<P> At some point cetus became synonymous with "whale" (the study of whales is now called cetology). In his 1534 translation, William Tyndale translated the phrase in Jonah 2: 1 as "greate fyshe" and the word kétos (Greek) or cetus (Latin) in Matthew 12: 40 as "whale". Tyndale's translation was later incorporated into the Authorized Version of 1611 . Since then, the "great fish" in Jonah 2 has been most often interpreted as a whale . In English some translations use the word "whale" for Matthew 12: 40, while others use "sea creature" or "big fish". </P> <P> In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, naturalists, interpreting the Jonah story as a historical account, became obsessed with trying to identify the exact species of the fish that swallowed Jonah . In the late nineteenth century, Edward Bouverie Pusey, a professor at Oxford University, claimed that the Book of Jonah must have been authored by Jonah himself and argued that the fish story must be historically true, or else it would not have been included in the Bible . Pusey attempted to scientifically catalogue the fish, hoping to "shame those who speak of the miracle of Jonah's preservation in the fish as a thing less credible than any of God's other miraculous doings". </P> <P> The debate over the fish in the Book of Jonah played a major role during Clarence Darrow's cross-examination of William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes Trial in 1925 . Darrow asked Bryan "When you read that...the whale swallowed Jonah...how do you literally interpret that?" Bryan replied that "a God who can make a whale and can make a man and make both of them do what He pleases ." Bryan ultimately admitted that it was necessary to interpret the Bible, and is generally regarded as having come off looking like a "buffoon". </P> <P> The largest whales--baleen whales, a group which includes the blue whale--eat plankton and "it is commonly said that this species would be choked if it attempted to swallow a herring ." As for the whale shark, Dr. E.W. Gudger, an Honorary Associate in Ichthyology at the American Museum of Natural History, notes that, while the whale shark does have a large mouth, its throat is only four inches wide, with a sharp elbow or bend behind the opening, meaning that not even a human arm would be able to pass through it . He concludes that "the whale shark is not the fish that swallowed Jonah ." </P>

Who got stuck in the belly of a whale