Jonah in the belly of the great fish
The Book of Jonah tells how the prophet, fleeing God's command to preach to Nineveh, sailed from Joppa (Jaffa), was thrown overboard in a storm and swallowed by a 'great fish', spending three days inside before being cast ashore.
750 BCE · 32.05, 34.75 · status: legend
The account
The story is set in the 8th century BCE, though most scholars date the book later. In Judaism it is read on Yom Kippur as a teaching on repentance; in the Gospels Jesus speaks of 'the sign of Jonah', and early Christians painted Jonah as a figure of the resurrection. The Qur'an names him Yunus and Dhu al-Nun, 'he of the fish'. Nineteenth-century newspapers invented a whaler, James Bartley, to prove it could happen.
The sceptical view
A religious narrative, not a natural-history report; the Bartley 'proof' was a fabrication.