Book of Jonah - Jonah and The Big Fish

Jonah and The Big Fish

The Hebrew text of Jonah 2:1 (1:17 in English translation), reads dag gadol (Hebrew: דג גדול), which literally means "great fish." The Septuagint translates this into Greek as ketos megas, (Greek: κητος μεγας), "huge fish"; in Greek mythology the term was closely associated with sea monsters. Saint Jerome later translated the Greek phrase as piscis granda in his Latin Vulgate, and as cetus in Matthew 12:40. At some point, cetus became synonymous with whale (cf. cetyl alcohol, which is alcohol derived from whales). In his 1534 translation, William Tyndale translated the phrase in Jonah 2:1 as "greate fyshe," and he translated the word ketos (Greek) or cetus (Latin) in Matthew 12:40 as "whale". Tyndale's translation was later incorporated into the Authorized Version of 1611. Since then, the "great fish" in Jonah 2 has most often been translated as "whale".

In the line 2:1 the book refers to the fish as dag gadol, "great fish", in the masculine. However, in the 2:2, it changes the gender to daga, meaning female fish. The verses therefore read: "And the lord provided a great fish (dag gadol, masculine) for Jonah, and it swallowed him, and Jonah sat in the belly of the fish (still male) for three days and nights; then, from the belly of the (daga, female) fish, Jonah began to pray." The peculiarity of this change of gender led the later rabbis to reason that this means Jonah was comfortable in the roomy male fish, so he didn't pray, but that God then transferred him to a smaller, female fish, in which the prophet was uncomfortable, so that he prayed.