Jonah and the Fish: Big Fish Story? Few biblical stories have captured the imagination like Jonah and the great fish. Skeptics dismiss it as a sailor’s tall tale, children’s Bibles simplify it into a cartoon whale, and believers wrestle with whether it should be taken literally. At the heart of the debate is a deeper question: does the Bible present Jonah’s encounter as history, allegory, or something in between? And what does Jesus Himself tell us about it?