Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

September 10, 2021

Jonah and the Whale in the Eyes of Writers and Rabbis

An anatomy lesson, a metaphor, or a synagogue?

On the afternoon of Yom Kippur, which begins Wednesday evening, the book of Jonah is traditionally read in its entirety. Stuart Halpern surveys the way the book’s famous scene where the title character is swallowed by a “great fish” has been imagined and employed in Anglo-American culture—from Herman Melville to George Orwell. In an anatomically explicit poem, Aldous Huxley imagines the prophet “seated upon the convex mound of one vast kidney.” The talmudic sages, by contrast, were much less interested by the biological details:

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