Jonah 2:10

And the Lord spake unto the fish,.... Or gave orders to it; he that made it could command it; all creatures are the servants of God, and do his will; what he says is done; he so ordered it by his

And the LORD spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land. And the Lord spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land - probably on the coast of Palestine.

And, or, as the particle is sometimes rendered, Then, i.e. after Jonah had prayed, and acted his faith, though in the whale’ s belly. The Lord, who made heaven and earth, and commandeth both, who is God of salvation. Spake; commanded, signified it to be his pleasure; as the same word prepared the fish, and brought it to give attendance to receive the prisoner, so now it doth discharge the keeper, and requires him to set his prisoner at liberty. Unto the fish: though fishes are destitute of reason, and understand not as man, yet they have ears to hear their Creator, and readily obey. It vomited out Jonah; it presently obeys the word, it could no longer keep Jonah a prisoner. On the dry land: the command required this, nor could it be a deliverance without this; had he been cast out of the whale’ s belly any where else in the sea he had been drowned, but now that which was his danger shall be his safety, a ship now to land him which before was like to be his grave. The Scripture doth not say where he was thus set on shore, but considering he was to go to Nineveh and preach repentance to them, it is a very obvious conjecture that any man might make, that the whale set Jonah on shore in some place of the Syrian shore nearest to Nineveh; and on view of the charts any indifferent geographer would conjecture that it was some where on the bay or gulf of Lajazzo, anciently the Sinus Issicus, or somewhat near to Alexandette, as the French, or Scanderoon, as the Turks call it, whence, though a long, yet by the maps appears to be the straightest, journey to Nineveh. As for some who conjecture it was on the Euxine Sea, they consider not the strait passage of the Propontis, nor the length of one thousand six hundred miles from Joppa to that part of the Euxine which is next to Nineveh, nor the length and difficulty of the passage thence by land to Nineveh: but he that said Jonah was landed on Nineveh’ s shore was much wider out in his guess, and never considered that Nineveh was built on Tigris some hundreds of miles by land from Joppa, and if the fish brought him thither, it was by a compass of many thousand miles, which would require some months to run over, besides that the fish would be too great to swim up the river. Their conjecture biddeth fairest who confine it to some places of the Syrian sea, and not far from Scanderoon.

Jonah 2:10 And the LORD spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry [land].Ver. 10. And the Lord spake unto the fish] He spake the word and it was done: he is the great centurion of the world, that saith to his creature, Do this, and he doth it. Dei dicere est facere (Aug.). Yea, he is the great, great Induperator, to whom everything saith, Iussa sequi tam velle mihi quam posse necesse esse (Lucan.): I am wholly at thy beck and check. Jonah spake to God, and God to the fish. It may be said of faithful prayer, that it can do whatsoever God himself can do; since he is pleased to yield himself, overcome by the prayers of his people, and to say unto them cordially, as Zedekiah did to his courtiers colloquingly, The king is not he that can deny you anything. Prayer is of that power that it can open the doors of leviathan, as we see here (which yet is reckoned as a thing not feasible, Job 41:14), yea of the all devouring grave, Hebrews 11:35. If the Lord, pricked on by the prayer of his people, set in hand to save them, and shall "say to the north, Give up; and to the south, Keep not back: bring my sons from far, and my daughters from the ends of the earth," Isaiah 43:6, they shall come amain, and none shall be able to hinder them; "Come, therefore" (with those good souls in Hosea, who had smarted for their folly, as well as Jonah), "and let us return unto the Lord: for he hath torn, and he will heal us; he hath smitten, and he will bind us up. After two days will he revive us: in the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live in his sight," Hosea 6:1-2. A time we must have to be in the fire, in the fish’ s belly, as in God’ s nurturing house; but he will take care that we be not there overly long; what is two or three days to eternity? Hold out, faith and patience: "Yet a very little, little while, and he that shall come will come, and will not tarry," Hebrews 10:37. And it vomited up Jonah upon the dry land] And here death was defeated and wiped; it was much more so when it had swallowed up Christ; and little dreamt that itself should have been thereby "swallowed up in victory." Quantum in devoratione mors laetata est, tantum luxit in vomitu (Jerome). But then was fulfilled that of the prophet, O death, I will be thy death. And as there, so here, in a proportion, and as a type, omnia iam inversa, saith Mercer, all things are turned the other way. Before the fish was an instrument of death; now of life, and serves Jonah for a ship to bring him to dry land.

Verse 10. And the Lord spake unto the fish] That is, by his influence the fish swam to shore, and cast Jonah on the dry land. So the whole was a miracle from the beginning to the end; and we need not perplex ourselves to find out literal interpretations; such as, "When Jonah was thrown overboard he swam for his life, earnestly praying God to preserve him from drowning; and by his providence he was thrown into a place of fish-a fishing cove, where he was for a time entangled among the weeds, and hardly escaped with his life; and when safe, he composed this poetic prayer, in metaphorical language, which some have wrongly interpreted, by supposing that he was swallowed by a fish; when dag should have been understood, as a place of fish, or fishing creek," c. Now I say the original has no such meaning in the Bible: and this gloss is plainly contrary to the letter of the text to all sober and rational modes of interpretation; and to the express purpose for which God appears to have wrought this miracle, and to which Jesus Christ himself applies it. For as Jonah was intended for a sign to the Jews of the resurrection of Christ, they were to have the proof of this semiosis, in his lying as long in the heart of the earth as the prophet was in the belly of the fish; and all interpretations of this kind go to deny both the sign and the thing signified. Some men, because they cannot work a miracle themselves, can hardly be persuaded that GOD can do it. The text, and the use made of it by Christ, most plainly teach us that the prophet was literally swallowed by a fish, by the order of God; and that by the Divine power he was preserved alive, for what is called three days and three nights, in the stomach of the fish; and at the conclusion of the above time that same fish was led by the unseen power of God to the shore, and there compelled to eject the prey that he could neither kill nor digest. And how easy is all this to the almighty power of the Author and Sustainer of life, who has a sovereign, omnipresent, and energetic sway in the heavens and in the earth. But foolish man will affect to be wise; though, in such cases, he appears as the recently born, stupid offspring of the wild ass. It is bad to follow fancy, where there is so much at stake. Both ancients and moderns have grievously trifled with this prophet's narrative; merely because they could not rationally account for the thing, and were unwilling (and why?) to allow any miraculous interference.

And the Lord spake unto the fish - Psalms 148:8. Wind and storm fulfill His word. The irrational creatures have wills. God had commanded the prophet, and he disobeyed. God, in some way, commanded the fish.