Frank's Casket is made of whale bone:

"Surprisingly, the main runic inscription on the front does not refer to the scene it surrounds. It is a riddle in Old English relating to the origin of the casket. It can be translated as 'The fish beat up the seas on to the mountainous cliff; the King of terror became sad when he swam onto the shingle.' This is then answered with the solution 'Whale's bone.' It tells us that the casket was made from the bone of a beached whale."

A shingle beach is one of pebbles rather than sand.

There are varied translations of the runic and carved riddle on Frank's Casket:

"hronæs ban
fisc . flodu . ahof on ferg (compound continued on next line)
enberig
warþ ga:sric grorn þær he on greut giswom
Which may be interpreted as:
whalebone

fish flood hove on mountain

The ghost-king was rueful when he swam onto the grit"

Whoever made Frank's Casket knew some Bible stories, including the life of Jesus.

In the Biblical story of Jonah and the Whale, the whale swallows Jonah, who is in danger of drowning, having been thrown into the sea. Jonah is enclosed inside the whale, which symbolically becomes a casket for Jonah. He could be considered "as good as dead". The whale eventually vomited Jonah from inside his belly onto the beach. Instead of being Jonah's death casket, the whale becomes a life-saving treasure container. When the whale disgorges Jonah, Jonah is then in his own element, in the right place, whereas a beached whale would be out of his element. For him this means life, not death. Jonah is saved from drowning. He is a living miracle in the story.

When Jesus was in the dark tomb for three days, his followers were praying for his soul. In order for Biblical prophesies to be fulfilled, he had to be released from that dark place of death into light and life. This happened, and a bright shining angel, a messenger of God, announced this to those who came to pray at his tomb on the third day. Jesus then becomes the living miracle.

The story of The Flood precedes that of Jonah and the Whale.

In the Biblical story of The Flood, Noah's ark (a very large casket) encloses Noah and his family, from which they are eventually released, saving them from drowning in the flood waters. They are living treasures because they are the only surviving humans of the catastrophe.

The fish ended up in the high mountains because the flood waters covered the highest peak. To make a riddle of this, one could ask the question "How did a giant fish end up on the top of a mountain?" (A whale could be considered one of the largest of fishes by people unaware of mammalian classification). Whales were outside the ark, but safe,  because water is their natural habitat. Jonah and Noah were out of their element, in and on the ocean, but were kept safe in their containers, a whale and an ark respectively. They both got a second chance at life after a horrendous experience.

Childbirth, with the growing child safely inside the womb, can be considered an archetypical ark. The child to be born carries the genetic code of his ancestors, thus preserving family lineage. The Bible has lengthy genealogical lists, important to identifying the Messiah.

It was thought originally that Frank's Casket may have been filled with treasures handed out as gifts by a king. In this case, the word casket means a container or box to hold jewels or other valuables, not a coffin. Frank's casket was made by finding a beached whale, which was the casket of Jonah, so to speak, making a casket that was made from a casket. This riddle is something like Sampson's "Out of the eater came something to eat. Out of the strong came something sweet."

In Shakespeare's lore, a ghost king was dead but still able to speak to the living, as in Hamlet. A ghost king could also be one who is numbered among the dead because of desperate circumstances, or as the expression goes, one who is "as good as dead".

The epic Babylonian hero Gilgamesh also escaped drowning in a flood by building a boat. In the Biblical version, the flood waters come from both the windows of the heavens and the fountains of the deep.

Gilgamesh is also involved in a scenario that is much like the garden of Eden where the proverbial Fountain of Youth was supposed to have been located:

"As Gilgamesh is leaving, Utnapishtim's wife asks her husband to offer a parting gift. Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh of a boxthorn-like plant at the very bottom of the ocean that will make him young again. Gilgamesh obtains the plant by binding stones to his feet so he can walk on the bottom of the sea. He recovers the plant and plans to test it on an old man when he returns to Uruk. Unfortunately, when Gilgamesh stops to bathe it is stolen by a serpent that sheds its skin as it departs, apparently reborn. Gilgamesh, having failed both chances, returns to Uruk, where the sight of its massive walls provokes him to praise this enduring work of mortal men. The implication may be that mortals can achieve immortality through lasting works of civilization and culture."