Yahweh prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.
⛓ Read Jonah 1 forward — the whole chapter and its afterlife →Where this passage surfaces again, sorted by the strength of the link. Each kind of reuse — formal quotation, deliberate allusion, faint echo, figural pattern — carries its own mark. Follow any reference to read it in place.
Quotation1
A formal citation — high verbal volume, often introduced by a saying-formula.
'Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the fish' — Jesus quotes this near-verbatim ('three days and three nights in the belly of the whale') as the type of 'the Son of Man... three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.' Figural fulfillment of Jonah's burial-and-deliverance.
High confidenceAllusion1
A deliberate verbal borrowing without a citation formula.
"The sign of Jonah" explicitly names the prophet swallowed by the great fish, the type for the Son of Man's vindication. The Jonah narrative is the controlling intertext of 11:29-30, named directly.
High confidenceEcho4
A fainter, low-volume reuse, carried by recurrence or thematic coherence.
Peter is addressed as 'Simon, son of Jonah' (vv.15-17) amid a sea/fish narrative; the Jonah-the-prophet sea imagery may color the scene of disciples on the deep at night. Faint and largely onomastic; included honestly as contested.
Low confidence'Three days and three nights'; Matthew elsewhere makes the Jonah-resurrection link explicit (12:40), so the 'third day' here may carry a faint Jonah resonance. Very faint.
Low confidenceA fish as divine instrument/provision at sea; the miraculous coin-bearing fish may carry a faint resonance of God's sovereign use of the sea-creature, though no verbal link. Very faint.
Low confidence'Three days and three nights' — the third-day/three-days motif Matthew elsewhere ties to the sign of Jonah (12:40), faintly present in the securing of the tomb 'until the third day.'
Low confidence◇ Figural4
A typological pattern re-read in a later text — no verbal quotation, high figural coherence.
The 'sign of the prophet Jonah' is a typological pointer: Jonah three days and nights in the belly of the great fish prefigures the Son of Man's burial and resurrection (made explicit in Matthew 12:40). Volume and recurrence are strong; Jesus names Jonah directly.
High confidence'Three days and three nights in the belly of the fish' is a possible scriptural warrant for the third-day timing, read figurally of death and deliverance (cf. Matt 12:40). Volume and recurrence in Paul are nil, so this is a faint, contested figural reading offered only because the 'according to the Scriptures' for the third day demands OT grounding.
Low confidenceJonah's 'three days and three nights' in the fish is invoked elsewhere in the Gospel tradition as the sign of resurrection (the 'sign of Jonah'), and stands behind the third-day pattern Luke repeats here. The link is typological rather than verbal in Luke 24, so confidence is low and the connection is contested.
Low confidenceThree days and nights in the fish became a stock figure for death-and-deliverance, invoked elsewhere in the Jesus tradition (the sign of Jonah). The empty-tomb scene enacts the emergence-from-the-deep pattern figurally, but Mark 16 makes no verbal contact, so the connection is thematic and faint.
Low confidence