Great Whale is one of the names by which the Right Whale was formerly known, according to Herman Melville. In his novel Moby Dick, he writes: "Among the fishermen, [the whale regularly hunted for oil] is indiscriminately designated by all the following titles: The Whale; the Greenland Whale; the Black Whale; the Great Whale; the True Whale; the Right Whale." The largest of the whales is the Blue Whale (Balaenoptera musculus).
In modern times, the phrase "great whale" is merely a descriptive phrase and does not refer to a specific species. The phrase sometimes echoes Genesis 1:21, "And God created great whales."
The Bible mentions whales four times: Genesis 1:21 noted above; "Am I a sea, or a whale, that thou settest a watch over me? (Job 7:12); "Thou art like a young lion of the nations, and thou art as a whale in the seas (Ezekiel 32:2); and "For as Jonas [sic] was three days and three nights in the whale's belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (Matthew 12:40). (All quotations from King James version).
Famously, the Book of Jonah (in the King James and some other translations) does not use the word "whale" at all, referring throughout to a "fish" or a "great fish": "Now the LORD had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights." (Jonah 1:17). This detail was used to dramatic effect in Clarence Darrow's cross-examination of fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan in the 1925 Scopes Trial, as depicted in the drama "Inherit the Wind" by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee.
However, the Bible is not a scientific work and the restriction of the word "fish" to refer only the taxonomic class Pisces is recent. In older parlance, "fish" referred to any sea-creature. The dictionary still endorses this as one of the meanings of the word, and it lives on in usages such as "jellyfish," "cuttlefish" and "lobster fishery." No less an authority than Melville defines the whale as "a spouting fish with a horizontal tail." Melville was well aware of "the grounds upon which Linnaeus would fain have banished the whales from the waters" but says that when he presented them to "my friends Simeon Macey and Charley Coffin, of Nantucket...they united in the opinion that the reasons set forth were altogether insufficient. Charley profanely hinted they were humbug."
And God Created Great Whales is the title of an orchestral work by Alan Hovhaness which makes use of the songs of the Humpback Whale.
