Amazon.com description: Product Description: Among the narratives of the Bible which have stood in the paths of the old mode of literal interpretation the story of Jonah has proved to be one of the worst stumbling blocks. Nowhere have the rationalistic school, the symbolical, the allegorical, the historical—and many others besides—better succeeded in maintaining the impossibility of adhering to the letter of the story; but nowhere also have they made a poorer show of their own respective latch-keys. As Dean Stanley said, at the funeral of Sir Charles Lyell in Westminster: "There were and are two modes of reconciliation which have each totally and deservedly failed: the one attempts to wrest the words of the Bible from their real meaning and force them to speak the language of science; the other attempts to falsify science in order to meet the supposed requirements of the Bible."
Bro. Simpson's remarkable essay is not one more attempt to put new wine into old bottles, but simply to seek how the Jonah legend has originated and grown. To that effect, the author resorts to the comparative method, which, he says, throws the older process of investigation into the shade, "as idle or vague speculation." In the very prayer which Jonah utters from the whale's belly, the Prophet represents himself as speaking "from the womb of Sheol" and even adds: "I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars was about me forever." Such language would hardly apply to a fish. In later iconography, Hell is often represented by the head of a sea-monster with the jaws open.
The Bible contains more than one story, which according to Bro. Simpson, has its origin in some initiatory legend of the same kind; for instance, the translation of Enoch, whose name means " the Initiate," and whom our author compares to the culture-hero of the Chaldæans, the Fish-God Oannes - also the translation of Elijah, which so closely resembles that of Enoch. Elijah, among other feats, recalls to life a Widow's son, by stretching himself three times on the body and crying to the Lord. Here again Bro. Simpson is inclined to suppose some form of ritual rather than pretended miracles. According to a Mahomedan tradition, referred to in Mirkhond, the Widow's son was Junas or Jonah, "the Companion of the Fish."
— Ars Quatuor Coronatorum [1900]