Did you catch my mistake in last week’s email?
In talking about words not in your Bible, I mentioned that Jonah was not swallowed by a “whale”. That is incorrect. Though ‘whale’ is not foud in the book of Jonah, it is mentioned 4 times elsewhere in the Authorized Version.
The LORD who created the whales on day five (Gen 1:21), and prepared the great fish (Jonah 1:17) confirms in Matthew 12:40 that a whale swallowed Jonah. I submit to him in all things.
Of course, this is only true in the King James which stands alone in retaining the word ‘whale’. The other most popular versions today all replace ‘whale’ with ‘fish’ or ‘sea monster’ in order to correct a supposed mistake in the mouth of Jesus.
I was grateful to the keen readers who pointed out my oversight, especially since removing ‘whale’ from the Bible is no small thing historically.
The argument that whales are not fish has been used by skeptics and Bible critics to undermine the inerrancy of Scripture and the words of the Lord Jesus Christ for years.
But whales were not questioned as fish until the 18-19th centuries, and that was only by the newly manmade taxonomical classifications. The same kind of technical nitpicking would call cucumbers, avocados, beans, and corn a fruit salad.
There are whales in the Bible. I make mistakes. Jesus does not.
For every word of God,
Justin “fallible” Johnson