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Why was the Hebrew word for 'fish' in Jonah 1:17 different from the one in the next verse?

tonychanyt

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Jona 1:

17 The LORD appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.
Strong's Hebrew: 1709. דָּאג (dag) — 19 Occurrences

LXX used G2486 (ἰχθύς, ichthys).

The very next verse, Jon 2:

1 Then Jonah prayed to the LORD his God from the belly of the fish,
Strong's Hebrew: 1710. דָּגָה (dagah) — 15 Occurrences

Again, LXX used G2486.

The shift from masculine dag (Jonah 1:17) to feminine dagah (Jonah 2:1) served a literary purpose. It was a linguistic change in gender, not in biological sex. A big (masculine) fish swallowed Jonah. From the belly of the (feminine) fish, Jonah prayed to God. The semantics were the same; it was a stylistic variation. There was no theological difference. In LXX, they were the same Greek lemma G2486. In both verses, the word for 'belly' was masculine.

Jonah proceeded to pronounce his poem in 2:

2 “I called out to the Lord, out of my distress,
and he answered me;
out of the belly of Sheol I cried,
and you heard my voice.
Wiki:

The shift from דָּג (dag) to דָּגָה (dagah) served as a deliberate stylistic choice in the narrative. In biblical Hebrew, nouns had grammatical gender (masculine or feminine), but this did not imply a real-world distinction in sex or biology. Instead, the alternation between masculine and feminine words enhanced the literary quality of the text by emphasizing different aspects of the same entity.
 
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