p. 642 | Jonah and the Whale by John Norton Loughborough

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Oct 19, 1915

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 42, No. 41.

Jonah and the Whale

By John Norton Loughborough

By J. N. LOUGHBOROUGH

INFIDELS and the “higher critics” discard the Bible account of the whale’s swallowing Jonah. They claim that the throat of a whale is not large enough—that it is not so large as the fist of a man. That depends on what kind of whale is meant.

MORE THAN ONE KIND OF WHALES

In the year 1852, in Rochester, New York, I attended a lecture on whales, delivered by E. C. Williams, the man who made our first meeting tents. In early life, he was on whaling voyages, in both northern and southern seas. His lecture was illustrated by an oil-painted panorama of his whaling experience. He noted the above objection, and said: “That depends on what whale you are talking about, whether of the northern or of the southern sea. That objection is true of the north sea (bone) whale, but is not true of the south sea (sperm) whale.”

He showed us a picture of a sperm whale that, after they had harpooned him, turned on their boat, and crushed it. Then he said, “If you had looked into that whale’s throat, as I did when we were scrambling to get out of his way, you would have thought his throat was large enough to take in at once all four of our little boat’s crew.”

THE LARGE THROATED WHALE

“Chambers’s Encyclopædia” says, “While the northern (bone) whale has a very small throat, the sperm (south sea) whale has a very large throat.” Of the former it says: “The gullet of the whale is very narrow. It is said to be not more than an inch and a half in diameter, so that only very small animals could pass through it.”—Volume 10, page 151, article “Whale.”

Of the cachalot, or south sea sperm whale, Chambers says: “It may almost be said to inhabit all seas, although it is most abundant in the southern hemisphere. It is not of frequent occurrence on the European shores, although it sometimes enters the Mediterranean. The cachalot sometimes reaches the length of seventy or eighty feet. The head is enormously large, forming about one third of the bulk of the animal, and occupying one third of the entire length. . . . The mouth is very large and wide; and the throat, unlike that of the Greenland whale, is very wide, sufficiently so to admit the body of a man.”—Volume 2, pages 450, 480. The testimony of the British “National Encyclopedia,” volume 8, article “Whale,” confirms these statements.

On March 29, 1909, in a museum at Hobart, Tasmania, I saw the lower jaw of a sperm whale. It stood on the floor, nose end up. I stood in the space of the jaw. It was five feet wide at the gullet, and the nose must have been about eight feet high. I thought, “Surely a man could go through that space.”

On June 11, 1909, I visited a museum of African animals, serpents, etc., at Port Elizabeth, South Africa. In the largest room was suspended from the ceiling the complete skeleton of a sperm whale. As I gazed on that immense group of ribs, I thought, “Surely such would make quite a house for Jonah’s brief abode.”

RECENT EXPERIENCE IN A WHALE’S BELLY

As the tablets with cuneiform inscriptions are coming forth to confirm many Bible records, we have a well authenticated case of a man who, on August 25, 1895, was swallowed by a whale, and was taken out of the dead body of the great fish after thirty-six hours. When restored to consciousness, he related his experience. This account is in the Bible Training School of September, 1914.

The Bible says, “Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.” Jonah 1:17. His boat was making for Tarshish, near Gibraltar, at the west entrance to the Mediterranean. It was very easy for the Lord to move upon the fish to turn into the Mediterranean, and come along just in time to pick up Jonah as he was cast from the ship.