Jonah, and the Great Fish

The whale, the largest of animals, appears in the Bible as the great fish that swallows the prophet Jonah, who has fled the command of God, and holds him for three days and three nights in its belly before casting him up alive on the shore, a story Jesus later takes as a sign of his own three days in the tomb, so that the whale became, in Christian reading, an emblem of death and resurrection, of descent into the depths and return. The vast sea-beast Leviathan of the Book of Job, which no man can master, stands for the untameable power of creation before which humankind is small.

The modern Save the Whales movement traces to a specific and well-documented moment: in 1970 the biologist Roger Payne released Songs of the Humpback Whale, a recording of the animals' haunting vocalisations that sold in the hundreds of thousands and is credited with turning public sentiment toward whale conservation more than any single scientific paper had managed; the International Whaling Commission adopted a moratorium on commercial whaling in 1982, taking effect in 1986, a regulatory milestone that remains in force today with only limited exceptions for indigenous subsistence and a small number of objecting or non-member nations.