Jonah 1 Study Notes

1:7-8 The sailors’ pagan worldview held that misfortune was the fault of an angry god. They asked Jonah questions seeking to know what could be done to pacify his angry god.

1:9 Worship is literally “fear.” Fear of God in the OT is the respect that a person has for God, causing him to turn from evil and obey God’s commandments (Gn 22:12; Jb 1:8; 28:28; Pr 8:13). Ironically, God’s prophet Jonah showed no such fear by his disobedience. It is also ironic that Jonah fled to avoid preaching to Gentiles in Nineveh, but now found himself preaching to Gentiles in the ship. The title the Lord stands in place of “Yahweh,” which means “He is [present]” and is God’s personal name in the OT, ordinarily rendered in translation as “Lord” in small caps (as in vv. 1,3,4,10,16,17). The substitution in translation of the title “Lord” for the personal name Yahweh goes back to postexilic Jewish reluctance to pronounce the divine name.

1:10-11 Perhaps what frightened the sailors was that Jonah’s God had created the sea. They hoped that some kind of sacrifice might calm the sea.

1:12-15 Rather than submitting to God, Jonah asked these men to kill him by throwing him overboard. Yet despite Jonah’s confession of guilt, these pagan Gentiles had moral scruples about sending a man to his death and tried to row ashore instead. Only after they saw no other option and had prayed that the Lord would not hold them accountable for taking a human life did they throw Jonah into the sea. The integrity and spiritual sensitivity of these Gentiles would have shocked Israelite readers of this book, confronting their belief that non-Hebrews were unworthy of God’s mercy. Certainly this is a lesson Jonah himself needed.

1:16 When the sea calmed, these Gentile sailors were seized by a great fear of the Lord. They were so overpowered by the experience that they could do nothing but worship the Lord (see note at 1:9). Jonah, who was fleeing from a mission to preach to Gentiles, had unintentionally converted an entire crew of Gentile sailors.

1:17 The great fish that swallowed Jonah was not necessarily a whale. Yarns of a sailor surviving Jonah-like in a whale have been widely repeated in recent centuries, but no account has ever been authenticated. Three days and three nights parallels Christ’s resurrection on the third day (Mt 12:40).