Jonah 2:5

"The waters compassed me about, even to the soul;

The deep was round about me;

The weeds were wrapped about my head."

"Even to the soul ..." "The meaning is that the waters so press in that life itself is threatened."[26]

"The weeds were wrapped about my head ..." Some of the critics have really hooted at this, screaming that "weeds do not grow in a great fish's belly!"[27] Indeed, indeed! Neither did Jonah "grow in the belly of the big fish," but there he was; and, of course, both Jonah and the sea weed got there in the same swallow. It is nothing short of amazing how commentators are intimidated by blatant assertion, risking all kinds of bizarre guesses as their answer to this phantom objection. Livingston supposed that, "Jonah had become entangled with other material within the fish";[28] and thought that maybe Jonah mistook "the whale's viscera!"[29] and merely thought it was seaweed! Blair stated the truth:

"Doubtless the fish had swallowed not only Jonah but considerable seaweed as well. There was Jonah floundering in the entangling mass, all adding to the confusion of his distressing dilemma."[30]

It seems hardly credible that intelligent men could find any kind of objection to this mention of the seaweed. This writer has seen accumulations of this weed so thick that one could almost be tempted to try walking on them in the open sea; and, especially off the coast of Nova Scotia, and following a storm, the accumulations of this material are very extensive. Remember that Jonah and his co-sailors were in a storm; and the presence of masses of seaweed at the place where Jonah was cast overboard would have made it absolutely impossible for a big fish to swallow him without taking on a substantial load of the seaweed at the same time, which, of course, is evidently what happened. Deane attempted an explanation of it by suggesting that, "Jonah sank to the bottom before he was swallowed by the fish."[31] Well, maybe he did; but none of this type of explanation is necessary. If the fish swallowed Jonah in three seconds after he hit the water, he would still have swallowed a lot of seaweed also. Dummelow understood the situation perfectly when he wrote, "Floating seaweed entangles him as he sinks."[32]