could Jonah have survived in the belly of a whale? (page 4)

Jonah is 100% satire.

I fleshed this out in a post a few years ago. Here is it reposted:

There are some excellent studies in the critical literature on the genre and purpose of the story, such as John Miles' "Laughing at the Bible: Jonah as Parody" (JQR, 1975) and John Holbert's "Satire in the Book of Jonah" (JSOT, 1981). There is a clear theological purpose to the story: that Gentiles will worship the one God of the Jews as the true God. This theme is found in other Jewish writings of the post-exilic period, especially Trito-Isaiah, Zechariah and Daniel LXX (ch. 4-6). But whatever serious theological aim the author had, the book as a whole stands as an example of early Jewish satire or comedy -- i.e. a short story with satirical humor (involving grotesquely absurd situations). Satirical elements mentioned by Miles and Holbert include:

When God commissions his prophets, they typically express a humble reluctance to accept the mission out of modesty (Exodus 4:10, Judges 6:15, Isaiah 6:5, Jeremiah 1:6). But Jonah doesn't say a thing. He instantly runs away without saying a word; this is unprecedented in the prophetic tradition and against the stereotype. And he runs away by trying to head west, the exact opposite direction that Yahweh wanted. And he even tries to buy out of his commission by purchasing passage on a westboard ship. As Miles puts it, this is like Moses trying to throw water onto the burning bush. And all this is underscored by the fact that Yahweh address him in his commission as "Jonah son of Amittai," Amittai meaning "faithfulness" -- Jonah acts anything but faithful.
The tempest is described in an absurd manner. God hurls a wind at the sea to create the tempest and the sailors similarly hurl (the same verb) their cargo at the sea, making the situation worse instead of better (they should leave the poor sea alone). The inanimate ship is also described as "thinking that it would break up", as if it were afraid for its own safety. At this moment of great danger, Jonah retires to bed and absurdly goes to sleep. The pagan sailors meanwhile are doing what the comissioned prophet should be doing -- they are praying to their own gods. Finally, the captain of the ship wakes Jonah up and tells him to get up and cry to his god. As Holbert points out, now the call is coming through the mouth of a pagan sailor. And Jonah has now brought doom on a party of pagans -- but these are the wrong pagans. He was supposed to assist Yahweh in bringing doom on wicked Ninevites -- not hapless sailors from Tarshish.
When the sailors ask for Jonah's identity, he says that he is a Hebrew who worships Yahweh "who made the sea and the land". This flies in the face with Jonah's actions, by which he tried to escape Yahweh by sailing of the sea that Yahweh supposedly made. The pagan sailors then end up becoming true worshippers of Yahweh at a time when Yahweh's prophet seeks to escape from him.
The most famous grotesque element to the story is Yahweh "appointing" a great fish (continuing the theme of great city, great wind, great storm) to swallow Jonah whole and keep him in its digestive system for three whole days before vomiting him onto the shore. Miles points out that here we are supposed to laugh at Jonah with scorn here, seeing how ridiculous it is for him to be saved through regurgitation. There are similar jokes about excretion, bleching, vomiting, etc. in classical satirical literature, and cf. the grotesque story in Judges 3:16-25 in which Ehud attacks the very fat Eglon while he is relieving himself in his palace and thrusts his sword into him at such a depth that the fat covered up even the handle (and Ehud got away because Eglon's attendants were embarassed to barge into the king's quarters while he was relieving himself). Notice that the ship was close enough to shore that the sailors attempted to row back to land, so Jonah was unnecessarily kept in the fish's gut for three long days.
This makes the pious psalm that Jonah recites in ch. 2 all the more absurd. It is a psalm of thanksgiving rather than a lament as it should be, and it uses metaphors from the Psalter (cf. Psalm 69, 84, 130) literally rather than figuratively, making the psalm a parody itself. The imagery in these psalms do not refer to real oceans, or real water; as Miles puts it: "Jonah's situation is not comparable to the situation of a man swallowed by a great monster. This is Jonah's situation. His troubles are not like waves washing over his head. His troubles are waves washing over his head". And by using the imagery in this way in this specific situation, Jonah subverts the whole genre of thanksgiving by blaming God for his predicament: "You sent me to the depths, to the heart of the sea" (v. 4), "all your breakers and waves" (v. 4), "I have been cast out before your eyes" (v. 5), whereas in reality it was Jonah himself who tried to run away from Yahweh and it was Jonah himself who requested to be cast into the sea. So he is not even honest in his prayer to Yahweh. The irony increases when Jonah says that he longs for Yahweh's holy temple (when in fact he tried to flee from the presence of Yahweh), and it reaches a climax when he condemns "those who keep worthless idols who abandon their true loyalty but with a voice of thanksgiving I will sacrifice to you, and I will keep my vow" (v. 9-10). In fact, it was Jonah who abandoned his loyalty to Yahweh and unbeknownst to him, it was the pagan sailors who had formerly prayed to their own heathen gods who turned to Yahweh and praised him and sacrificed to him for their deliverance (1:14-15). In light of what just happened, Jonah is far more of a hypocrite than the pagans he condemns (notice that the book mentions the sacrifice made by the pagan sailors but not any sacrifice made by Jonah -- his promise is an empty one). Jonah ends his inappropriate prayer with "Deliverance belongs to Yahweh", and almost as if on cue Yahweh tells the fish to regurgitate Jonah on dry land. Jonah is cast onto the beach with vomit (picture the ridiculous image of Jonah covered in vomit) after Yahweh "speaks" to the great fish. In a story that already has a ship that thinks, we have a fish that understands speech.
In ch. 3, we have another example of Jonah humorously playing against type. After accepting his commission, he goes to Ninevah to deliver his warning. The stereotypical prophet confronts the king (e.g. Moses confronting Pharaoh, Micaiah confronting Ahab, Isaiah confronting Manasseh, Jeremiah confronting Zedekiah) and delivers a lengthy and impassioned "word of Yahweh" given to the prophet. Jonah however is "jejune to the point of banality" as Miles puts it, and he does the exact opposite: He utters just five words, to nobody in particular, with no description of the sins or reason for the punishment, with no mention of the God that sent him, or anything else. By any measure of the hardworking prophets described in the OT (cf. Isaiah prophesying naked for three years, Jeremiah bearing a yoke on his shoulders to demonstrate the political state of the nation, Ezekiel being forced to lie on his side publically for 390 days in his own excrement, etc.), Jonah is a complete failure. And yet he succeeds beyond their wildest imaginations -- for the entire city repents for their sins, something that Ezekiel, Jeremiah, or Isaiah could never accomplish despite their best efforts. The city is also described in grotesque terms as "an exceedingly great city" (literally, "a great city before God", using the same ultimate superlative found in Genesis 10:9, 30:8), requiring three days' journey to walk through -- a grotesquely large size (about 60 miles). It is in such an enormous city that Jonah succeeds with minimal effort in getting every last man, woman, child -- and animal (!) -- to repent.
The "king of Ninevah" (an anachronism, as the Jonah ben Amittai of 2 Kings 14:25 lived a half century before Sennacherib chose Ninevah to be the capital of the Assyrian empire, and the title itself was never used by the Assyrian kings themselves) is also described in comic terms. The king is the last one to get the news about Jonah's warning, and he only hears it second-hand and not from the prophet himself. He instantly reacts in great mourning, sits in ashes, and then orders the populace to do something they were all already doing -- wearing sackcloth in repentance. But he also absurdly orders even the cattle and other animals to wear sackloth -- plus he requests all to fast from water; this goes well beyond the actions that the prophets requested others to take for repentance. So Yahweh was treated to the incredible spectacle of men and beast alike dressed up in sackcloth which made him feel compassion so he called off his plans to wipe out the city.
This made Jonah the most successful prophet of all time; he accomplishes what no other prophet was able to do. He barely utters five words when he is part-way through the city and, as Holbert puts it, "fantastically, the entire city is seized with a fever for immediate repentance, from the king to the cows. And God, seeing their honest repentance, delivers them from the threat of destruction". This parallels the actions taken by the sailors on the ship in ch. 1 and it reflects Jonah's statement in ch. 2 that "deliverance belongs to Yahweh". But selfishly, while he is grateful that Yahweh saved himself from drowning, he is enraged in ch. 4 that Yahweh saved the great city from destruction. He reacts to his great success with anger -- the exact opposite of how a prophet should respond to others seeking repentance. In fact, his reaction is in grotesque terms -- he views this salvation of the city as a "great evil" (4:1), cf. the other intensives of great city, great wind, great storm, great fish, etc. This hyperbole suggests that Jonah viewed the city's deliverance as a greater evil than the calamity that Yahweh threatened to bring to the city. Why was it such an evil to Jonah? He explains in v. 2 that he shirked from his commission and ran away to Tarshish because he knew that Yahweh would relent from his threatened destruction and show compassion -- Jonah cared more for having his Schadenfreude (taking satisfaction in the misfortune of others) than in saving the lives of others. He wanted the message of doom to come true and Yahweh has frustrated his petty expectations. He escaped to Tarshish because he knew that Ninevah would have a greater chance of being destroyed if it went unwarned than if he gave it a chance for repentance. And so he laments and expresses a wish to die (v. 3). Rather deftly, the author has portrayed Jonah as giving a thanksgiving in ch. 2 when he should have been giving a lament, and in ch. 4 he gives a lament when he should be giving a thanksgiving. In both cases, his inappropriate actions are due to selfish motives.
Jonah's request to die is directly modeled on that of Elijah in 1 Kings 19:4 and recalls that of Moses in Numbers 11:10-15, Jeremiah's self-curse in Jeremiah 20:7-8, and Job's similar laments in Job 3:3, 11, 10:18, etc. But these faithful men were undergoing genuine misfortunates at the time of their laments. As Miles explains, at this point in the story, "Jonah has done his job, Ninevah is saved, and a happy ending is held up only by the prophet's childish pout". So Yahweh treats Jonah as the child he is making himself out to be. He gently teaches Jonah why he has the wrong attitude by setting up a qal wahomer (light vs. weighty) rhetorical argument by growing a castor plant to give Jonah shade. Here again the reader encounters fantastic details: a plant that springs up in a single day and a worm ("appointed" by Yahweh just as the great fish was "appointed" to swallow Jonah) that chews on the same plant so that it withers the next day. The dying plant caused Jonah to lament again out of anger, allowing Yahweh to make his qal wahomer comparison: "You had pity on the gourd, though you did not tend it or make it grow, for it sprang up overnight and died overnight. Should I not even more show pity for the great city of Ninevah where there are more than 120,000 people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, as well as many cattle?" The comparison here is ridiculous -- there is nothing so insignificant as a plant gourd and Jonah mourns over the death of the gourd while showing no concern for the 120,000 children of the city. It is also ridiculous because the reference to the cattle (which the book ends with, such that the story ends on a humorous note) recalls the foolishness of the Ninevites in dressing up their cattle in sackcloth and making them fast. Yahweh reminds Jonah of this foolishness at the same time he refers to the people of the city as 120,000 children. If this was intended to be read as literal children, then this would imply a truly fantastic size of Ninevah's population (such as 600,000, whereas Babylon at its height had a population of 200,000), but it is possible that the author here is characterizing the populace of Ninevah itself as like young children "who cannot tell their right hand from their left". Yahweh has compassion for them like one has for children, just as he gently is patient with the childish Jonah.

Within the Bible, the closest parallel is probably the parables and similitudes of Jesus -- which also employ lots of irony, exaggeration, satire, sarcasm, and humor to make didactic points (e.g. men gulping down camels when they care so much for straining out gnats, squeezing camels through an eye of a needle, the kingdom being compared to corrupting leaven and noxious weeds, a women calling her friends over and rejoicing with them that she found a coin, the business manager who scams his boss and then gets praised by him for it, etc.). The story of Jonah reads almost as an extended parable. The moral is that one should not be like Jonah who was self-righteous and thought that he was pious and the Gentiles deserved destruction by God. The idea is that ignorant Gentiles may have a greater capacity for honest piety than those who are like Jonah who declare, "I am a Hebrew and I worship Yahweh the God of heaven" (Jonah 1:9), but who prove themselves to be hypocrites by their actions. The story thus closely anticipates the later Christian focus on bringing salvation to the Gentiles and the critique of hypocritical piety in the gospels.

Seen from this perspective, the book of Jonah is pure genius.

could Jonah have survived in the belly of a whale?

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