Dolphins have been known to take drowning people in their snouts and propel them to the nearest shore. This is probably what happened to Jonah since the Aramaic word for whale actually means big fish.
I assume this is about Have any real-life Jonahs been swallowed by whales and lived?
Shouldn’t that be “Whale Swallowing Sea Men”? 
What probably happened to Jonah was he was made up.
Ever notice that you never hear of all the stranded sailors who got carried further out to sea by dolphins?
:dubious:
:smack:
No one wants to hear your stories of cetecean sodomy, Chronos. Leave that shit for the Welsh.
I don’t follow your logic. What does the Aramaic word for big fish have to do with dolphins?
Nothing “really happened to Jonah.” You might as well argue the “real color” of Paul Bunyan’s ox or which state Davy Crockett was in the time he rode a lightning bolt.
If I remember correctly, a whale’s esophagus is the same size as every other mammal, i.e. , too small for a man to fit down there …
A whale’s esophagus is the same size as a mouse’s esophagus?! :eek:
You’d rather it were the other way around, maybe?
I thought it was Pecos Bill who rode the lightning bolt. The day he lassoed the cyclone.
Pecos Bill, too, but Davy Crockett did it first. I remembered it from a Little Golden Book or something of the sort that I read during the great Crockett craze of the 1950s, but I checked on line, and it is definitely an authentic Crockett myth.
stop it, you’re krilling me.
I’m bitterly disappointed.
Thanks a lot, Cecil, for harpooning the Bartley story, a favorite of my youth. Bartley’s survival was a telling example of a fluke of luck.
Well, it was a sperm whale, after all.
I guess if the original version of the story was written in Aramaic, then the translation to ‘whale’ could equally have been to ‘dolphin’. That would suggest that the impressive part of the story, about living inside it, becomes less likely though.
(‘less likely’ being a relative term, of course)
I have no idea why Aramaic has entered this discussion. Jonah is written in Hebrew, and I cannot find that is alleged to have even one Aramaic word in it.
And, in any case, the Hebrew wording merely says “big fish” (which, at that time, would not rule out a cetacean, but would not imply one, either).
But it doesn’t really matter. The entire story is full of ridiculous impossibilities that cannot even be explained by outright miracles. Jonah is a fable, a “tall tale” if you will, written to make people laugh, and, by the way, to make a point, roughly the same point Jesus made centuries later in His tale of the Prodigal Son, though from the opposite viewpoint. It’s a point, in fact, that still needs to made.
It’s probably just a typo - it was supposed to read “Jonah ate a big fish.”
And then he said, “That peice of halibut was good enough for Jehova himself!”