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Swallowed By A Whale

McAvennie

Justified & Ancient
Joined
Mar 13, 2003
Messages
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Was just wondering if you could humanly survive inside a blue whale. I've had a look on the net and see about a guy named James Bartley but his tale seems to be dismissed as hokum.
If you could get into a whale's mouth through the thing that sives out stuff from the water - if that is even possible - and you ahd an oxygen tank on could you survive inside a whale?

I'm guessing as soon as it dived you'd be killed from pressure or drowning or would the whale act as a living submarine. If you could get out again after a reasonable amount of time and you hadn't suffocated/drowned could you theoretically live in a whale for say 24 hours?

How much of the inside of a whale is open space? They can grow to 130 feet so I've read so you must have a fair bit of room in there.

The internet seems to suggest no-one has ever been swalowed and emerged from inside a giant whale. It seems like a challenge begging to be taken up if you ask me.

Also how did the bible writers know what a whale was? When did the term 'whale' come into use and what is it's origins? Whoever wrote the bible how did they know it was a whale? Was it common knowledge among people in those days what a whale was?
 
Assuming a blue whale's throat is wide enough to swallow you (and I think I've read it ain't) you'd presumably find yourself immersed in highly acidic stomach juices...

After you, Mac! :lol:
 
The aforementioned James Bartley was apparently bleached all over by gastric juices and came out a jibbering wreck!
straightdope.com/columns/010914.html
Link is obsolete. The current link to the Straight Dope article is:
https://www.straightdope.com/21343432/have-any-real-life-jonahs-been-swallowed-by-whales-and-lived



ship-of-fools.com/Myths/04Myth.html
Jonah II: Swallowed Alive!
LInk is dead. The MIA web article can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20041010225317/http://ship-of-fools.com/Myths/04Myth.html


It appears that no human being has ever been swalowed by a whale and survived. That sounds like a challenge.
You'd need an oxygen tank, an unsuspecting whale and maybe a cable to pull yourself back out again once you'd been in there for a pre-determined time.
The danger would be the whale diving and taking your boat under with you. If you could capture the whale somehow rather than attempting the stunt in open water, although that would be a lame version of the trick.
Maybe they could do it in the US and instead of electric chair or poison gas they could train people on death row in diving and use them in the stunt. If it goes wrong and they die then no great loss. Would be kick-ass TV.
 
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McAvennie said:
Also how did the bible writers know what a whale was? When did the term 'whale' come into use and what is it's origins? Whoever wrote the bible how did they know it was a whale? Was it common knowledge among people in those days what a whale was?

Sort-of answering your questions: It was the writers of The King James version that used the tem 'whale'. The Hebrew in the OT and the the Greek in the NT just say, more or less, "huge fish". My NRSV translation renders it in the NT as "sea monster".
 
lopaka said:
McAvennie said:
Also how did the bible writers know what a whale was? When did the term 'whale' come into use and what is it's origins? Whoever wrote the bible how did they know it was a whale? Was it common knowledge among people in those days what a whale was?

Sort-of answering your questions: It was the writers of The King James version that used the tem 'whale'. The Hebrew in the OT and the the Greek in the NT just say, more or less, "huge fish". My NRSV translation renders it in the NT as "sea monster".

So Jonah was swallowed by a huge fish really. So it could have been anything? If whales cannot physically swallow a human it must have been something else.
A human couldn't possibly live inside a sea-based creature for three days and nights anyway. What poppycock.Makes you wonder what else they made up!
;)
 
Leviathan is another Biblical term usually thought to refer to a whale.
 
Isn't there a species of whale or shark or summat that's got an enormous gob and no "throat" as such that could "swallow" a person? I'm sure I saw David Attenborough whispering about it on TV once ...
 
Perhaps in the time when the biblical story was supposed to have happened, whales were much bigger? Perhaps they were considerably larger than today's giants because they lived longer (i.e. there was no whale hunting then)?
A few thousand years ago, the oceans would have been much deeper, and the monsters correspondingly larger...
 
Lobelia Overhill said:
Isn't there a species of whale or shark or summat that's got an enormous gob and no "throat" as such that could "swallow" a person? I;m sure I saw David Attenborough whispering about it on TV once ...

I think there's something out there called a 'whale shark' and it's very rare.
 
That sounds about right example ... enormous huge great big fish with a mouth as wide as it's head and you could see all the way to it's tail [on the inside] ...
 
Mythopoeika said:
Perhaps in the time when the biblical story was supposed to have happened, whales were much bigger? Perhaps they were considerably larger than today's giants because they lived longer (i.e. there was no whale hunting then)?
A few thousand years ago, the oceans would have been much deeper, and the monsters correspondingly larger...
Apparently the blue whale is the biggest creature ever to have lived on the planet (that is known about).
 
What is just as remarkable is that they live on tiny plankton (krill) - lots and lots of em - the largest being only about 3cms - they aren't known for going round swallowing anything larger for food.
 
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I once heard a tale about a skin diver who climbed inside the mouth of a basking shark....

GULP!

I bet the poor shark had very bad indigestion....
 
Rrose Selavy said:
Leviathan is another Biblical term usually thought to refer to a whale.

I've always heard Leviathan linked with the sea-monsters of older (Sumerian, Babylonian, etc.) myths.

Here's an example from the Bible that sounds a lot like, say, the battle between Marduk and Tiamat or some similar battle. In this passage (in Isaiah), Leviathan is refered to as a sea-serpent - which I doubt would be a term used to describe a whale.


As for the Jonah story, there's a huge range between "poppycock" and literalism, much of which is occupied by other forms of truth-telling such as poetry and myth.
 
I saw a documentary the other day that showed the remains of a massive prehistoric shark (Megalodon). It was like a giant version of the great white shark. The presenter stood alongside the massive jaws and showed the gigantic teeth. The jaws opened so wide, that the presenter could walk through the jawbones.
Apparently, it was big enough to swallow a car, and fed on whales.
There are theories that suggest Megalodon only became extinct 10000 years ago. I don't know how old the Jonah story is, but might he have been swallowed by one of these rather than by a whale?

Interesting article here:

http://www.strangemag.com/megalodon.html
 
I was swallowed by a whale while diving – I could feel the animal’s muscles squeezing me…I thought I going to die

A DIVER swallowed by a whale has revealed what it’s like being inside one of the massive creatures.

NINTCHDBPICT000658697208.jpg


Michael Packard was fishing for lobster in the sea off Cape Cod in Massachusetts when he had the biblical encounter with the humpback whale.

It was 8am and the dad-of-two had gone into the sea for his second dive of the day to pluck lobsters from the ocean floor when 10ft from the bottom he was hit by he said felt like a 100 ton truck.

“All of a sudden, I felt this huge shove and the next thing I knew it was completely black,” told the Cape Cod Times.

“I could sense I was moving, and I could feel the whale squeezing with the muscles in his mouth.”

At first he thought he was inside a great white shark but he couldn’t feel any teeth and hadn’t suffered any obvious wounds.

Then it quickly dawned on him that he had been swallowed by a whale during the 2021 encounter.

“I was completely inside it was completely black,” Packard said.

Michael had to feel around in the darkness while inside the whale’s mouth.

The whale began shaking its head so Packard could tell the creature didn’t like having him in his mouth.

He estimated he was inside the whale for 30 to 40 seconds before it finally surfaced.

“I saw light, and he started throwing his head side to side, and the next thing I knew I was outside,” said Packard.

“I just couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe I got out of that.”

https://www.the-sun.com/news/5963707/diver-swallowed-whale-reveals-like-inside/

maximus otter
 
The aforementioned James Bartley was apparently bleached all over by gastric juices and came out a jibbering wreck! ...
https://www.straightdope.com/21343432/have-any-real-life-jonahs-been-swallowed-by-whales-and-lived

ship-of-fools.com/Myths/04Myth.html
Jonah II: Swallowed Alive! ...
https://web.archive.org/web/20041010225317/http://ship-of-fools.com/Myths/04Myth.html

Both these articles debunking the man-in-whale long term survival trope refer to the alleged case of one James Bartley - a whaler reputed to have survived for some 3 days after being swallowed by a whale. Both articles point to research by a Christian college professor named Edward B. Davis into the Bartley story, as originally published in:

A Whale of a Tale: Fundamentalist Fish Stories
Edward B. Davis
Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith Volume 43 Number 4 (December 1991), pp. 224 - 227.

This original article - containing more details of the evidence Davis located - is accessible at:

https://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1991/PSCF12-91Davis.html
 
The original Davis article includes the following illustration, attributed to the New York World newspaper of 12 April 1896.

PSCF12-91DavisFig2.jpg
 
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