Ah, the Bible! The Bible is an endless source of inspiration. Inspiration that is for trying to figure out how to deal with the idiocies contained within. Some tales are plausible like David and Goliath; many aren’t, like Jonah and the whale or large fish; and some, like Joshua at Gibeon (Gideon) violate so many laws of physics that no sci-fi authors in their right minds would perpetrate such nonsense on their reading public.
It never ceases to amaze me that an awful lot of people take every word in the Bible literally. I consider that a very poor reflection on the human intellect and the ability to think logically. To believe the Bible as literal truth today is now akin to believing that the Earth is flat and that the Sun goes around it. Once upon a time it might have been understandable, but those days are long gone.
However, scholars who don’t accept Biblical truth as the undisputed literal word of God, when stumped for an actual alternative physical explanation, retreat to nebulous and wishy-washy concepts and start throwing buzz words like parable, metaphor, archetype, symbolism, ancestral memory and other psychological mumbo-jumbo around – anything that’s an alternative to 1) pure make-believe or 2) a real and unexplainable event. But those are my alternatives: the tales of Jonah and Joshua are either just make-believe or reality. Make-believe is more way more plausible, but it’s boring. So, let’s try for reality, but not supernatural reality – that’s a contradiction in terms.
Jonah First:
Despite a large percentage of people taking a literal interpretation of all things Biblical, including the ‘Jonah and the Whale’ of a tale, now you know, and I know since we can think for ourselves, that while it might be theoretically possible for a very large fish, or some whales (like the sperm whale) to swallow you alive and whole (thus avoid biting you in half in the process), it’s unlikely in the extreme because no marine creature currently known exhibits that sort of feeding behaviour. Large fish or toothed whales have teeth for a reason, and humans are fairly large prey – we’re not minnows. Other very large fish like the whale shark (an endangered species that needs your help) don’t have teeth the shark in “Jaws” would have been proud to display, rather they are filter feeders. Filter feeders include the very large baleen whale – but it couldn’t swallow you without choking to death. So, you’re gonna be bitten and chewed first before being swallowed. Further, you’re not going to survive in their stomach for very long – minutes at most in all likelihood. If you don’t drown first, the lack of oxygen will soon do you in or the digestive acids will soon turn you into digestible fish food. So the ‘Jonah and the Whale’ story is rubbish, unless the whale were really a submarine that was embellished and given flesh-and-blood in order to provide the narrator and reader with something in a more familiar context. But then there weren’t no subs back then were there?
So the story of ‘Jonah and the Whale’ (or large fish) is in all likelihood just another of the numerous Biblical tall tales. It can not be a literal event. However, let’s play that ‘what if’ game again.
I interrupt the story here to point out that 1) behind all mythology, including Biblical mythology lurks a tiny grain of historical truth and that 2) God isn’t a supernatural deity but just one of many extraterrestrials who have arrived on Earth eons before and have divided jurisdiction over various terrestrial geographical areas among themselves. God’s patch of turf to oversee and govern of course is what we now call the Middle East . The logic behind that is too long and complicated to go into again; I’ve done that previously. Let’s just say if you believe in God then you actually believe in extraterrestrial life, extraterrestrial intelligence and ‘ancient astronauts’.
Now if I get the story right, God (the E.T.) sends Jonah on an errand. Jonah doesn’t want a bar of this and heads off in the opposite direction that involves a sea journey*. God ain’t amused at mutiny and so causes this storm at sea, which makes the sailors very unhappy indeed. The sailors, a superstitious lot, make Jonah walk-the-plank or otherwise heave Jonah overboard, actually at Jonah’s own suicidal suggestion. Now that throws a monkey wrench in God’s plans. God therefore had better save his errand boy from drowning and so Jonah is rescued by one of Captain God’s Starship Heaven’s shuttlecraft, or a UFO. But, Jonah gets punished with a three day and night solitary confinement prison sentence for his disobedience, locked away inside this so-called ‘fish’. But, Jonah, inside the belly of the ‘beast’ is eventually released (regurgitated) unharmed, repents and is able to complete his mission for Captain God. A happy ending!
Now Jonah, being a rather typical Biblical character, unsophisticated in the ways of high technology (and you can’t blame him for that – you couldn’t exactly enrol for a Ph.D. in engineering way back then) found himself floundering in the ocean one moment, then locked inside something strange for three days and nights before being deposited on dry land. The only logical explanation to such a Biblical lad lacking an engineering Ph.D. was the whale/large fish alternative. In fact to his mind, there was no alternative – that had to have been the only possible explanation.
Now Jonah wouldn’t of necessity have to have actually seen the aliens piloting the UFO shuttlecraft sent by God (the E.T.) that rescued him from certain death.
So, in conclusion, here are your options: 1) Supernatural God works a miracle and allows Jonah to get swallowed alive by a large marine creature and live to tell the tale after surviving a lack of oxygen and digestive acids for three days and nights; 2) There was no such person and no such marine creature, rather the author of the Jonah tale was on some sort of Biblical-era LSD – the option any sane betting person would take; 3) the story has some sort of foundation, in which case the ‘fish’ had to have been something technological complete with oxygen supply and no digestive juices.
*Obviously Jonah didn’t perceive God as all-knowing and all-powerful, otherwise he would have known that ‘resistance is futile’!
Joshua Second:
Then we have the tale of Joshua, a relatively minor figure in the Bible, a sort of sidekick apprentice to Moses during all those Exodus bits, at least until he gets his very own Biblical book, the “Book of Joshua” (how original). He was a sort of Biblical James Bond and military officer who commanded the Israelites in the destruction of many places, like Canaan and Jericho Gibeon he asked God to cause the Sun and the Moon to stand still, so that he could finish his battle, a battle on behalf of God, in daylight.
The exact quote from the King James Version is:
Joshua: 10: 12 – “Then spake Joshua to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon.”
Joshua: 10: 13 - “And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day.”
Now the first and minor objection is that if the Moon and the Sun are in the sky at the same time, the additional lighting the Moon provides is so marginal that the average person wouldn’t even notice it. The Full Moon, when you get maximum illumination from the lunar orb, only rises at about the same time the Sun is setting; setting when the Sun is rising in the east. As long as the Sun was up and shining, Joshua had all the light he needed.
Now the second and major objection is that in order to get the Sun to stand still – hover in the sky – Planet Earth has got to stop rotating on its axis. God would have had to cause the Earth to brake very suddenly. Now, what happens if you’re driving along at a rapid rate of miles per hour and all of a sudden have to apply the brakes full force? Well anything not tied down inside the car is going to keep on travelling in a forward direction. Apply that principle to the Earth, which is rotating a hell of a lot faster than any family car, and anything not tied down, like you, will go shooting off into space! So, the Sun standing still in the sky would result in the Mother of all Disasters down here on not so terra-firma. Since that didn’t happen, the Joshua story is another example of Biblical bovine fertilizer.
Now the third and also a major objection is that since the Moon goes around the Earth, stopping just the Earth’s rotation wouldn’t stop the Moon from travelling across the sky. God would have had to stop the Moon dead still in its orbit. But that adds the complication that the gravitational attraction between Earth and Moon would then cause the Moon to start dropping like the proverbial stone – right towards target Earth (actually the Earth would also head towards the Moon as well; each celestial object gravitationally attracting the other). It’s only because the Earth orbits the Sun that prevents us from colliding with it; ditto the Moon orbiting the Earth in constant motion results in no lunar-terra collision. Of course God also needed to freeze the Earth’s rotation since that too would cause the Moon to move in the sky from east to west.
Now what sort of natural or even unnatural but closer-to-home terrestrial objects might substitute for a stationary Sun and Moon? Well, nothing really comes to mind. Since there were no helicopters, flares, blimps or balloons, or spotlights back then, and no other natural source of light, say ball lightning, stands still, then we’re left with either a total fabrication or something extraterrestrial.
So the only escape clause as I see it, apart from the observation that the tale is pure fiction, is that the objects weren’t the Sun and the Moon at all, but UFOs under Captain God’s command. Brightly glowing UFOs could hover overhead, for as long as this was required, providing the illumination required for Joshua to complete his military rape and pillage, which of course God gave His stamp of approval to.
P.S. The moral to these stories is that once you reject the literal interpretation of any one of the Biblical tall tales (The Brothers Grimm should have written so many), like Jonah and Joshua, then you have to question the literal aspects of all the texts; every Biblical book, chapter and verse.
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