Obadiah and Jonah; With Introduction and Notes

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1918 Excerpt: ... to the realm of myth. Foremost among these is the episode of the fish. It may be perfectly true that there are fish in the Mediterranean large enough to swallow a man whole1, and that a man has actually been known to have been rescued alive after having been swallowed by a certain kind of whale. But that a man should remain two or three days in the belly of a fish and then be vomited forth safe and sound on to the dry land goes far beyond the bounds of human experience. Of course "with God all things are possible," and we may not say that this could not have happened. But a suspicion naturally arises that we have here a story rather than an actual event. The same may be said about the narrative of the repentance of Nineveh. It is possible for those who hold to the literal truth of the book, to suppose that the fame of Jonah's adventure had preceded him to Nineveh, and that his name was in every one's mouth before he arrived with his message of doom. With regard, too, to the actual repentance of the city, attention has been drawn by Dr Kennedy2 to a fragmentary inscription in which the king of Nineveh enjoined a fast of an hundred days when the city was sore beset by the Medes and Babylonians. But the cases are not quite parallel and there is, to say the least, a certain improbability in this wholesale repentance, including the beasts as well, at the preaching of a stranger. 1 Cf. the story alluded to by Konig in HDB. II. p. 750 b. This story has, however, been investigated and disproved in Expository Times for Febr. 1907, p. 239. See Bewer, Jonah, p. 5. 3 Book of Jonah, pp. 52 f. The episode of the gourd is also plainly miraculous. The plant with which it is generally identified (whether the castor oil plant or the bottle gourd) is indeed a very ...