The sailors have just learned, in v. 10, that Jonah is fleeing from the presence of YHWH, the God who made the sea and the dry land. Verse 11 is their response, and it is not reproach but consultation: מַה־נַּעֲשֶׂה לָּךְ — “what shall we do to you?” They treat Jonah as the one competent to say what his God requires, and they want one outcome: that the sea grow quiet off them.

Three things carry the verse. First, the deliberative question is addressed to Jonah about what is to be done to Jonah (the preposition לְ, not a polite “with you”). Second, שָׁתַק is a verb of falling silent, used of the sea only here and in v. 12 within Jonah — the storm is treated as noise to be hushed. Third, the closing clause הוֹלֵךְ וְסֹעֵר, participle plus participle, is the standard Hebrew way of saying a process is intensifying: the sea was getting worse while they spoke. The narrator inserts that as urgency, not decoration.

Note also the shape of the chapter: the question of v. 11 is answered in v. 12, and the clause וְיִשְׁתֹּק הַיָּם recurs verbatim there with the suffix changed from “us” to “you.” The repetition is the hinge of the dialogue and must survive into English.

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

נַּעֲשֶׂה is a qal yiqtol 1cp functioning as a deliberative imperfect — the standard Hebrew construction for asking what one is obliged or able to do (Waltke–O’Connor on the modal uses of the prefix conjugation). It is not “what will we do” as a prediction, nor a cohortative in form; it is a request for a ruling. English “what are we to do” catches it; “what shall we do” is the wooden equivalent and is kept in the literal line.

לָּךְ is the preposition לְ with a 2ms suffix in pausal form (the zaqef accent accounts for the lengthened vowel and the loss of the final vowel). OSHB’s row codes it as 2fs; that is a parsing of the bare form in isolation, and the referent is unambiguously Jonah. The apparatus notes the disagreement rather than silently adopting the code.

The force of לְ matters. The sailors are not asking “what should we do with regard to you” in a detached sense; לְ with עָשָׂה commonly marks the person acted upon or affected (so HALOT s.v. עָשָׂה). They are asking what is to be done to him — which is why Jonah can answer in v. 12 with an imperative to throw him overboard. Rendering it “about you” would blunt the question the narrative is building toward.

Built onwaltke-oconnor · halot · jouon-muraoka

שָׁתַק is rare — roughly four occurrences in the Hebrew Bible. Its core sense is to fall silent, be still, subside; HALOT and BDB both place it in the semantic field of quieting rather than of mere cessation. Here and in v. 12 it governs הַיָּם, and in Psalm 107:30 it describes the stilling of the waves for seafarers in distress. The image is of a noisy, raging sea being hushed.

The literal line keeps “grow quiet” rather than “calm down,” because the metaphor is live: the storm is treated as clamor. Note that the narrator does not use שָׁתַק when the stilling actually happens — v. 15 says וַיַּעֲמֹד הַיָּם מִזַּעְפּוֹ, “and the sea stood still from its raging.” The sailors ask for silence; what they get is described with different vocabulary. That gap between request and fulfilment is worth preserving in English by not harmonizing the two verbs.

מֵעָלֵינוּ is a double preposition, מִן + עַל, literally “from upon us.” The sea is pictured as weighing on them, and the quieting is a lifting-off. The same construction with the second-person suffix appears in v. 12, and the idiom should be rendered the same way both times.

Built onhalot · bdb · dch

Two coordinated qal active participles with no finite verb: הוֹלֵךְ וְסֹעֵר, “going and storming.” This is the well-attested Hebrew idiom in which the participle of הָלַךְ joined to a second participle or adjective expresses progressive intensification — a condition increasing over time. The construction recurs in v. 13, where the identical phrase explains why the sailors’ rowing failed.

So the clause is not “the sea was stormy” (a state) but “the sea was getting stormier” (a process). The idiom is culturally opaque if rendered word for word, so the modern line gives the sense — “growing stormier and stormier” — while the literal line keeps the Hebrew shape, “going and storming,” with the idiom explained here.

סֹעֵר is cognate with the noun סַעַר in v. 4 (“a great storm arose on the sea”) and in v. 12 (“this great storm”). Verse 11 is thus knitted to the opening of the episode by root repetition, which is how Jonah argues. Keeping “storm”/“storming” for this root at every occurrence lets the link survive.

There is no copula; the participial clause is temporally anchored by the narrative frame, hence past progressive in English. This is aspect, not tense, in the Hebrew.

Built onwaltke-oconnor · jouon-muraoka · halot

The accents divide the verse at the ʾatnaḥ on מֵֽעָלֵ֑ינוּ, which closes the sailors’ speech, leaving כִּי הַיָּם הוֹלֵךְ וְסֹעֵר as the second half-verse. Two readings of that final clause are possible and the accentuation does not settle it:

BHS records no significant variant for this verse, and the consonantal text is not in doubt. The only parsing question is לָּךְ (see above), which concerns the vocalic tradition, not the consonants.

Built onbhs · bhq

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

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.

LXX reads, in substance, καὶ εἶπαν πρὸς αὐτόν· τί σοι ποιήσωμεν καὶ κοπάσει ἡ θάλασσα ἀφ’ ἡμῶν; ὅτι ἡ θάλασσα ἐπορεύετο καὶ ἐξήγειρεν μᾶλλον κλύδωνα.

Three observations. First, τί σοι ποιήσωμεν is an aorist subjunctive — the translator read נַּעֲשֶׂה correctly as deliberative, and rendered σοι as a dative of the person affected, which supports the reading of לְ argued above. Second, κοπάζω (“grow weary, abate”) for שָׁתַק shifts the image from falling silent to subsiding; this is interpretation of the idiom, not evidence of a different Hebrew text. Third, and most interesting, the final clause is expanded: the translator renders the intensifying participles הוֹלֵךְ וְסֹעֵר with a finite imperfect plus an explicit comparative, “the sea was going and raising up the surge more and more.” That is a translator who understood the Hebrew idiom precisely and made its force explicit in Greek. It is not a witness to a longer Hebrew text. The Göttingen edition of the Twelve should be consulted for the manuscript spread of the final phrase, which varies in wording among witnesses.

The Vulgate’s quid faciemus tibi et cessabit mare a nobis follows the Hebrew closely, with cessabit standing where LXX has κοπάσει — the same move away from “fall silent.”

Built ongoettingen-lxx-xii · muraoka-lxx

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 less to v. 11 itself than to the exchange it opens. The rabbinic tradition in Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer (Midrash Jonah) elaborates the sailors’ consultation at length, including the tradition that they first lowered Jonah partway into the sea, saw the storm abate, drew him back, and saw it resume — a narrative expansion built precisely on the tension between the question of v. 11 and the answer of v. 12. It is midrashic amplification, not exegesis of the Hebrew.

Among the Fathers, Jerome’s commentary on Jonah treats the sailors sympathetically at this point: their asking rather than acting is read as reluctance to shed blood, which v. 14 makes explicit. Jerome’s reading of the verse is a reading of the sailors’ character, and he does not press it allegorically here.

The Christological reception of Jonah in the New Testament attaches to 1:17 and the three days, not to this verse; v. 11 has no New Testament citation. Recorded here as reception only — it tells us nothing about what the Hebrew of v. 11 means in its own setting.

Proposed — pending reviewJerome, Commentarii in Ionam prophetam (Commentary on Jonah), ed. Y.-M. Duval, Sources chrétiennes, Paris: Cerf. · Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer / Midrash Jonah, in A. Jellinek, Bet ha-Midrasch, Jerusalem: Wahrmann.

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.