JESUS COMPARED TO JONAH

There are many theologians who attempt to explain the seemingly wrong information about Jesus’s time in the tomb. Mine is another entirely different approach, using the literal interpretation of the Hebrew and Greek scripture.

When speaking of His death, Jesus referred to Jonas (Jonah) in the belly of the big fish. “For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly, so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Mat 12:40). It seems that Jesus would be buried for three days and three night as he referred to the “heart of the earth” (kardia ho ge).

That seems to refer to the tomb. However, ge has many meanings; one of them is the ‘world’ (Strong 2006).

“Kardia,” as can be expected, is the center or middle of anything, even inanimate things (ibid). It does not mean ‘within’ at all, but more so ‘at.’ Of course, the translation could be in the earth, but at the heart of the earth may refer to the location of Calvary.

Calvary, the mountain, is at the so called ‘navel of the world’ and the Mediterreanian is ‘middle of the earth,’ as the name means.

Therefore, was Jesus referring to his tomb or the situation in which Jonah found himself? Jonah was made a living sacrifice for those within the storm, so that they all would be saved. So, what did the crew do? 

They took up Jonah, and cast him forth into the sea; and the sea ceased from her raging. Then the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and offered a sacrifice unto the Lord, and made vows.  Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.” (Jon 1:15-17)

 The key to the location of the sea is the city of Tarshish which was in what is now Spain. Likewise, the direction of the ship was eastward toward Nineveh as scripture reveals. Jonah, therefore, spent time within the ‘fish’ while in the Mediterranean Sea. (According to scholars any reference to ‘sea’ in scripture means the Mediterranean.)

Therefore, Jesus may have not been referring to burial in the earth at all but at the middle of the Earth where Jerusalem (Zion) is the center. He possibly would not been referring to his own situation but Jonah’s.

Jonah was very much beneath the sea at the ‘heart’ of the Earth, or more precisely the ‘navel of the world’ and the ‘celestial axis’ as well!

That differentiation is important because Jesus did not remain in the tomb for three full days and three full nights.

In my theory about time, Jesus was on the Cross during one cooling and warming period as the ‘lights’ went out for three hours and came back on; and that God created what seemed to be another three-hour ‘night’ and three-hour ‘day,’ so that scripture would be fulfilled. Why else was it important to reveal the darkness and its return unless it had a prophetic significance?

Now consider the actual event for Jonah. “Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.” Figuratively, the ‘belly’ could have been translated ‘heart’ (ibid). So, that explains why the Greek translation was ‘kardia’ (heart).

Jonah was somewhere in the middle of a “fish.” It was not necessarily a fish nor a whale, but something ‘wonderfully prolific,’ or full of life. (BLB Institute 1995). The animal could have been any living beast, so a fish or a whale both fit quite well.

Three (salos) is indeed a triad of some sort. “Days” and “nights” are again, yom and layil in the Hebrew — a period of hotness, and a twisting from it, or a cooling process.

Certainly, Jonas could have been in the cetacean’s innermost parts for three twenty-four hour days, or it could be that the whale could have come up for air three times from being deep in the Mediterranean to blow, wherein the last blow would have ejected him from the whale. (In this case, the whale is a better translation than just a fish.)

The point to all those lingual gymnastics is that Jonas may not have been in the fish three days and three nights, but three blowing processes of a whale wherein Jonas saw the warmth of day and the cool of night three consecutive times before he was ejected.

The same argument may apply to Jesus who is said to be in the tomb three days and three nights. He was certainly at the center of the earth (the Mediterranean) near the Foundation Stone for three periods of warming and cooling (see the previous commentary) because God added another so-called ‘day” to make prophecy happen according to the Jonah’s situation.

When God bought on darkness for three hours and Jesus saw light again before he died, that is an added cycle of warming and cooling and back to a warming, just like in a day.

Jesus does not lie, nor would He ever exaggerate. He could have been speaking rhetorically, but that was not his nature because truth is concrete. I believe that to be all the truth that God added a miraculous cooling and warming cycle to make it the same as Jonah’s experience in the whale. With that said, Jesus was not in the tomb for three days and three nights but alive at the heart of the earth — Zion — for three warming and three cooling cycles.

Jonah surviving three blows of the whale could be a simile of Jesus surviving three periods of  warming and cooling in the glorification process.