I am a servant of the Lord, and I worship the Lord God of heaven, who hath made the sea and the dry land.” [This was done] that man, receiving an unhoped-for salvation from God, might rise from the dead, and glorify God, and repeat that word which was uttered in prophecy by Jonah: “I cried by reason of mine affliction to the Lord my God, and He heard me out of the belly of hell;” and that he might always continue glorifying God, and giving thanks without ceasing, for that salvation which he has derived from Him, “that no flesh should glory in the Lord’s presence;” and that man should never adopt an opposite opinion with regard to God, supposing that the incorruptibility which belongs to him is his own naturally, and by thus not holding the truth, should boast with empty superciliousness, as if he were naturally like to God. For he (Satan) thus rendered him (man) more ungrateful towards his Creator, obscured the love which God had towards man, and blinded his mind not to perceive what is worthy of God, comparing himself with, and judging himself equal to, God.

Beatrice Belladonna expects despair to hurt, but it doesn’t feel like much of anything. She thinks of Jonah in the belly of the whale and the little red witch inside the wolf and wonders if either of them felt a little relieved to be eaten, to be taken away from the world and permitted to curl up in the suffocating black, alone.

But the woman he knew and loved had been swallowed up. Like Jonah. Her white whale of sorrow and loss in an ocean of body fluid.

Many Christians are deciding that the comparatively liberal and prosperous Kurdish regions are their safest bet. ‘‘Every Christian prefers to stay in Kurdistan,’’ said Abu Zeid, an engineer. He too said he wouldn’t be going back to Mosul. ‘‘It’s a shame because Mosul is the most important city in Iraq for Christians,’’ he added. Mosul is said to be the site of the burial of Jonah, the prophet who tradition says was swallowed by a whale. Iraq was estimated to have more than 1 million Christians before the 2003 invasion and toppling of Saddam Hussein. Now church officials estimate only 450,000 remain within Iraq borders. Militants have targeted Christians in repeated waves in Baghdad and the north. The Chaldean Catholic cardinal was kidnapped in 2008 by extremists and killed. Churches around the country have been bombed repeatedly.

There were no oceans on Oasis, no large bodies of water, and presumably no fish. He wondered whether this would cause comprehension problems when it came to certain crucial fish-related Bible stories. There were so many of those: Jonah and the whale, the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, the Galilean disciples being fishermen, the whole ‘fishers of men’ analogy . . . the bit in Matthew 13 about the kingdom of heaven being like a net cast into the sea, gathering fish of every kind . . . Even in the opening chapter of Genesis, the first animals God made were sea creatures. How much of the Bible would he have to give up as untranslatable?

If she did , she might have to question God Himself , and anybody who does that , no matter how religious they are , is going to have to deal with one of three possible choices . That the so - called God of love and kindness and charity and morality and above all justice , is a bastard who likes tormenting and punishing the beings He Himself created , or that He doesn’t care , or that there is no God . Mott, M. J.. Jonah and the Whale (Kindle Locations 1922-1925). Deeply Shallow Publications. Kindle Edition.

No. I reckon Man has created God in his own image. And it’s a really ugly one. Mott, M. J.. Jonah and the Whale (Kindle Locations 1926-1927). Deeply Shallow Publications. Kindle Edition.

I mentioned on Friday, the church sits and listens to preposterous stories: Mary and the virgin birth, Jesus turning water into wine, Peter getting two gold coins from the mouth of a fish, Moses parting the Red Sea, donkeys talking, the Ark of the Covenant destroying Israel’s enemies, Moses receiving the Ten Commandments from God, the prophecy of the Messiah’s death as in Isaiah 53, Jonah being swallowed by a whale, the flood of Noah, and on and on it goes. Most of us believe all the stories,

Although the Koran seethes with unrelenting hostility toward the Jews, it’s clear from the Koran’s many Biblically derived stories that Judaism greatly influenced Islamic theology. The story of Noah’s ark appears in sura 10; Jonah and his whale in sura 37. The patriarch Abraham appears in many suras. And as we shall see, Moses figures prominently throughout the Koran, with his confrontation with Pharaoh retold numerous times.

2:

The Leviathan of Isaiah, Psalms, and the Book of Job, so fierce that it makes the ocean heave and boil, comes alive as a symbol of inscrutable strength, and Melville conscripts a whole army of mythic warriors—“Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo”—into the family of gallant whalemen who defy and pursue it. “Towards thee I roll,” cries Ahab in his last outburst of half-sacred, half-demonic rage, “thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.” The whole of humankind seems to pass through these pages, as if Moby-Dick were an encyclopedia of “heroes, saints, demigods, and prophets” to whom lesser men turn for guidance and grace when facing the terrors of the deep.

A debate about the history of religion with a very famous sceptic; who, when I tried to talk about Greek cults or Asiatic asceticism, appeared to be unable to think of anything except Jonah and the Whale.

But no man has ever truly escaped his destiny. Jonah always goes to Nineveh.

You know, son, there are a lot of people who deny God simply because they say they can't find out where Cain got his wife, or because they say the whale couldn't have swallowed Jonah. 'Course that's not their real reason, an' they know it. I guess it's a way of thinkin'. As far as I'm concerned, I can look at a rose covered with dew or watch a young mother tendin' her baby an' know there's a God. Things like that would be proof enough, even if I didn't know more. People who want to believe in God always can find Him. An' they don't have to wait until they die to know that He's real.

Those who tried to refuse or go against the Will of God, like Jonah, had to pay the price of disobedience.

Lying all night, holding Clara, he’d dared to hope that the worst was over. That maybe the grief, while still there, would today allow some of his wife to be present. But the woman he knew and loved had been swallowed up. Like Jonah. Her white whale of sorrow and loss in an ocean of body fluid.

Lesson Focus God shows compassion where he wills. • God is responsive to small steps in the right direction. • God’s compassion is not earned and never deserved. Lesson Application God sometimes shows compassion on us by giving us a second chance when we don’t deserve it. • We respond to God’s Word by taking steps in the right direction. • We recognize that God’s compassion is great. Biblical Context The book of Jonah is about how people respond to the Lord and how the Lord responds to them. Both the sailors and the Ninevites, though pagans, were responsive to what they saw the Lord doing. Jonah, a prophet who should have known better, was the least responsive and had to be taught a lesson about God’s compassion. Interpretational Issues in the Story Jonah’s prophetic mission (Jonah 3:4). Jonah was sent to denounce Nineveh, not to save it. His word to them was a word of judgment. He did not even name Yahweh and he did not confront them with their offenses, instruct them as to what they ought to do, or offer any hope for them to avoid the judgment. If the text does not offer this information, we cannot read those things between the lines and assume that they occurred. Great fish (Jonah 1:17). Nothing in the text indicates the species of the creature, and while a whale cannot be ruled out (they would not have distinguished sea-dwelling mammals from fish), the text is vague. Fish as rescue, not punishment (Jonah 2:6, 9). Jonah’s prayer demonstrates that he saw the fish as deliverance, not judgment. He was drowning, and the Lord used the fish to save his life. Jonah’s prayer (Jonah 2:4, 7–9). Jonah offered no repentance and did not ask forgiveness when he prayed inside the fish. He assumed that since the Lord had saved him from death, he had been restored to favor. He spoke ill of those who worship idols, which apparently included the sailors (whose response had been far better than his own) as if he was insisting, “At least I’m not a pagan idol-worshiper!” He made no mention of his disobedience and indicated no willingness to go to Nineveh. The vows he referred to (v. 9) would have involved sacrifices of thanksgiving at the temple for his rescue. This prayer was a farce, and Jonah was still unchanged (as the rest of the book demonstrates). Ninevite response (Jonah 3:5). The Ninevites believed what Jonah said, but that does not mean they converted to his God. He never even told them the identity of his God, and there is no indication that they got rid of their idols or understood the law. They repented, but any Assyrian would have done so under these circumstances. If they had been convinced that some god was angry at them and about to destroy them, they would have sought to appease that god. That is how they took Jonah’s warning. In the ancient world people believed that there were all sorts of powerful gods, but they only worshiped the ones they believed had power over their lives. Jonah was informing them that a God they had not recognized had noticed them and was going to act against them, and they were grateful for this information. Likely they checked Jonah’s message against their omens and afterward were eager to respond. Sackcloth (Jonah

If Jonah had gone to Yale, Instead of the gut of a whale, He'd have a diploma, A better aroma, And a nice little condo in Vail.

Yet Jesus went further. When people asked him for ‘a sign from heaven’, he saw their request as a sign of unbelief. They wanted things to be obvious. The only sign he would give them, he said, was another prophetic sign: the sign of Jonah (Matthew 12.39). Jonah disappeared into the belly of the whale – and then came out alive, three days later. That, said Jesus, was the ‘sign’ that would tell his generation what was going on. The other ‘signs’ that Jesus was doing were not negative ones. They were not like the prophetic ‘signs’ to which Amos referred, or indeed like the ‘signs’ that Moses and Aaron performed in Egypt to try to shake Pharaoh out of his complacency and allow the Israelites to go free. Those ‘signs’ were strange warning signals: plagues of frogs, or locusts, or rivers turning into blood. Jesus’ ‘signs’ (John gives us a neat catalogue of them) were all about new creation: water into wine, healings, food for the hungry, sight for the blind, life for the dead. The other Gospels chip in with several more, including parties with all the wrong kind of people, indicating a future full of forgiveness. All these were forward-looking signs, declaring the new thing that God was doing. Was doing now.

When the Captain finds the sleeping prophet he says, "Arise, call...!" ( Hebrew qum lek, verse 6), the same words God used when calling Jonah to arise, go, and call Nineveh to repentance. But as Jonah rubs his eyes there is a Gentile mariner with God's very words in his mouth. What is this? God sent his prophet to point the pagans toward himself. Yet now it is the pagans pointing the prophet toward God.

In the English Church a man succeeds, not through his capacity for belief but through his capacity for disbelief. Ours is the only Church where the sceptic stands at the altar, and where St. Thomas is regarded as the ideal apostle. Many a worthy clergyman, who passes his life in admirable works of kindly charity, lives and dies unnoticed and unknown; but it is sufficient for some shallow uneducated passman out of either University to get up in his pulpit and express his doubts about Noah’s ark, or Balaam’s ass, or Jonah and the whale, for half of London to flock to hear him, and to sit open-mouthed in rapt admiration at his superb intellect. The growth of common sense in the English Church is a thing very much to be regretted. It is really a degrading concession to a low form of realism. It is silly, too. It springs from an entire ignorance of psychology. Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

Last night I was perfecting the list of theoretical, experimental and allegorical animals: Alice's cat, Muhammad's hologram rooster, Ruiz's camel (free in the desert, or prisoner of the desert?), Jonah's whale, etc.

It is our duty, he thought, to imagine the suffering of all; for God is outside of time, and so should be in weeping for the sorrows of others; as on a church wall, Jonah stands upon the ship and lies within the belly of the whale and dances under his woodbine all at the same instant , standing next to himself. The world is never young and never old.

When they had finished the Lord’s Prayer, Father Tom said, “O Lord, we are eighteen hundred Jonahs in the dank black belly of this whale. We humbly beseech Thee, O Lord, to cast us out of this whale and to deliver us safely to our families. In your mercy, keep us free from sin and protect us from all evil as we await in joyful hope the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.

Father Tom rotated the crucifix in the light. The restless POWs grew quiet and still. Some crossed themselves. “Let us pray with confidence to the Father in the words our Savior gave us,” he said. A sea of POWs bowed their heads in unison, though they were a mix of Catholics, Jews, Protestants, agnostics, and even a few atheists. When they had finished the Lord’s Prayer, Father Tom said, “O Lord, we are eighteen hundred Jonahs in the dank black belly of this whale. We humbly beseech Thee, O Lord, to cast us out of this whale and to deliver us safely to our families. In your mercy, keep us free from sin and protect us from all evil as we await in joyful hope the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.” “Amen,” the great bulk of the soldiers called out. “The peace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you always,” the chaplain said. “And also with you,” the POWs said. “Let us offer each other the kiss of peace.