Jonah and the Great Fish

[patrick457]

Humpback whales have 14-35 throat grooves that run from the chin to the navel. These grooves allow their throat to expand during the huge intake of water during filter feeding. Blue whales can swallow an object the size of a beachball which is also wide enough for a person to pass through. Blue whales and humpbacks have similar feeding habits so would have similar throat sizes. Both whales also somtimes cross breed so you may even get bigger humpback hybrid whales visiting the Med.
In sept, 2009, a humpback whale was found in the Thames river in England near Dartford Bridge; so I suppose our Humpback whale could also have swum up the Tigris to Nineveh, or whatever, if needed. .

That’s very interesting!
Any more ideas as to what animal could swallow a man apart from whales? I find myself leaning more to the idea that the big fish is not identifiable with any existing animal; i.e. a sort of special one-time creature.

 

[Thing]

That’s very interesting!
Any more ideas as to what animal could swallow a man apart from whales? I find myself leaning more to the idea that the big fish is not identifiable with any existing animal; i.e. a sort of special one-time creature.

Well… hmm… passing over for the moment any difficulties in researching and describing a special once-off creature which does not exist now - I think there are several candidates;
The Whale Shark grows to over 21 tons.
The Megamouth Shark 18 feet long - with the added bomus that it was only discovered 33 years ago.
The Basking Shark 33 feet long.

The Whale shark is equatorial and its most northernly territory appears to be the red-sea. While the theology may be correct the suez canal was only opened in 1869.

The Megamouth is even more equatorial and has not yet been discovered even in the red sea.

The Basking Shark is however a Mediterranean creature and despite our initial worries about a fish delivering Jonah possibly up a freshwater river from its natural saltwater habitat the Basking Shark *has *been found around the mouth of the Amazon river and washed up on river banks in Devon and Maine, the Dennys river.
Whether it could swallow a man remains to be discovered but it could concievably carry a man within its mouth as it is a natural surface feeder and it is designed to swim just at the surface where Jonah may get some air. However with an average speed of three miles an hour this fish would take 9 days to swim up the Tigris to Nineveh. Jonah made the trip in 3.

However a Humpback whale which has a cruising speed of 9 knots could make the journey up the Tigris to Mosul [Nineveh] in 4 days. I take it that cruising speed is not the top speed of the animal and it could have made the trip in 3 days with the right sort of encouragement.

 

[Thing]

Here at the Idiot Research Institute we have received an interesting email from Nobby in Canada - inquiring whether Iraq is on the Mediterranean Sea. It is with some dismay that we see our head researcher reporting in the negative - we’ll deal with him later.
So after much head-scratching and foot-stomping we pull out the old bible again and are thrilled to report to you that the Tigris is not once mentioned in the Book of Jonah!
Our Humpback whale, or mysterious fish, Nobby, does not have to swim up the Tigris.
The boat, we are told, left Jaffa and was shortly thereafter seen caught in a storm, Jonah was swallowed, and the fish swam for three days and three nights before depositing Jonah on dry land.
Considering our Humpback, as an example, he swam at a cruising speed of 9 knots and could have covered a distance of 760 miles in three days. The, most probably, square-rigged ship on which Jonah left Jaffa in, (the opposite direction to Nineveh, we assume, as large trading ships continued along the coasts to other ports), could travel at a speed of between 5 and 10 knots we reckon, lets say 3 knots because there was a storm.
We will assume that Tarshish is Tarsus, the first destination of the ship. Then the ship could have been blown west soon out of Jaffa towards land at Port Said about 100 miles away. The fish picks up Jonah, takes a lesurely 350 mile swim around Cyprus to Tarsus, leaves Jonah on dry land and Jonah then, resignedly, makes his way *overland *to Nineveh.