The waters surrounded me, Even to the soul. The deep was around me. The weeds were wrapped around my head.
It seems hardly credible that intelligent men could find any kind of objection to this mention of the seaweed.  This writer has seen accumulations of this weed so thick that one could almost be tempted to try walking on them in the open sea; and, especially off the coast of Nova Scotia, and following a storm, the accumulations of this material are very extensive.  Remember that Jonah and his co-sailors were in a storm; and the presence of masses of seaweed at the place where Jonah was cast overboard would have made it absolutely impossible for a big fish to swallow him without taking on a substantial load of the seaweed at the same time, which, of course, is evidently what happened.  Deane attempted an explanation of it by suggesting that, "Jonah sank to the bottom before he was swallowed by the fish."[31]  Well, maybe he did; but none of this type of explanation is necessary.  If the fish swallowed Jonah in three seconds after he hit the water, he would still have swallowed a lot of seaweed also.  Dummelow understood the situation perfectly when he wrote, "Floating seaweed entangles him as he sinks."[32]