The picture shows that while the whale’s gastric juices had completely absorbed Jonah’s clothes and curls, they prevailed not, possibly from callosity of hide, against his body.]
Cheyne detects the link between the original myth and the story of Jonah in Jeremiah li. 34, “he hath swallowed me up as a dragon: he hath filled his maw with my delicates: he hath cast me out,” and again in verse 44, “and I will bring forth out of his mouth that which he has swallowed up.”
Allusions to mythical dragons occur elsewhere, as in Psalm lxxiv. 13, “Thou breakest the heads of the dragons (or sea-monsters) in the water.” The curious belief in a dragon or fish that swallows the moon spreads wide. This draws from Mr. R. C. Thompson[1089] the comment, “when it is remembered that Jonah was swallowed by the ‘great fish’ for three days (the period of the moon’s disappearance at the end of the month), the coincidence is well worth considering; especially as Jonah is the Hebrew word for dove, and it was at Harrān, the city sacred to the Moon God, that the dove was sacrificed (Al. Nadim, 294).”
But whatever the “great fish,” and whatever the story’s derivation, the whimsical treatment of the prophet’s imprisonment in a poem by the Rev. Zachary Boyd, Rector of Glasgow University in the seventeenth century, demands some quotation:—
“What house is this? here’s neither coal nor candle; Where I no thing but guts of fishes handle; The like of this on earth man never saw, A living man within a monster’s mawe!”
He then goes on to contrast Noah’s freedom of movement in the ark with his enforced immobility:
“He and his ark might goe and also come, But I sit still in such a straitened roome, As is most uncouth, head and feet together Among such grease as would a thousand smother; I find no way now for my shrinking hence, But here to byde and die for mine offence; Eight persons were in Noah’s hulk together, Comfortable they were each one to other. In all the earth like unto me is none Farre from all living I heere byde alone, Where I, entombed in melancholy sink, Choakt, suffocat, with excremental stink.”[1090]
I close this, as my other chapters, with a legend which makes fish directly or indirectly responsible for some historical happening.
It was through a fish (according to the Talmud) that Solomon regained his kingdom. The King one day, while bathing, confided his signet ring to one of his many concubines, Amina. Was it her eyes, I wonder, or those of that Queen, Pharaonic or other (by whose happy influence Solomon, eschewing evil and cleaving only unto her, was perhaps inspired to write The Song of Songs), which he likens to the pools of Hesbon?
A devil named Sakhar, the Talmud goes on, coming in the shape of Solomon, obtained the ring from Amina, and by virtue of its possession sat on the throne in Solomon’s guise. After forty days the devil flew away, and threw the ring into the sea. The signet was immediately swallowed by a fish, which on being caught was given to Solomon. The ring was found in its stomach, and he, who without its credentials had been compelled to beg for bread and from his appearance being changed by the devil had been regarded as a preposterous pretender, “by this means recovered his kingdom, and taking Sakhar and tying a great stone to his neck, threw him into the sea of Tiberias.”[1091]