Dear Sir,
Good for Chris Sinkinson for defending the historicity of Jonah in October’s en. At the time of writing it is unlikely that anyone distinguished fish from sea mammals, hence the ‘great fish’ of Jonah 1.17. However in the use of this account by Jesus, in Matthew 12, the Son of God [who surely knew the things he had created] used the word, translated into Greek as khtouj – from which we get the term cetacean, referring to dolphins and whales.
As an air-breathing mammal, a large whale would have an oropharynx large enough for a man to be accommodated, and unlike a literal ‘belly’ it would be full of air, if rather smelly and becoming stale as the whale approached the time for another surface breath. There is therefore no rational, scientific objection to Jonah being ‘swallowed’ by a whale, and living to tell the tale.
