The legend of the huge fish

Note: this text is extracted from Book V, chapter 25:

“And those fishermen, proud of their prize, immediately dragged it along to show their king, for it was of enormous size. He too, out of curiosity, seeing that it was of such extraordinary size, ordered his servants to cut it open; and when it was cut open Śaktideva came out alive from its belly, having endured a second wonderful imprisonment in the womb. Then the fisher-king Satyavrata, when he saw that young man come out and bestow his blessing on him, was astonished...”.

For Śaktideva’s imprisonment in the belly of the fish cf Chapter LXXIV of this work; Indian Fairy Tales, by Miss Stokes, No. xiv; and Lucian’s Vera Historia, Book I. In this tale the fish swallows a ship. The crew discover countries in the monster’s inside, establish a “scientific frontier,” and pursue a policy of Annexation.—In Chapter CXXIII of the Ocean of Story the huge fish appears twice: firstly in the “Story of the Two Princesses,” where it swallows a ship and all on board; and secondly in the tale of “Keśaṭa and Kandarpa,” where a woman is rescued from a fish’s belly. To the former of these Tawney adds a few further references.

Similar incidents are found in the Hindī Bundēlkhaṇḍī, where the hero Alhā is cut out from captivity in a fish’s inside (see Ind. Ant., vol. xiv, October 1885, p. 258). In some cases the flights of fancy of the storyteller fall little short of those indulged in by Lucian. In a Kasmīrī tale (J. H. Knowles, “Pride Abased,” Ind. Ant., vol. xv, June 1886, p. 157) a king lives inside a fish for years, until he is finally rescued by a potter who is hacking at the stranded fish with an axe. Similarly in Miss Stokes’ tale “Loving Lailī” lives twelve years in a rohita fish. All these stories appear to me to be merely examples of one of the numerous forms of exaggeration dear to Oriental story-tellers, and which comes in most handily as part of the hero’s adventures during his travels in a foreign land, or while on his search for a lost bride, magic article or what not.

In the case of Sindbad, he is not swallowed by a fish, but lands with the crew on a huge fish’s back mistaken for an island. See Nights, Burton, vol. vi, p. 6 with note. Further references will be found in Crooke, Popular Religion and Folk-Lore of Northern India, vol. ii, p. 254-; and Chauvin, op. cit., vii, p. 9, under “La Baleine.”

Various explanations of this legend have been offered, some rather fantastic like that of a certain American astronomer of the last century who saw the star-group “Cetus” in the whale and the “moon passing through it in three days and nights” in Jonah. There are, however, other cosmological interpretations deserving of more attention. We have already seen (pp. 81-83 of this volume) how widespread was the belief that at eclipses the luminary was swallowed or attacked by some monster, and it is quite understandable that the primitive mind might easily conceive of the sunset being caused by a huge fish swallowing the sun. But when we come to the Jonah legend, we find that the prophet was in the fish— i.e. invisible to human eyes—for three days—the period of the moon’s disappearance at the end of the month (see R. Campbell Thompson, Semitic Magic, pp. 53, 54). Jonah is the Hebrew word for “dove,” and, as Robertson Smith has pointed out (Religion of the Semites, quoting Al-Nadīm, 294), it was at Harran, the city sacred to the moon-god, that the dove was not sacrificed.

A fairly widely accepted interpretation of the Jonah legend, however, is that it is a prophecy conveyed under a parable. There are several reasons given for the propagation of this view. In the first place, no reference of the supposed conversion of Nineveh by Jonah is mentioned by Isaiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, or the other prophets, and no records of Jonah's visit to the city have been discovered. Jeremiah (li, 34) clearly shows the meaning of expressions similar to those found in the Jonah story.

Here we read:

“Nebuchadrezzar, the king of Babylon, hath devoured me, he hath crushed me, he hath made me an empty vessel, he hath swallowed me up like a dragon, he hath filled his belly with my delicates, he hath cast me out.”

See also Jeremiah 1, 17; 1, 44; and Isaiah xxvii, 1.

Other interpretations of the story have been advocated. W. Simpson (The Jonah Legend, London, 1899) considers that it is an initiatory legend showing death and subsequent resurrection, embodying the same principles as Christian baptism and the Brahmanic “rite of the twice-born.” He points out that Jonah (ii, 2) cried out from “hell”— i.e. “Hades,” “Sheol,” or the “grave”—which shows that there was no real “fish” in the case, and that it was, on the contrary, the dramatic action of a ceremony, with its symbolic accessories.

For other interesting references see G. A. Smith, The Book of the Twelve Prophets, 1899, vol. ii, p. 524; Hans Schmitt, Jona, 1907; and T. K. Cheyne, “Jonah,” Ency. Brit., vol. xv, pp. 496, 497. For a Polynesian and Dutch New Guinea parallel of the Jonah story see respectively Macculloch, Childhood of Fiction, p. 50, and Frazer, Folk-Lore of the Old Testament, vol. iii, p. 83. —n.m.p.