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and the dry land” (Jonah 1.9), in order that human beings, receiv-
ing an unhoped-for salvation from God, might rise from the dead,
and glorify God, and repeat, “I cried to the Lord my God in my
a?iction, and he heard me from the belly of Hades” (Jonah 2.2),
and that they might always continue glorifying God, and giving
thanks without ceasing for that salvation which they have ob-
tained from him, “that no ?esh should glory in the Lord’s pres-
ence” (1 Cor 1.29), and that human beings should never adopt an
opposite opinion with regard to God, supposing that the incor-
ruptibility which surrounds them is their own by nature, nor, by
not holding the truth, should boast with empty superciliousness,
as if they were by nature like to God. (Haer. 3.20.1)

For Irenaeus, then, God has borne the human race, from the beginning, while
it was swallowed up by the whale. But in doing so, God has “arranged in ad-
vance the ?nding of salvation, accomplished by the Word through the sign of
Jonah”; this is already a given, though it is unknown to human beings prior to
Christ, who brings an “unhoped-for salvation,” unhoped-for, but nevertheless
divinely foreseen. Christ, as we have seen, is our starting point for understand-
ing how and why we have been held under sin and death from the beginning.

For Irenaeus, death is undoubtedly the result of human apostasy, turning
away from the one and only Source of life; it was instigated by the Devil and so
the expression of his dominion over the human race. But it is also embraced
within the divine economy, the way in which everything ?ts together in God’s
hand. When viewed from the perspective of the salvation granted by Christ
through “the sign of Jonah,” we can see that, as it was God himself who ap-
pointed the whale to swallow up Jonah, so also the engul?ng of the human race
by the great whale was “borne” by God in his arrangement, his economy, which
culminates in the ?nding of salvation.

But there is yet more! For Irenaeus, the newly-created humans were in-
experienced, and so they immediately gave way to temptation. And, so Ire-
naeus continues:

Such then was the patience of God, that human beings, passing
through all things and acquiring knowledge of death, then attain-
ing to the resurrection from the dead, and learning by experience
from whence they have been delivered, may thus always give
thanks to the Lord, having received from him the gift of incor-
ruptibility, and may love him the more, for “he to whom more is

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