Matthew 12:40

40. Three days His resurrection, connected with the diurnal revolution, would be an astronomical sign.

Our Saviour was not in the tomb three days and three entire nights, according to our modes of calculation. He expired on Friday afternoon and rose on Sunday morning. He was therefore entombed but the nights of Friday and Saturday. But the Jews reckoned the entire twenty-four hours in an unbroken piece, as a night-and-day. They counted the odd fragment of a day, in computation, as an entire night-and-day. Our Lord therefore was dead during three night-and-days.

The sign of the prophet Jonah was full of warning to the Jews. Jerusalem was the modern Nineveh; a living parallel to Jonah, greater than Jonah himself, was predicting its destruction; and the three night-and-days suggested that without repentance Jerusalem might meet the destruction that Nineveh, by repentance, escaped. Jonah prophesied a destruction in forty days; Jerusalem was destroyed after forty years. Whale Rather, sea monster. But Dr. Thomson has the following remarks on this subject:

“The Bible says that the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up the prophet; but in Matthew it is called a whale by our Saviour. Now, if I am correctly informed, there are no whales in the Mediterranean. How do you explain this?

“Simply by the fact that the multiplication of ships in this sea, after the time of Jonah, frightened them out of it, as other causes have driven all lions out of Palestine, where they were once numerous. It is well known that some of the best fishing stations, even in the great oceans, have been abandoned by the whales because of the multitude of whalers that visited them. This sea would of course be forsaken. If you could stock it thoroughly with these monsters to-day, there would be none left a year hence. But up to the time of Jonah navigation was in its infancy, ships were few and small, and they kept mostly along the shores, leaving the interior undisturbed. Whales may therefore have been common in the Mediterranean.

And there are instances on record of the appearance of huge marine creatures in this sea in ancient days. Some of these may have been whales. The Hebrew word dâg, it is true, means simply any great fish; but nothing is gained by resorting to such a solution of the difficulty. Our Lord calls it a whale, and I am contented with his translation; and whale it was, not a shark or lamia, as some critics maintain. In a word, the whole affair was miraculous, and as such, is taken out of the category of difficulties.”

Heart of the earth As our Lord was not buried in the ground, but enclosed in a tomb of rock, some have understood by the phrase, heart of the earth, the place of departed spirits, to which our Lord at his death descended. But surely the rock is a part of the earth, as truly as the soil. The bosom of a rock is very expressively styled the heart of the earth.