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Why the Bible story of Jonah couldn't happen

COULD JONAH HAVE SURVIVED IN A WHALE STOMACH?

In a previous essay I analysed the Biblical story of Jonah and the whale in some detail. I ended on a promise to look out for real life parallels. Here are the findings of that quest.

JONAH – THE OBVIOUS FICTIONS

Popular culture has several stories inspired by Jonah in which characters get temporarily swallowed by giant beasts. A whale transported round Baron Munchausen and his allies. Pinocchio and his maker, father Gepetto end up in a whale for a time. The TV series Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea had crewed and missiles swallowed by a whale but being rescued before being digested. (Jonah & The Whale) and in The Matt Smith Dr. Who story, The Beast Below, the hero and his companion get temporally swallowed by a space whale, though they don't go further into its body than the back of its tongue.

The escape in such dramas is invariably to make the poor whale sneeze or vomit the living near-meal out into the sea or onto conveniently present land.

Those stories are fiction. Jonah is passed off as true, so are there any real possibilities of this happening? In a word, no.

TRUE JONAHS – THE LESS OBVIOUS FICTIONS

There are no known whales or fish on the planet that can swallow people whole. The biggest creature on Earth, The Blue Whale rakes only very small plankton. A sardine would choke it to death. The Sperm Whale, as used in Hermann Melville’s Moby Dick, has a big mouth, but a small throat. It has to dismember giant squid to eat them.

Occasionally sailors have circulated yarns and urban legends of mariners who were alleged real life Jonahs. The best recorded such myth is that of James Bartley, who, in 1891, or soon afterwards, sailed as a crewman on the whaler, The Star Of The East and supposedly fell overboard from a smaller boat launched in an attempt to harpoon a sperm whale. The incident allegedly occurred near the Falkland Islands. The crew gave chase and somehow, Bartley and another crewman fell into the South Atlantic water. The other sailor drowned, and it was assumed that Bartley shared his fate, but the rest of the crew put grief aside and captured the already mortally wounded whale, Bartley or a surviving mariner had already managed to harpoon it.

Ripping into its carcass, they were amazed to find an unconscious but alive Bartley within, his skin blanched pale being the only effect on him of the beast’s gastric digestive juices. Bartley, after raving like a madman for six weeks, calmed down and became famous telling his tale for the rest of his days.

Creationists and Biblical literalists sometimes tell the story as evidence for how events in Jonah could have really taken place. It actually originates in a 1927 Princeton Theological Review paper, by Ambrose John Wilson and in the less likely sounding source book, Sixty-Three Years of Engineering by evangelist and engineer, Sir Francis Fox, an early pioneer of Anglo-French Channel Tunnel engineering project work. The essay comes from his autobiography, which moves from his genuinely fascinating and illustrious life story to looking at stories that can be used as evidence to support the Bible against the Darwinists and growing numbers of atheistic Humanists. This draws heavily, without much source acknowledgement, on the Theological Review article, . A few obscure earlier claims of such legends exist, traced in the Edward B. Davis account I’ve linked in to below this Hub, and these seem to have inspired the Fox presentation too. Fox’s aim is simple, to show that if Bartley survived any time inside a whale, Jonah could have endured similar privations, and so the Bible story gains truth bearing evidence.

There are however many problems with the cracking Bartley yarn. 1/. The facts about how whales eat deny Bartley being able to get into a whale in one piece. 2/. There is no air in the stomach of any mammal. Air goes to our lungs. Bartley would have suffocated even if not deluged in freezing seawater and drowned. 3/. The ship really existed, but it was not a whaler, never lost any crew overboard (surviving or deceased) and it was not a whaling vessel. 4/. There was no whaling of the Falkland Isles before 1909. 5/. Bartley’s rescue was supposedly within hours of him being swallowed, let alone three days as with Jonah. 6/.Though Wilson names surgeons and hospitals involved in examining Bartley, no records of such people or treatments exist.

Davis gives a very likely explanation for the true roots of the story. In 1891, a few months after the whale swallows man story is dated (February), but before its publication, a whale swam close to the Yarmouth England coastal town, Gorleston, and beached there. Rather than try to save the poor beast as happens with modern beached and distressed whales, the people of the area killed it and stripped it of fat, blubber, and bone, etc. The carcass became a museum exhibition for some time afterwards. Early anonymous media accounts of a whaler living through a swallowing began to circulate at this time, inspired by religious fervour and Gorleston whale hysteria / hype. Naming a real ship that only ever sailed between New York and Wellington gave it some credibility. Investigation since proves precisely the opposite.

The food consumption process of most animals and especially mammals, including whales & dolphins is similar. Food enters mouth, if untouched by teeth, as would be necessary for Jonah or Bartley, then saliva immediately begins the softening process. In the case of marine mammals, seawater rather neutralizes the saliva process. The meal is then troughed, (drawn to the back of the tongue). The tongue rises to slope the food towards the throat area. Reflex action (the Bolus reflex) in the body will drop the food into the Oesophagus, and this can happen at the rate of 25 feet per second. Even in a whale you would be in the stomach within a minute. The bolus (as the food lump, even if a live intact human), is then going to slow down as it reaches this area and it then goes into the stomach where hydrochloric acids kill off any germs, and start breaking down the food into proteins, carbohydrates, waste products, etc. Churning now begins as the food is squirted with differing breakdown chemicals, absorbed into chambers that squirt chemicals, acids and breakdown processes, rolled back into the stomach, and effectively taken apart. Nothing gets to sit alive in a cave like chamber for three days.

In humans it will take 4 to 6 hours to digest a meal. A whale would take up to 15. It would not take 3 days or more to even get started on a living morsel.

Dismissing whales only able to digest plankton, we are left with whales like the Killer Whale that mostly feeds on seals, and sperm whales that feed mostly on deep-sea squid & krill. Most food with such whales is digested in the first 6 hours, with some stored aside in a stomach chamber for more gradual consumption later. This excites some Jonah enthusiasts into thinking he might have ended up left in the back of such a pantry for longer. In fact, the food in this for-stomach is ground up and crushed to ease its later digestion. Jonah and Bartley would have been pulped alive if they lived this long anyway. A secondary or the ‘main’ stomach to which most food gets rushed right away if the whale is hungry enough, is filled with acid releasing peptic glands for further breaking down food, and the final ‘pyloric’ stomach finishes the job off with more digestive glands. The wanted produce is called chyme, and little more than a mush. The rest is excreta and regurgitant. Even in the fore-stomach the only visibly identifiable remains of squid are hard material beaks and bones. Jonah and Bartley would have been skeleton and teeth and unidentifiable slime by this phase of their whale journey.

Whales on average feed five times a day. Jonah would have had 14 other 1,500 kg meal remains dumped on him, and been in constant risk of being sucked through the next stomach with each and every part of that rolling feast.

I have found several Christian sites online that still peddle the Bartley story as if it was proof of the truth of the Jonah story. It is not.

My sceptical assessment of the Bible story of Jonah http://arthurchappell.me.uk/bible-jonah

The full text of the Bible book of Jonah. http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Jonah%201-4;&version=NIV

The Bartley story http://web.archive.org/web/20021015131359/www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1991/PSCF12-91Davis.html

A whale’s digestion system – scientific study http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=BKaUpfo2XCUC&pg=PA427&lpg=PA427&dq=digestion+in+a+whale+stomach&source=bl&ots=SH5pHKNCWK&sig=SQp17KxeLwoaUsMNpKhkk42pZqs&hl=en&ei=xIs8TfvdDMyChQeov-TPCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CEUQ6AEwBzgK#v=onepage&q=digestion%20in%20a%20whale%20stomach&f=false

Arthur Chappell

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