<P> Jonah's rejection of God's commands is a parody of the obedience of the prophets described in other Old Testament writings . The king of Nineveh's instant repentance parodies the rulers throughout the other writings of the Old Testament who disregard prophetic warnings, such as Ahab and Zedekiah . The readiness to worship God displayed by the sailors on the ship and the people of Nineveh contrasts ironically with Jonah's own reluctance, as does Jonah's greater love for kikayon providing him shade than for all the people in Nineveh . </P> <P> The Book of Jonah also employs elements of literary absurdism; it exaggerates the size of the city of Nineveh to an implausible degree and incorrectly refers to the administrator of the city as a "king". According to scholars, no human being could realistically survive for three days inside a fish, and the description of the livestock in Nineveh fasting alongside their owners is "silly". The motif of a protagonist being swallowed by a giant fish or whale became a stock trope of later satirical writings . Similar incidents are recounted in Lucian of Samosata's A True Story, which was written in the second century CE, and in the novel Baron Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia, published by Rudolf Erich Raspe in 1785 . The story of a man surviving after being swallowed by a whale or giant fish is classified as ATU 1889G . </P> <P> Though it is often called a whale today, the Hebrew, as throughout scripture, refers to no species in particular, simply saying "great fish" or "big fish" (whales are today classified as mammals and not fish, but no such distinction was made in antiquity). While some biblical scholars suggest the size and habits of the great white shark correspond better to the representations given of Jonah's being swallowed, normally an adult human is too large to be swallowed whole . The development of whaling from the 18th century onwards made it clear that most or all species of whale were incapable of swallowing a man, leading to much controversy about the veracity of the biblical story of Jonah . </P> <P> In Jonah 2: 1 (1: 17 in English translations), the Hebrew text reads dag gadol (דג גדול) or, in the Hebrew Masoretic Text, dāḡ gā ḏō wl (דָּ֣ג גָּד֔וֹל), which means "great fish ." The Septuagint translates this phrase into Greek as kētei megalōi (κήτει μεγάλῳ), meaning "huge fish". In Greek mythology, the same word meaning "fish" (kêtos) is used to describe the sea monster slain by the hero Perseus that nearly devoured the Princess Andromeda . Jerome later translated this phrase as piscem grandem in his Latin Vulgate . He translated kétos, however, as ventre ceti in Matthew 12: 40: this second case occurs only in this verse of the New Testament . </P>

Who gets swallowed by a whale in the bible