Wednesday, February 13, 2008

here's a new one

Today in my Spanish Civilization class, the professor was talking about ancient port cities and came to Tarshish.

At this point in the lecture he stopped and asked if everyone knew the story of Jonah and the whale. Most of the class (largely of Hispanic descent and probably predominantly Catholic) nodded. Then the prof. broke into English and told this story:

The king of Israel got mad with the way Jonah was preaching, so Jonah decided to get away and go to Tarshish. He got on a boat to go to Tarshish, but on the way there was a storm. During the storm, Jonah fell overboard and was swallowed by a whale, who spit him back up right in the same place where he started. Es un mito [a myth] -- pero es muy buen mito.
Kinda makes me wonder about the reliability of the rest of the lecture (on prehistoric Spain). How often does VeggieTales beat somebody in the accuracy department.

I looked for Jonah on Wikipedia to make sure that I wasn't totally ignorant of this other retelling of the Jonah "myth" that happens to be accepted by academicians everywhere. [Don't anybody start on the reliability of Wikipedia.] This entry seems to confirm that the Biblical account is the popular account.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I tried the waltz steps, but I kept getting farther away from the computer and eventually ran into the wall...