Leviticus 11.13-19 • Deuteronomy 14.11-18 • Jonah 1.17 • Matthew 12.40
During a talk with a fellow Christian, we went off on a bit of a tangent.
- ME. “…Like when Jonah got swallowed by the whale…”
- HE. “Sea creature.”
- ME. “Whale. How’re you getting ‘sea creature’ from
kítus? ” - HE. “From what?”
- HE. “Kítus. The Greek word for ‘whale.’ The word Jesus used when he talked about Jonah being in the whale’s belly three days and nights.
Mt 12.40 It’s the word we get our adjective ‘cetacean’ from, which refers to whales, dolphins, porpoises, and other marine mammals.” - HE. [confused; betcha he didn’t expect me to know what I was talking about] “But Jonah said he was swallowed by a great fish.”
Jh 1.17 - ME. “Sure.”
- HE. “Well a whale’s not a fish.”
- ME. “Not anymore. It was a fish in Jesus’s day.”
- HE. “Whales used to be fish…?”
- HE. “Yep. No, they didn’t once have gills then evolve lungs. They used to be fish because the ancients classified them as fish: If it lives in the sea it’s a fish. Then somebody realized some of these fishes have lungs, and decided if you have lungs you’re not a fish, and humanity redefined ‘fish.’ Well, the bible’s still using the old definition. So whales, in the bible, are still big fish.”
- HE. [still confused] “But whales aren’t fish.”
- ME. “Aren’t fish now. Were fish back in Jesus and Jonah’s day.”
- HE. “So are you saying the bible’s wrong, or we are?”
- ME. “Neither. The bible doesn’t define fish; it explains God. We define fish. You remember Adam got to name the animals.
Ge 2.19-20 We get to decide what’s called a fish and what’s not. And if we update the words, we gotta update our bible translations. Problem is, sometimes we update ’em wrong and make the bible look inconsistent. It’s not. It’s just a quirk of language.”
Turns out his confusion came from the fact his updated bible translation changed the wrong word. It took Jesus’s kítos—which still means “whale” in modern Greek!—and rendered it thisaway:
Matthew 12.40 NIV - “For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”
Which isn’t an entirely illegitimate translation. To Jesus’s mind (at the time) a whale was a huge fish. But if we wanna be precise, he said kítus/“whale.” Whenever there appears to be a bible difficulty, the
Problem is, people aren’t always gonna read an
Bats and birds.
Give you another fun example from the scriptures. In the Law, the L
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Bats? Yep; an
Again, bats were birds in Moses’s day. Birds were winged creatures, larger than insects so as not to be lumped together with them, and since a bat’s a winged creature too, it was counted as a bird. It was only later that humans decided birds are defined as winged feathered creatures, which leaves out bats. (And now that it turns out dinosaurs had feathers, scientists are likely gonna make a further distinction between pteranodons and birds.) God was using human language, and human definitions, to spell out what not to eat. We’re the ones who changed the categories. As we have every right to do.
Like I said, the
(And yeah, I know many Christians in the present day figure we don’t need to follow these lists anymore, ’cause
Young-earth creationists and biology.
Various Christians, who think
Bluntly, this is pure speculation on their part. And not all that consistent with the bible, I might add. Fr’instance some of ’em claim donkeys and horses are the same “kind” of animal. They’re not just physically similar; they’re genetically similar, which is why you can crossbreed ’em and produce mules. Thing is, in the Law the L
Leviticus 19.19 KWL - “Guard my rulings. Don’t make two different seeds of your animals breed.
- Don’t sow many different seeds in your fields.
- Don’t put clothes made from many different seeds on yourselves.”
Various young-earthers insist this command can’t be about mules, ’cause there were still mules in the bible. Even King David owned a mule,
I’m not entirely certain why God made this a command. My guess is he didn’t want ranchers experimenting to see what kind of interesting animals they could create by getting their animals to commingle. Put a sheep and horse together and get a woolly horse? Put a cow and goat together and see what kind of milk this weird new creature would make? Not that any of these animals would naturally breed; nor would you even get results. But you can get mules by crossing a horse and donkey, and mules are useful. Still, it’s a bad precedent. (And a little pervy.)
And an indicator young-earth creationists aren’t sticking to the bible as closely as they claim when it comes to their theories of creation.
The authors of the bible weren’t even trying to teach us science and natural history. They were trying to teach us God and salvation history. The bible’s about who God is, not about how the world works. About how God cures the sin problem, not about other ailments and their treatment (unless of course we turn to God for some supernatural healing). About how to follow him and do good works, not how to interpret nature. About the fact God created everything, not how. How God did it is for us humans to figure out—and if our theories are inconsistent with the bible, it’s nearly always because we’re expecting more of the bible than is its proper, stated purpose.
Got that?