The verse is the pivot of the storm scene. Jonah has just confessed that he “fears” YHWH, the God of heaven, maker of sea and dry land (v. 9) — and the immediate result is that the pagan sailors fear, and fear greatly. The narrator uses the same root for both: Jonah says he is a yārēʾ of YHWH, and the men wayyîrʾû yirʾâ gədôlâ. Jonah’s claim is verbal; the sailors’ fear is real, and it grows through the chapter (v. 5, v. 10, v. 16).

Three things carry the weight:

1. The cognate accusative yirʾâ gədôlâ — “they feared a great fear.” Hebrew intensifies by repeating the root, and the adjective gādôl is the book’s signature word (great city, great wind, great storm, great fish). The literal line keeps the figure.
2. מַה־זֹּאת עָשִׂיתָ — formally a question, functionally a rebuke. Hebrew has no separate exclamation marker; the context decides, and here the sailors are not requesting information they have just been given.
3. The three כִּי clauses stacked at the end. The first is the narrator’s explanation of the sailors’ fear; the second gives the content of what they knew; the third explains how they knew it. The syntax is a chain, and the chain is what makes the verse feel like the narrator leaning in to the reader.

The narrator also drops a verbatim echo: millipnê YHWH here is exactly the phrase used twice in v. 3 to describe Jonah’s flight. The sailors now say out loud what the narrator said at the start — and they are appalled.

Proposed — pending reviewHans Walter Wolff, Obadiah and Jonah: A Commentary, trans. Margaret Kohl, Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1986.

The root ירא governs the chapter’s structure. In v. 5 the sailors “feared” (wayyîrʾû) and each cried to his own god. In v. 9 Jonah describes himself with the participle/adjective yārēʾ — “I am one who fears YHWH.” Here in v. 10 the sailors fear a great fear; in v. 16 they fear a great fear with YHWH as the explicit object and offer sacrifice.

Two senses sit inside one Hebrew word, and the chapter plays on both:

• Terror — the natural response to a storm (v. 5), and clearly part of what is happening here.
• Reverent fear, religious allegiance — the idiomatic sense of yērēʾ YHWH, which is what Jonah claims in v. 9 and what the sailors reach by v. 16.

HALOT and BDB both treat these as one lexical field rather than two homonyms, and the narrative exploits the overlap. Verse 10 is the hinge: the fear is still dread, but it is now dread of the God Jonah named, not dread of weather.

יִרְאָה גְדוֹלָה is a cognate accusative (sometimes “internal object”): the noun is from the same root as the verb and serves to intensify rather than to add information. Joüon–Muraoka and Waltke–O’Connor both treat the construction as a Hebrew intensifier where English would use an adverb. The literal line therefore keeps “feared a great fear”; the modern line gives “were seized with great fear,” which preserves the intensity without the English oddity.

I keep גְדוֹלָה as “great” per the standing glossary decision rather than “terrible” or “deep,” because the word is the book’s leitwort and the repetition is the argument.

The narrator has called the crew הַמַּלָּחִים, “the sailors,” in v. 5, and he calls the officer רַב הַחֹבֵל in v. 6. From v. 10 onward they are simply הָאֲנָשִׁים, “the men” — and the word is used twice in this one verse, bracketing the speech.

The shift is not accidental. Once they have heard the name of YHWH, the crew stop being a professional category and become men standing before God. The same designation carries through vv. 13 and 16, where they are the ones who try to row back and then sacrifice.

אִישׁ here is referentially masculine and refers to an identifiable ship’s crew, so “men” is the rendering, not a generic “people.” Nothing in the text suggests a mixed-sex group.

Literally “what [is] this you have done?” The clause is a nominal question with the perfect עָשִׂיתָ following; the syntax is identical to Genesis 3:13 (God to the woman) and Genesis 4:10 and 12:18, and close to Genesis 29:25 and Judges 15:11.

In every one of those places the force is accusation, not inquiry. Hebrew marks exclamation by context, not morphology, which leaves the translator with a real decision about punctuation. I keep the question mark in the main lines because the interrogative pronoun is there and the literal line should show it; the study line offers the exclamatory alternative.

There is also a pointed verbal echo. The sailors’ ʿāśîtā (“you have done”) picks up Jonah’s own ʿāśâ in v. 9 — YHWH “made the sea and the dry land.” Jonah has just confessed the maker of the sea, and the sailors ask what he has made of it. The root returns a third time in v. 14, where the sailors tell YHWH: “you have done as you pleased.” Three uses of עָשָׂה, three agents, one storm.

The back half of the verse is כִּי … כִּי … כִּי, and the three are not doing the same job:

1. כִּי־יָדְעוּ הָאֲנָשִׁים — causal, and the cause explains the narrator’s own statement, not the sailors’ words. “The men were terrified … because they knew.” This is narratorial aside: the reader is told why the fear was great.
2. כִּי־מִלִּפְנֵי יְהוָה הוּא בֹרֵחַ — complementary, giving the content of their knowledge. “…that he was fleeing from before YHWH.”
3. כִּי הִגִּיד לָהֶם — causal again, explaining the knowledge. “…for he had told them.”

The Masoretic accentuation supports this reading: the ʾatnaḥ falls on עָשִׂ֑יתָ, dividing the verse after the quoted speech, so the whole כִּי chain belongs to the narrator’s comment rather than to what the sailors said aloud.

On the verbs: יָדְעוּ and הִגִּיד are both qatal, and both are anterior to the moment of the speech. Hebrew has no pluperfect form; relative past is carried by the perfect in a subordinate clause. “Had come to know” and “had told” are therefore right in English, and the translation is adding sequence that the Hebrew encodes by position rather than by morphology.

Proposed — pending reviewJack M. Sasson, Jonah: A New Translation with Introduction, Commentary, and Interpretation, Anchor Bible 24B, New York: Doubleday, 1990.

מִלִּפְנֵי is a double preposition over the plural construct of פָּנִים, “face”: literally “from before the face of.” The literal line keeps the anthropomorphism; the modern line gives “from before YHWH,” which is already idiomatic English.

The phrase is a verbatim quotation of v. 3, where it occurs twice as a refrain framing Jonah’s descent to Joppa and his boarding: he rose to flee to Tarshish millipnê YHWH, and he went down into the ship millipnê YHWH. By repeating the exact phrase in the sailors’ knowledge, the narrator puts his own verdict in their mouths.

The theological edge is that the phrase assumes what Jonah’s own confession in v. 9 denies is possible. He has just called YHWH “the God of the heavens, who made the sea and the dry land” — and he is on the sea, trying to get out from in front of that God’s face. Compare Psalm 139:7–10, where the impossibility is stated directly, and Genesis 4:16, where Cain goes out millipnê YHWH. Jonah’s flight is not geographic ignorance; the narrator sets the confession and the flight side by side without comment, and the contradiction is the point.

הוּא בֹרֵחַ is an independent pronoun plus an active participle — periphrastic progressive, “he is/was in flight.” The word order is marked: the prepositional phrase millipnê YHWH stands first, fronted for emphasis. The study line reflects it (“it was from before YHWH that he was fleeing”); the main lines keep the natural English order.

הִגִּיד is hiphil of the root נגד, which in Biblical Hebrew occurs effectively only in the hiphil and hophal — “make known, declare, report.” The lexicons (HALOT, BDB) treat it as a verb of disclosure rather than of ordinary speech, often of information the hearer did not have or could not get on his own.

The form ties back directly to v. 8, where the sailors demand הַגִּידָה־נָּא לָנוּ — “tell us, please!” The narrator’s note here answers that demand: higgîd lāhem, “he told them.” The request and the compliance use the same stem, which makes the verse a closure of the interrogation even though the content of the disclosure is not quoted.

I render it “he had told them” rather than “he had declared to them”; the sense is reporting a fact, and the English should not inflate it.

The Greek runs: καὶ ἐφοβήθησαν οἱ ἄνδρες φόβον μέγαν καὶ εἶπαν πρὸς αὐτόν· τί τοῦτο ἐποίησας; διότι ἔγνωσαν οἱ ἄνδρες ὅτι ἐκ προσώπου κυρίου ἦν φεύγων, ὅτι ἀπήγγειλεν αὐτοῖς.

The translator follows the Hebrew closely and makes two choices worth noting.

• ἐφοβήθησαν … φόβον μέγαν reproduces the cognate accusative word for word, which is not natural Greek. This is the characteristic isomorphism of the Greek Twelve Prophets: the Hebrew figure is carried across rather than converted into an adverb. It is also, incidentally, the construction that surfaces in Mark 4:41 of the disciples in the boat.
• ἐκ προσώπου κυρίου renders millipnê YHWH with the body-part image intact (“out from the face of the Lord”), and κύριος stands for the Tetragrammaton per the version’s regular practice.
• ἦν φεύγων, imperfect of εἰμί with a present participle, matches the Hebrew pronoun-plus-participle periphrasis and shows the translator read hûʾ bōrēaḥ as progressive, as I have.

I am not aware of a meaningful variant in the Greek tradition of this verse affecting sense; the Göttingen edition should be consulted for the detail of the manuscript groups. Nothing in the Greek suggests a Hebrew text different from the WLC here.

Draft — witness readings here are an AI’s recollection and have not been checked against the apparatus (BHQ, the Göttingen Septuagint, DJD). Verify before relying on them.

The WLC text of this verse is stable and the BHS apparatus records nothing that affects sense. No Qumran witness to Jonah 1:10 that I can name with confidence preserves a variant here; the Twelve Prophets are attested at Qumran and in the Naḥal Ḥever Greek scroll, and the apparatus of BHQ for the Twelve should be checked for the detail rather than asserted from memory.

One orthographic point: גְדוֹלָה here lacks the article, agreeing with the anarthrous יִרְאָה, exactly as in v. 16. The pair of verses is formally identical apart from the explicit object אֶת־יְהוָה added in v. 16 — which is itself the narrator’s way of showing that by the end the sailors’ fear has found its proper object.

Draft — witness readings here are an AI’s recollection and have not been checked against the apparatus (BHQ, the Göttingen Septuagint, DJD). Verify before relying on them.

Later readers were drawn to the contrast between the sailors and the prophet.

• Targum Jonathan renders the Twelve into Aramaic with its usual reverential adjustments to anthropomorphic language; the wording of this verse in the Targum should be checked against a critical edition before being quoted.
• Rabbinic tradition (notably the aggadic treatments of Jonah, including material gathered in Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer / Midrash Jonah) expands the storm scene considerably, with the sailors as representatives of the nations who come to recognize the God of Israel. The direction of that reading — gentile sailors shaming the Hebrew prophet — is well attested across the aggadah, even where individual details vary between recensions.
• Jerome, in his commentary on Jonah, makes the sailors’ fear an argument about the gentiles’ readiness to believe and the prophet’s reluctance; the Vulgate renders the cognate accusative as timuerunt viri timore magno, keeping the Hebrew figure.
• The sea-storm type-scene. The Synoptic stilling of the storm (Mark 4:35–41 and parallels) shares the setting, the sleeping figure in the boat, the terrified crew, and even the “they feared a great fear” construction in Greek. The early Church read the two together freely. This is reception and typological reading, not a claim about the Hebrew: Jonah 1:10 is not quoted in the New Testament, and the only explicit New Testament appeal to Jonah is to the fish and the three days (Matthew 12:39–41; Luke 11:29–32).

None of this bears on what the Hebrew says in its own setting, where the narrator is simply explaining why the crew’s terror spiked.

Proposed — pending reviewJerome, Commentarii in Ionam prophetam (Commentary on Jonah), in Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 76, Turnhout: Brepols. · Kevin J. Cathcart and Robert P. Gordon, The Targum of the Minor Prophets, The Aramaic Bible 14, Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1989.

Draft — the later uses cited here (New Testament, rabbinic, patristic) are an AI’s recollection and have not been checked against the sources. Verify before relying on them.

The narrator sets two facts against each other and refuses to comment. Jonah has confessed the God who made sea and dry land; Jonah is fleeing from the face of that God across the sea. The sailors, who have no covenant and no prophet, grasp the incoherence at once — hence the great fear and the rebuke.

The fear language tracks a movement across the chapter: fear of the storm (v. 5), fear at hearing who stands behind it (v. 10), fear of YHWH with sacrifice and vows (v. 16). The prophet who claims the title yērēʾ YHWH in v. 9 never once in this chapter does anything the title implies. The text makes the point structurally rather than by statement, and a translation should let the repetition do the work rather than varying the English.

Proposed — pending reviewPhyllis Trible, Rhetorical Criticism: Context, Method, and the Book of Jonah, Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994.