From a historical standpoint, Jonah is one of the more perplexing characters in the Old Testament. He is called to be a prophet and yet disobeys, unwilling to heed the voice of God or dwell in his presence (Jon. 1:3).[1] He ends up being swallowed by a great fish, but somehow survives only to be regurgitated three days later and vomited out near a coastline (Jon. 2:10). Moreover, after finally going to Nineveh at the word of the Lord, he is ultimately frustrated with Nineveh’s positive response, complaining about God’s mercy of all things (Jon. 4:2). Quite obviously, critical scholars dismiss these details as ahistorical, relegating Jonah to the status of “myth” in order to make sense of the story as the use of a literary character to enforce a moral lesson. But natural men do not comprehend the ways of God.
1. Jonah 1:1 begins, “Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah.” The phrase, “the word of the Lord came” appears 109 times in the Old Testament, and is primarily associated with the prophets indicating the mode by which God communicates with a chosen servant (see e.g. 1 Sam. 15:10; 2 Sam. 7:4; 1 Kgs. 18:1; Isa 38:4; Jer 1:2; Ezek 1:3; Hag 1:1; Zech 1:1; etc.).
From a theological standpoint, Jonah’s significance is not so easily discounted. In just four short chapters, the book of Jonah is full of rich theological themes, including the presence of God, divine sovereignty and human responsibility, God’s immutability,[2] and salvation, among others. In the context of the narrative, the point that Jonah is in the belly of the fish for “three days and three nights” (Jon. 1:17; Heb. 2:1) is striking for the simple fact that Jonah did not ultimately die and lived to tell the tale. Yet the significance of Jonah’s ordeal goes beyond the historical details. When we come to the New Testament we read Jesus saying, “for just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matt 12:40). In other words, an association is being made between Jonah’s experience and Jesus’s resurrection. Thus, there is more to Jonah’s maritime internment than what might meet the eye at first glance.
2. Immutability means unchangingness.
In this essay, I intend to address several aspects of the Jonah/Jesus relationship in two brief questions: 1) What is the nature of the association that Jesus is making between his death and resurrection and Jonah’s? And, 2) What bearing does this association have on Jonah’s historical claims?
Jonah as a Type of the One to Come
First, in the full context of Scripture, it is best to understand Jonah’s experience in the belly of the fish as a typological theme finding its fulfillment in Christ’s death and resurrection. Typology in Scripture includes divinely intended patterns of historical correspondence and escalation among certain historical people, events, and institutions which propel the storyline of Scripture forward, ultimately finding their telos (goal) and terminus (finish line) in Christ.[3] Types can be discerned initially by recognizing patterns, words, and themes that repeat within the Old Testament as they occur in biblical history, and/or by finding these Old Testament patterns, words, and themes repeated in the New Testament. In other words, the reuse by later biblical authors of persons, events, and institutions recorded by earlier biblical authors is what constitutes typology. In this way typology connects past events with present ones, while also linking current events with the past. In the biblical framework, types are not made between abstractions but historical realities, a point I will return to below.
3. For one example of employing typological hermeneutics in biblical theology, see Joshua M. Philpot, “Was Joseph a Type of Daniel?: Typological Correspondence in Genesis 37–50 and Daniel 1–6,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 61, no. 4 (2018): 681–96.
In the present study, we can discern a relationship between Jonah and Jesus noted explicitly by both Matthew and Luke. Three patterns of historical correspondence are mentioned specifically. First, Jonah is in the belly of the fish for “three days,” while Jesus will be in the grave for “three days” (Matt 12:38–42; Luke 11:29–32). One might argue that Jonah is not in a “grave” per se; that is, he is not dead. But Jonah states that his entombment within a fish is in “the belly of Sheol” (Jon. 2:1), using the common Hebrew term for “grave” to refer to his predicament.
Second, Jonah’s time within the fish follows the pattern of the “third day” theme in Scripture, whereby a person or nation is delivered and saved from certain death after three days: the sacrifice of Isaac on the third day (Gen 22:4), God’s descent on Sinai on the third day (Exod. 19:16), Hezekiah healed on the third day (1 Kgs. 20:5), Esther’s intervention for the Israelites on the third day (Esth. 5:1), and Hosea’s prophecy that the Lord will raise up Israel from the dead on the third day (Hos. 6:2). As it happened with Jonah on the third day, so also it will be with Christ.
Paul says additionally in 1 Corinthians 15:3 that Christ “was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures,” concluding the pattern established in the Old Testament. The exact “Scriptures” Paul had in mind is a matter of debate.[4] What we can ascertain is that when Jesus references “the Scriptures” in Luke 24:26–27 to demonstrate now the Old Testament anticipates his death and resurrection, he likely had many texts in mind instead of just one: “‘Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?’ And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” Perhaps Paul does as well when he describes Jesus dying and then rising from the dead on the third day “in accordance with the scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:4).[5]
4. For an overview of interpretive views, see Stephen Dempster, “From Slight Peg to Cornerstone to Capstone: The Resurrection of Christ on ‘the Third Day’ According to the Scriptures,” The Westminster Theological Journal 76, no. 2 (2014): 371–409.
5. However, see the intriguing essay by Tom Sculthorpe who argues that Paul is referring specifically to Gen 1:11–13.
Third, Jonah’s expulsion from the fish (i.e. Sheol, the grave) corresponds symbolically to Jesus’s resurrection from the dead. The connection with resurrection is not stated explicitly in Matthew and Luke, but it’s implied nonetheless, a point that Jesus makes crystal clear in several speeches in Matthew alone (Matt. 16:21; 17:9, 23; 20:19; 26:32). The details in Jonah thus typify the details in Jesus.
As the “third day” theme moves from type (the original context) to antitype (i.e., its fulfillment)[6] in history, a divinely intended pattern emerges, escalates, and reaches fulfillment in the New Testament. Jesus refers to these corresponding details as the “sign of Jonah” (Matt. 12:39; 16:4; Luke 11:29), indicating that just as Jonah’s rescue from the fish was a sign to the Ninevites that he was truly a prophet from God, so also Jesus’s resurrection from the dead proves to his generation that he is truly the Son of God.
6. An “antitype” simply means the fulfillment of a type. In other words, it is the final and highest repetition of the pattern that gives the whole sequence meaning. In Scripture, many types have their antitype in Jesus.
We can conclude, therefore, that Jonah’s three days in the “grave” of the fish and his repulsive resurrection[7] fits a typological pattern culminating in Christ’s three days in the grave and glorious resurrection. These points of contact establish historical correspondence and escalation from one resurrection to the next. Indeed, in Christ “something greater than Jonah is here” (Matt. 12:41; Luke 11:32).
7. It must have been disgusting.
Jonah as a Historical Reality
But the fact that Jonah’s experience is a typological theme does not lessen its historical nature, as if the story is merely the use of an abstraction (“belly of the fish”) to make a greater moral lesson. This is the view of many who embrace the theological message in the book of Jonah but not the historical reality. For example, David Baker suggests on the evidence of the types of Jonah and Job, that “it is possible to have correspondences between an imaginary person and a real person.”[8] In his view, even if the type is artificial, the type still has educative value. He writes,
8. Emphasis mine. David L. Baker, Two Testaments, One Bible: A Study of the Theological Relationship Between the Old & New Testaments (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1992), 180, fn17.
There is an undoubted correspondence between Macbeth or Hamlet and real people, and the significance of these characters is not lessened by the fact that they are fictional. Likewise, whether or not they ever lived, there are real correspondences between the lives of Jonah and Job as portrayed in the biblical stories and those of Jews and Christians today.[9]
9. This analogy is offered in a section arguing for the basis of typological relationships, chiefly that types are historical by definition. Baker, Two Testaments, One Bible, 179–80.
To this line of thinking, I offer three counterpoints. First, although the analogy from Shakespeare might serve to illustrate Baker’s point, it does not illustrate a biblical point. Shakespeare never claims divine inspiration as the biblical authors do. Thus, it is the analogy and not the biblical text that is artificial, however convenient that analogy may be. Second, on the basis of the divine inspiration of types/antitypes, one must accept that if Jonah or Job is merely symbolic of a greater principle—i.e. literary contrivance, parabolic or otherwise[10]—then these men are the only biblical types that might fall into that category. Thus, Jonah and Job would be outside the norm of what constitutes a biblical type. It is the convenience of the skeptical critic that he or she might choose which types are historical and which types are not. But insofar as the authors of the New Testament are concerned (namely, Matt. 12:38–42; Luke 11:29–32), Jonah’s three days in the great fish correspond typologically to Jesus’s three days in the tomb. If one accepts that Jesus’s three days look back to the three days of Jonah, is it possible, within the context of the Bible, to confirm the factuality of the one while denying the other? In addition, if one argues as Baker does that Jonah and his three days refers not to a factual person or event, then one must also apply the same logic to the rising up of the men of Nineveh in judgment (the main point of Jesus’s message), as well as the Queen of the South (1 Kgs. 10:1–13; 2 Chr. 9:1–12), as well as Solomon—all characters that Jesus uses typologically to illustrate the salvation he brings through judgment. Would Matthew and Luke (and Jesus, for that matter) mix an imaginary type with real types? The link between Jonah and the others in relationship to “this generation” supports the conclusion that Jesus considered these individuals to be historical.[11] Further, Matthew’s assertion that “one greater than Jonah is here,” indicating escalation from type to antitype, prophet to prophet, accords best with correspondence to a factual type and not an imaginary one. What good is it for Jesus to be greater than an imaginary prophet?
10. On the view that the Jonah narrative is an extended parable, see Leslie C. Allen, The Books of Joel, Obadiah, Jonah, and Micah, New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976), 175–81, 194–97; Raymond B. Dillard and Tremper Longman, An Introduction to the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), 392–93.
11. Although the conclusion here was reached independently, see the same argument for internal consistency and authenticity of the Jonah story in Douglas K. Stuart, Hosea–Jonah, vol. 31, Word Biblical Commentary (Waco: Word, 1987), 440.
Third, the comparison in Matthew 12 with Jonah, Sheba, and Solomon comes at the end of a section beginning in Matthew 12:1 where the words meizon and pleion (“greater”) are used to show how Jesus is “greater” than the temple/priesthood (Matt. 12:6), prophets (Matt. 12:41), and kings (Matt. 12:42). Thus, Jonah is the archetypal, representative prophet in this instance where both his life (in the belly of the fish) and message (to the Ninevites) is presented in typological relationship to Jesus’s life and work. As the archetype of Old Testament prophets, Jonah, not Moses, is put forward. Thus, if Matthew intended to show that Jesus’s life is naturally associated with an imaginary hero like Jonah, the typological relationship would falter. The text assumes that the death and resurrection of Jesus will not be ambiguous. Neither was the death and resurrection of the prophet Jonah. If a person or event is rejected on the basis that it is miraculous, then the Bible’s fabric is torn. If, however, we accept the divine inspiration of the text, then the authenticity of the miraculous events of the Bible (such as Jonah’s three days) is not so far-fetched.[12] The church stands or falls, after all, on the historical factuality of a dead man coming back to life.[13]
12. For my attempt at applying the logic of typology to the historical case for Adam, see Joshua M. Philpot, “See the True and Better Adam: Typology and Human Origins,” Bulletin of Ecclesial Theology 5, no. 2 (2018): 77–101.
13. One might conceive of a type in the realm of literary stories like the Ancient Near East tales of Leviathan, which find their way into the biblical text (Job 3:8; 41:1; Ps. 74:14; 104:26; Isa. 27:1). But even the creative use of Leviathan has a basis in real history. It is clear from Psalm 74 (“crush the heads of Leviathan,” cf. Ezek. 32:4ff.) that Leviathan refers to Egypt, and from Isa. 27:1 (“In that day,” “fleeing serpent,” “twisted serpent”) that the tale of Leviathan is being used literarily to refer to Satan, whom the New Testament calls the “ancient serpent” (cf. Isa. 51:9; Rev. 12:9; 20:2). The point is not whether typology employs metaphors to recall persons/events, but whether the type is a historical person or occurrence.
Conclusion
Christ’s death on the cross, three days in the tomb, and resurrection were unambiguous according to eyewitnesses and historical testimony. And, on a future day the men of Nineveh will rise up in the judgment and give testimony to Jonah’s story, proving once and for all the historical reality of his own personal death and resurrection (Matt. 12:41).[14] I have argued in this essay that Jonah’s three-day internment in the fish and expulsion to dry land serve as types in the biblical storyline which point to future fulfillment by one greater than Jonah. Like Jonah, Jesus was a prophet. Like Jonah, Jesus descended through the waters of judgment (Luke 9:31; 1 Pet. 3:18–22). Like Jonah, Jesus was in the grave/Sheol for three days. Like Jonah, Jesus did not “see corruption” (Ps. 16:10; Acts 13:35) even while in the grave. Like Jonah, Jesus was expelled from the grave by the voice of God, resurrected to life. Like Jonah, following his resurrection Jesus preached repentance and turning to God for salvation. Like Jonah, Jesus was raised to life in order to prove once and for all that he truly was the man he claimed to be—God’s Son in the flesh. And like Jonah, Jesus’s real resurrection was proof that his message was truly God’s message.
14. The sailors likely assumed Jonah’s death after casting him from the boat in Jonah 1:11–16 in the middle of a turbulent storm.
These are not the only typological correspondences of Christ’s death and resurrection in the Old Testament and New Testament. However, as Christians celebrate Resurrection Day each spring, may we read and remember Jonah’s own experience and glory in the One greater than Jonah, who leads us through the waters of judgment to a future resurrection from the dead.
