Charles Ellicott Commentary Matthew 12:40

"for as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth." — Matthew 12:40 (ASV)

As Jonah was three days and three nights — To understand these words correctly, we must remember the prominence our Lord gives to the history of Jonah and to the repentance of the men of Nineveh, both here and in the parallel passage of Luke 11:29, as well as in His response to another demand for a sign in Matthew 16:4. In the other passages, “the sign of the prophet Jonah” appears with a vague, unexplained mysteriousness. Consequently, some critics have inferred from this difference that the explanation given by Matthew was an addition to the words Jesus actually spoke. They argue that “the sign of the prophet Jonah” was sufficiently fulfilled by Christ preaching repentance to a wicked and adulterous generation, just as Jonah had done to the Ninevites.

However, several points can be argued against this view:

1. Jonah’s work as a preacher was not a “sign” in any sense. Nothing in his history had this character except for the two narratives of the great fish (Jonah 1:17) and the gourd (Jonah 4:6–10). Any reference to the gourd is, of course, out of the question. Therefore, we must look to the story of the fish as the one to which our Lord alluded.
2. The very difficulty presented by the prediction of “three days and three nights”—when compared with the approximately thirty-six hours (one day and two nights) of the actual time between Christ’s death and resurrection—argues against the probability that this verse was inserted as a prophecy after the event.
3. If we believe that our Lord had a clear foreknowledge of His resurrection and foretold it—sometimes plainly and sometimes in veiled language, as the Gospels clearly show (Matthew 16:21; Matthew 26:32; John 2:19)—then the history of Jonah presented an analogy that He would naturally have noticed.

This use of the history as a prophetic symbol of the Resurrection does not require us to accept every literal detail of the account. For the purpose of the illustration, it was enough that the story was familiar and generally accepted. The chronological difficulty is explained by the common way of speaking among the Jews, where any part of a day, even a single hour, was legally considered a whole day. An example of this is found in 1 Samuel 30:12–13. It is also possible that the measurement of time in the history of Jonah itself should be understood with the same flexibility.

Several related points are also worth noting:

1. The word translated “whale” can refer to any large sea creature.
2. The phrase “the heart of the earth,” standing in parallel to “the heart of the seas” and “the belly of hell” (i.e., Sheol or Hades) in Jonah 2:2-3, means more than the rock-hewn tomb. It implies the descent into Hades, the realm of the dead, which was popularly believed to be deep within the earth.
3. The story has left its mark on Christian art, both in the frequent use of Jonah as a type of our Lord’s resurrection and in the depiction of the jaws of a great sea monster as a symbol of Hades.
4. The specific character of the psalm in Jonah 2, which corresponds so closely with Psalm 16:10–11 , may well have prompted our Lord’s reference to it.