Was Jonah swallowed by a whale?

[ManusJustus]

famousringo said:

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.

Ah, I've never heard that before.  I wish there was a way I could read the Bible (or other Holy Books) and them inform the reader when passages are idioms or sayings.