The book of Jonah is the story of a clash of wills. On the one side, God has a task in mind for His appointed servant. On the other side, Jonah, a stubborn man, has resolved otherwise. As Jonah naively seeks to distance himself from God’s intangible but ubiquitous presence, we witness a downward spiral in the trajectory of his life.
First, he finds seclusion below deck in a ship tossed by a raging storm. Subsequently, he is thrown even deeper, into the dark abyss, where the Lord provides a huge fish to swallow him (Jonah 1:17). There, inside the fish, he reaches the bottom of the pit (Jonah 2:6) and finally turns to God.
Jonah’s three-day sojourn in the belly of the fish is certainly a pivotal turning point in the account of his experience. This dramatic scene has captured the imagination of many artists through the centuries and is a classic page in illustrated Bibles for toddlers, alongside Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Noah’s ark, and the Nativity scene.
Unfortunately, maybe because of this association with children’s storybooks or because of the modern predominance of a secular and rationalistic mind-set, Jonah and his survival in the belly of the fish have also become a favorite of skeptics pointing to the fairy-tale character and implausibility of certain biblical stories.
Not long ago a friend of mine asked a tricky question at church: “Do I need to believe the story of Jonah to be a Christian?”
A certain level of uneasiness could be sensed in the silence of the room. It seemed to me that what was being asked was more than a genuine quest to define the essentials of Christianity. Implicit in the question was a deeper, more fundamental challenge.
We know that the Bible contains parables, poems, symbols, and figures of speech. However, suppose that after a careful literary and exegetical study we concluded that a certain section of the Bible, in this case the book of Jonah, was written to be intended as a historical narration. The real question then becomes: did God really act in the way the Bible says He acted? Can we really trust the inspiration and veracity of the biblical account when it depicts events that are outside our empirically tested experience of natural processes?
The interesting thing is that Jesus Himself answered in part my friend’s dilemma about being a Christian and believing the story of Jonah. In the Gospels there are three passages (Matt. 12:38-42; 16:1-4; Luke 11:29-32) in which Jesus refers to Jonah. In all of them the context is the demands of a disbelieving crowd (scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees, an evil generation) for Christ to show signs and evidence of His being the Messiah.
Jesus is reluctant to engage in the sort of demonstrations expected by those whose real goal is to oppose His ministry. By praising the Queen of the South and the Ninevites who responded to Jonah’s preaching (Luke 11:31, 32), Jesus is illustrating the crucial contrast between a mind that is open to listening and one that is impermeable to God’s reach. Faced by disguised opposition, the sign that will be sufficient to reveal true intentions and true seeking will be the sign of Jonah. As Jonah’s three-days experience in the belly of the fish represented a turnaround point for his convictions, so Christ’s death and resurrection is the arena where the choice of belief is tested (Matt. 12:40; Acts 4:10-12).
Although the general intention of Jesus’ reference to Jonah is sufficiently clear, biblical scholars and theologians have been debating for centuries about the specific identity of the sign of Jonah. This is partly because in one passage the sign is related to Jonah’s being in the fish’s belly (Matt. 12:40); in another, to Jonah’s interaction with the Ninevites (Luke 11:30); and in another the expression is not accompanied by any explanation (Matt. 16:4).
Nevertheless, as pointed out in an article by biblical scholar Andrew Adam, it appears that the focus of the interpreters has shifted decisively through time.
* In the early centuries of the Christian church the emphasis was more on Matthew’s explanation of the sign, possibly as a text illustrating Christ’s prediction of His passion.
With the more recent advent of the historical-critical method, however, Luke’s explanation became favored, as it did not allude to the supernatural elements of Jesus’ resurrection and foreknowledge. Today, in the age of experimental testing, it is not just the historical reality of Jonah and the fish that has come into question, but also the actual occurrence of the resurrection of Jesus, or of any of His miraculous actions reported in the Gospels.
As with the skeptics at the time of Jesus, the real issue is not the desire to understand the hermeneutics of a biblical text, but the starting presupposition that anything in the Bible with a whiff of the supernatural lacks historical and scientific reliability. This approach places human knowledge in the highest regard, constraining in a predetermined space the limits of divine action. This is essentially another version of the clash of wills depicted in the book of Jonah, between what I favor and what God says.
By acknowledging that God has truly intervened in history in miraculous ways, we are not advocating for an abdication of the intellect, promoting credulous religiosity, and showing disregard for the physical world. On the contrary, we affirm a rational, sound, and mature conviction that the God who is revealed in the workings of this universe and in the pages of Scripture is indeed greater than we are and can act in ways that are not circumscribed to our definitions and philosophical characterizations of what is and is not possible. This affirmation is built upon a view of God as present and active in history.
In a sense, this decision between our own wisdom and God’s inspired word makes the difference between a new beginning and a spiraling descent into darkness. The sign of Jonah still challenges us, both by reminding us of the need for a mental paradigm change and by manifesting our disposition toward God’s revelation.
In the age-old struggle between self-reliance and dependence on God, we can find new life only by accepting Christ’s sacrifice and His three-days permanence in the heart of the earth (Matt. 12:40).
* “A.K.M. Adam, The Sign of Jonah: A Fish-Eye View,”
Semeia 51 (1990): 177-191.
Ronny Nalin, Ph.D., is an associate scientist at the Geoscience Research Institute of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists. He lives with his wife, Elisa, and daughter, Gioia, in Mentone, California.
