Whale

The Hebrew word tan (plural, tannin) is so rendered in Job 7:12 (A.V.; but R.V., "sea-monster"). It is rendered by "dragons" in Deut. 32:33; Ps. 91:13; Jer. 51:34; Ps. 74:13 (marg., "whales;" and marg. of R.V., "sea-monsters"); Isa. 27:1; and "serpent" in Ex. 7:9 (R.V. marg., "any large reptile," and so in ver. 10, 12). The words of Job (7:12), uttered in bitter irony, where he asks, "Am I a sea or a whale?" simply mean, "Have I a wild, untamable nature, like the waves of the sea, which must be confined and held within bounds, that they cannot pass?" "The serpent of the sea, which was but the wild, stormy sea itself, wound itself around the land, and threatened to swallow it up...Job inquires if he must be watched and plagued like this monster, lest he throw the world into disorder" (Davidson's Job). The whale tribe are included under the general Hebrew name tannin (Gen. 1:21; Lam. 4:3). "Even the sea-monsters [tanninim] draw out the breast." The whale brings forth its young alive, and suckles them. It is to be noticed of the story of Jonah's being "three days and three nights in the whale's belly," as recorded in Matt. 12:40, that here the Gr. ketos means properly any kind of sea-monster of the shark or the whale tribe, and that in the book of Jonah (1:17) it is only said that "a great fish" was prepared to swallow Jonah. This fish may have been, therefore, some great shark. The white shark is known to frequent the Mediterranean Sea, and is sometimes found 30 feet in length.

תן and תניין, Gen. i, 21; Job vii, 12; Ezek. xxxii, 2; κῆτος, Matt. xii, 40; the largest of all the inhabitants of the water. A late author, in a dissertation expressly for the purpose, has proved that the crocodile, and not the whale, is spoken of in Gen. i, 21. The word in Job vii, 12, must also be taken for the crocodile. It must mean some terrible animal, which, but for the watchful care of Divine Providence, would be very destructive. Our translators render it by _dragon_ in Isaiah xxvii, 1, where the prophet gives this name to the king of Egypt: “He shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.” The sea there is the river Nile, and the dragon the crocodile, Ezek. xxxii, 2. On this passage Bochart remarks, ”The תנין is not a whale, as people imagine; for a whale has neither feet nor scales, neither is it to be found in the rivers of Egypt; neither does it ascend therefrom upon the land; neither is it taken in the meshes of a net; all of which properties are ascribed by Ezekiel to the תנין of Egypt. Whence it is plain that it is not a whale that is here spoken of, but the crocodile. Merrick supposes David, in Psalm lxxiv, 13, to speak of the _tunnie_, a kind of whale, with which he was probably acquainted; and Bochart thinks it has its Greek name _thunnos_ from the Hebrew _thanot_. The last-mentioned fish is undoubtedly that spoken of in Psalm civ, 26. We are told, that, in order to preserve the Prophet Jonah when he was thrown overboard by the mariners, “the Lord prepared a great fish to swallow him up.” What kind of fish it was, is not specified; but the Greek translators take the liberty to give us the word κῆτος, _whale_; and though St. Matthew, xii, 40, makes use of the same word, we may probably conclude that he did so in a general sense; and that we are not to understand it as an appropriated term, to point out the particular species of fish. It is notorious that sharks are common in the Mediterranean.