From what I've heard, this is a matter of mistranslation, just like how killing poisoners somehow got transformed into killing witches.
There's an old Aramaic idiom that to be preoccupied by a dilemma is to be "in a fish." The modern turn of phrase would be to be "in a pickle."
So at some point, Jonah being "in a large fish" for three days evolved into being swallowed by a whale for three days. It would be like me writing in my journal how I was really in a big pickle being transformed by two thousand years of copying and translation into "And woe betide, famousringo was transformed into an enormous cucumber." Language is a tricky thing.
"The worst part about these reviews is they are [subjective]--and their scores often depend on how drunk you got the media at a Street Fighter event." — Mona Hamilton, Capcom Senior VP of Marketing
*Image indefinitely borrowed from BrainBoxLtd without his consent.
