Home

For Teaching

Jonah 1: What the Passage Says

71 claims across 17 verses, in the order the chapter makes them.

Not a sermon outline. What Jonah 1 says, and what its hard words meant. The reading of it is yours.

The Chapter in a Sentence

God tells the prophet Jonah to go to the city of Nineveh and speak against it, but Jonah boards a ship headed the opposite way, toward Tarshish. God sends a storm; the sailors cast lots, learn Jonah is running from his God, and at his own word throw him overboard, and the sea grows calm. The sailors fear the LORD, offer a sacrifice, and make vows. God appoints a great fish to swallow Jonah, and he stays in it three days and three nights.

Claim by Claim

  1. 1:1
    • The word of the LORD came to Jonah.
    • Jonah was the son of Amittai.
    • The word of the LORD came to Jonah with speech following.
  2. 1:2
    • The LORD told Jonah to get up.
    • The LORD told Jonah to go to Nineveh.
    • The LORD called Nineveh a great city.
    • The LORD told Jonah to cry out against Nineveh.
    • The LORD said the wickedness of Nineveh's people had come up before him.
  3. 1:3
    • Jonah got up to flee to Tarshish.
    • Jonah fled away from the presence of the LORD.
    • Jonah went down to Joppa.
    • Jonah found a ship that was going to Tarshish.
    • Jonah paid the ship's fare.
    • Jonah went down into the ship.
    • Jonah boarded to go with the crew to Tarshish, away from the presence of the LORD.
  4. 1:4
    • The LORD hurled a great wind onto the sea.
    • There was a mighty storm on the sea.
    • The ship was in danger of breaking apart.
  5. 1:5
    • The sailors were afraid.
    • Each sailor cried out to his own god.
    • The sailors threw the ship's cargo into the sea.
    • The sailors threw the cargo overboard to lighten the ship.
    • Jonah had gone down into the innermost part of the ship.
    • Jonah lay down.
    • Jonah fell into a deep sleep.
  6. 1:6
    • The captain of the ship came to Jonah.
    • The captain asked Jonah what he meant by sleeping.
    • The captain called Jonah a sleeper.
    • The captain told Jonah to get up.
    • The captain told Jonah to call upon his God.
    • The captain said perhaps the god would give thought to them.
    • The captain said the purpose was that they not perish.
  7. 1:7
    • The sailors spoke to one another.
    • The sailors proposed casting lots.
    • The sailors said the lots would show on whose account this calamity had come upon them.
    • The sailors cast lots.
    • The lot fell on Jonah.
  8. 1:8
    • The sailors told Jonah to tell them on whose account the calamity had come upon them.
    • The sailors asked Jonah what his occupation was.
    • The sailors asked Jonah where he had come from.
    • The sailors asked Jonah what his country was.
    • The sailors asked Jonah what people he belonged to.
  9. 1:9
    • Jonah said he was a Hebrew.
    • Jonah said he feared the LORD.
    • Jonah said the LORD is the God of heaven.
    • Jonah said the LORD made the sea and the dry land.
  10. 1:10
    • The men were exceedingly afraid.
    • The men asked Jonah what he had done.
    • The men knew Jonah was fleeing from the presence of the LORD.
    • The men knew this because Jonah had told them.
  11. 1:11
    • The men asked Jonah what they should do to him so the sea would grow calm for them.
    • The sea was growing more and more stormy.
  12. 1:12
    • Jonah told them to pick him up.
    • Jonah told them to throw him into the sea.
    • Jonah said the sea would then grow calm for them.
    • Jonah said he knew this great tempest had come upon them on his account.
  13. 1:13
    • The men rowed hard to bring the ship back to land.
    • The men were not able to reach land.
    • The sea was growing more and more stormy against them.
  14. 1:14
    • The men cried out to the LORD.
    • The men begged the LORD not to let them perish for this man's life.
    • The men begged the LORD not to lay innocent blood upon them.
    • The men said the LORD had done as it pleased him.
  15. 1:15
    • The men picked Jonah up.
    • The men threw Jonah into the sea.
    • The sea stopped its raging.
  16. 1:16
    • The men feared the LORD exceedingly.
    • The men offered a sacrifice to the LORD.
    • The men made vows.
  17. 1:17
    • The LORD had appointed a great fish to swallow Jonah.
    • Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

1:1
"The LORD" in small capitals stands for the personal name of Israel's God, four Hebrew letters usually written YHWH and often pronounced "Yahweh". Jewish readers avoided saying it aloud and substituted the ordinary word for "lord", which is why English Bibles print it this way. Jonah son of Amittai is named elsewhere as a prophet from Gath-hepher in northern Israel, active in the reign of Jeroboam II, in the first half of the 700s BC (2 Kings 14:25).
1:2
Nineveh was a chief city of Assyria, on the Tigris river near modern Mosul in northern Iraq. Assyria was the great military power of the region and the empire that would later destroy the northern kingdom of Israel; to an Israelite audience it was the feared enemy capital, several hundred miles to the north-east. "Their wickedness is come up before me" is a Hebrew idiom in which the noise of wrongdoing rises like a shout that reaches God's hearing.
1:3
Tarshish was a distant port in the far west, most often identified with Tartessos in southern Spain; for Israelites it stood for the far end of the known world, in the exact opposite direction from Nineveh. Joppa (modern Jaffa, now part of Tel Aviv) was the nearest Mediterranean harbor. "From the presence of the LORD" translates a phrase meaning "from before the face of the LORD", going outside the land where this God was worshiped and where a prophet stood in his service. The Hebrew also uses the same verb "went down" three times over in this chapter, tracking Jonah down to the port, down into the ship, and later down into the sea. The wording "he paid the fare" can be read either as paying his own passage or, less commonly, as hiring the vessel itself.
1:4
The verb translated "sent out" means to hurl or throw something with force; the same verb is used a few lines later for the sailors throwing the cargo overboard and for throwing Jonah into the sea. The Hebrew of the last clause says literally that the ship "thought it would break up", giving the vessel itself the fear the sailors feel.
1:5
Ancient Mediterranean sailors, probably Phoenicians here, each served the god of his own city or people, so a mixed crew would pray to several different gods at once. Throwing cargo overboard was ordinary emergency practice: a lighter ship rides higher and takes on less water.
1:6
"Shipmaster" is the captain. "What meanest thou, O sleeper?" is not asking what Jonah means; it is closer to "What do you think you are doing, asleep?" "If so be that" means "perhaps," and "that we perish not" means "so that we do not die."
1:7
Casting lots meant throwing marked stones, sticks or pieces of pottery and reading the result as an answer given from outside human control. It was a normal way of settling questions no one could otherwise decide (dividing property, assigning duties, identifying a guilty party) and was used across the ancient world, including in Israel.
1:8
The questions are not idle curiosity. Ancient people assumed that a god's anger traveled with the person who had offended him, so learning a stranger's trade, homeland and nation was the practical way of working out which god was behind the storm and how he might be appeased.
1:9
"Hebrew" is the term Israelites typically used of themselves when speaking to foreigners. To "fear" a god in this language means to worship and serve him, not to be frightened of him. "God of heaven" was a title commonly used in dealings with outsiders, and Jonah's addition that this God made "the sea and the dry land" is pointed to men currently at the mercy of the sea.
1:10
The Hebrew behind "Why hast thou done this?" can be a question or, just as easily, a cry of horror, closer to "What on earth have you done!"
1:11
"The sea wrought, and was tempestuous": "wrought" is the old past tense of "work," so the picture is of the sea working itself up, getting wilder by the minute.
1:13
Ships then had long oars, like giant paddles. The men pulled on them very hard to push the ship along.
1:14
"Innocent blood" is a legal phrase. Killing a person who had done nothing deserving death left bloodguilt on the killer, a debt that could be claimed from him and from the community that allowed it. The sailors are asking not to be held answerable for a death they believe they are being forced into.
1:16
As in verse 9, to "fear" the LORD here means to give him worship. A vow was a binding promise to give a god something specific, usually a sacrifice or gift, in return for rescue, paid once the person was safely home.
1:17
In the Hebrew Bible this verse is numbered 2:1, the opening of the next chapter. The Hebrew says simply "a great fish"; it names no species, and the familiar "whale" comes from the Greek word used when this episode is referred to in Matthew's Gospel. "Three days and three nights" follows a reckoning in which any part of a day counts as a whole day, so the span need not be seventy-two full hours; the phrase is also used elsewhere for a long journey or a long stretch of darkness.

Read Jonah 1