Trivia / Book of Jonah

• Common Knowledge:
  • Despite popular belief, the text never says Jonah was swallowed by a whale as such. The Hebrew original uses the phrase dag gadol (גָּדוֹל דָּג), "giant fish," which could apply to any number of sea creatures. Theology being the Serious Business it is, there's been a lot of speculation by naturalists and other scholars as to which exact species of fish (or whale, or shark, or...) could have plausibly swallowed Jonah. But then, the text also says specifically that the swallowing was a miracle caused by divine intervention, so the usual laws of nature don't necessarily apply the same way.
  • Jonah's message to the Assyrians is often presented as including an admonition to repent. But the text never includes that. Jonah's Words are presented as being simply, "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!" ^note Whether his actual message was longer could be, and is debated, those are the only words we get in the text.
• Word of Dante / Word of God (depending on your religious beliefs): When Jesus refers to the story of Jonah in the New Testament, he refers to the "great fish" with the Greek word meaning "sea monster" (κήτους, ketous), which was then often used to refer to whales. For those who believe in the New Testament as well as the Old, that's as close as one gets to reading the beast being called a whale.
  That being said, the Septuagint (an ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible often referenced in the New Testament) calls the fish a great sea monster (ketei megaloi), too.