Did Ancient Hebrew even have a word for whale? It seems to me the Jews at that time wouldn’t have had much contact with whales, at least not enough to differentiate them from large fish.
Ok, so they had shitty traffic and instead Jonah went bar-hopping and of course there were the temples and the temple prostitutes on the way. Only three days…
The ancient Hebrews had a sort of generic word for whales, sea-monsters, and such: tannin (plural, tanninim).
However, there is some sentiment, even among those who take their scripture straight, that Jonah might be more of a parable than a prophet, as with Job.
I’ve read that the throat of a sperm whale is larger than the throat of your typical baleen whale, and that a sperm whale could swallow a human.
Quite so. From Cecil’s column:
Other prey items exceeding the size of an adult human have been found in sperm whale stomachs. Baleen whales, on the other hand, are filter feeders and have quite narrow throats that would not be able to accomodate a human.