Whales are the largest species of exclusively aquatic mammals, members of the order Cetacea, which also includes dolphins and porpoises. They include the largest known animals ever evolved.
The term whale is ambiguous: it can refer to all cetaceans, to just the larger ones, or only to members of particular families within the order Cetacea. The latter definition is the one followed here. Whales are those cetaceans which are neither dolphins (i.e. members of the families Delphinidae or Platanistoidea), nor porpoises. This can lead to some confusion because Orcas ("Killer Whales") and Pilot Whales have "whale" in their name, but they are dolphins for the purpose of classification.
The King James Version of the Bible mentions whales four times: "And God created great whales" (Genesis 1:21); "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).
Nevertheless, the passages in question do not unambiguously refer to whales; modern translations tend to use other terms; for example the New International Version uses "creatures of the sea"; "monster of the deep"; "monster"; and "huge fish" respectively.
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.
The story of Jonas being swallowed by a whale is mentioned in the Qur'an as well.
The hunting of whales is the subject of one of the classics of the English language literary canon, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. Melville classed whales as "a spouting fish with a horizontal tail", despite science suggesting otherwise the previous century. Melville acknowledged "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." Melville's book is an extraordinary work, part adventure story, part metaphysical allegory, and part natural history; it is essentially a complete summary of nineteenth-century knowledge about the biology, ecology and cultural significance of whales.
Some cultures associate some level of divinity with the whale, such as in some places in Ghana and the Vietnamese, who occasionally hold funerals for beached whales, a throwback to Vietnam's ancient sea-based Austroasiatic culture.
Festivals celebrating whales have sprung in both Sitka and Kodiak Alaska. They feature speakers on marine biology and celebrate the creatures with art, music, whale-watching cruises, and symposiums.
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