Archaeologists Confirm the Authenticity of the Story of Jonah and The Whale

Jonah and the WhalePieter Lastman - Public Domain

After archaeologists in the holy land made discoveries of reliefs and motifs on catacombs and tombs of early Jewish Christians that depicted Jonah’s deliverance from the whale, they were able to account for the historicity of Jonah’s account precisely as the bible mentioned.

However, when the researchers also found a first-century bone box in Jerusalem that had a sketch of the whale vomiting out Jonah, they found their archaeological proof that collaborated with the biblical story of Jonas.

According to the bible, Jonas, the son of Amittai, is a prophet who is a central figure in the book of Jonas, whose subsequent reluctance to his divine mission to the city of Nineveh resulted in a whale swallowing him up.

Although God forgave and rescued Jonah from the belly of the whale after repenting, sceptics through the ages have doubted the authenticity of Jonah’s story claiming that there were no whales on the Mediterranean when Jonah’s biblical incident occurred.

However, further evidence published in a study conducted by a team of researchers presented the first evidence that the Mediterranean was once home to whales. The painstaking research was achieved after the scientists analyzed rare whale bones from pre-roman and Roman sites in the strait of Gibraltar.

In their research, they identified two species of whales, the right whales (E. glacialis) and the grey whales (Eschrichtius robustus), further concluding that the Mediterranean was a calving ground for the ancestors of today’s whales. Besides the DNA evidence, the study further argued that the Mediterranean would have whales today if it weren’t for the Roman commercial whaling enterprise that drove them out of the region.

Like Judaism and Christianity, Islamic sources such as the Koran offer insights into how Jonas found himself in the belly of the whale. According to the Koran and Hadith, after the people refused to heed the words of the prophet, Jonas left them without permission from Allah (God). However, when the ship he was traveling in started taking in water as a result of a storm, the sailors drew lots as to who would be tossed into the sea to lighten the load.

Every time they drew lots, Jonas’s name came up, and finally, they threw him into the ocean resulting in the whale swallowing him up. After Jonas’s glorification of his Lord was heard by the Angels, they interceded on his behalf. After Jonas was forgiven by his Lord, his Lord pardoned him and sent him back to carry on with his divine mission fulfilling his duties successfully.

Though all Abrahamic religions and now Archaeological evidence confirms Jonas’s story, there is credible evidence of at least one other person surviving after being swallowed by a whale. James Barley, who, after a whaling expedition, found himself in the stomach of a whale after it swallowed him up. James was found days later inside the dead whale after a harpoon killed it, but he lived on for 18 years. However, the experience left him blind and his skin bleached. 

Nevertheless, even for the hardened sceptic, the fascinating story of Jonas teaches that there is always hope, even for one who finds himself in the stomach of a whale. Perhaps that is the message encoded in prophet Jonas’s story of the whale.