Oh, I don't know. Penguins and seals are considerably larger than grapefruits and Orca have no trouble swallowing those. And whale-sharks are pretty big with giant mouths...

Except if the story as the Grandmother was told it says whale, a whale being able to swallow a person IS myth. Bad translations don't mean that a myth isn't a myth.

That doesn't really change anything though because if whale should've been translated as fish, then you're saying it should be 'Jonah got eaten by a fish'... which is quite implausible.

It is biologically possible that a Sperm whale could swallow a human. Their prey includes giant squid.

I don't think OP deserves it at all, unless she didn't warn her bf before hand. She's not responsible for his actions, especially if he knew they were religious and he didn't care.

I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not.

But killer whales (proper name: orca) are technically dolphins, not whales.

While it's not true for all whales Orca's are dolphins, not whales. There's no whale that could swallow a person or a boat whole.

Either way, in the original language the Bible was written the word means fish, not whale. A big fish swallowed Jonah. Not a whale. Also, we don't know what kinds of fish they had around back then, plus God can do whatever he wants and can make anything possible. That's the whole reason behind faith, trusting something you can't see and believing in His miracles. Most christians do not "know these stories are made up to get a point across". The Bible is Gods word and everything in it is true. If you're a Christian you believe that. If you're not a Christian then yeah, I see how it's hard to believe if you want science to back up everything.

And dolphins are whales... At least that's the classification I learned. Whales are split between toothed whales (dolphins etc) and... "Bartenwale" in German, google gives me Baleen whales as a translation. A dolphin's a whale, and orca's a dolphin, so logically, an orca's a whale, too?

The bible isn’t God’s word, it’s a bunch of stories written by other men, about events that may or may not have happened exactly as recorded. And the bible as it stands today, is not the true and original book. It has been doctored and censored countless times over the years to suit what ever political or religious agenda the person changing it, has.

Well, the main reason that's a point of contention is because if it is a whale, there are zero factual cases of a full grown human being swallowed alive- which makes the rest of the myth completely moot. And in the ridiculously unlikely chance that the only whale capable of swallowing something of that size- a sperm whale swallowing a human- the human would be crushed almost immediately once they reached the stomach due to the whale's anatomy.