The sailors have just asked Jonah what they should do to him (v. 11). His answer is the first thing he says in the book beyond his confession in v. 9, and it is a sentence of self-execution: lift me, hurl me. Three things carry the verse.

First, the verb הֵטִיל (hēṭîl, “hurl”) is the same verb used of YHWH hurling the wind at the sea in v. 4 and of the sailors hurling the cargo overboard in v. 5. Jonah asks to be treated as the ship’s last piece of jettison. The repetition is the argument: what God threw at the sea, and what the sailors threw into the sea, now converge on the prophet himself.

Second, Jonah’s diagnosis is exact. He uses בְּשֶׁלִּי (bᵉšellî, “on account of me”), picking up the sailors’ own phrase בְּשֶׁלְּמִי (“on whose account?”) from v. 7. The lot had already said it; Jonah now says it in the first person. The storm vocabulary is likewise repeated verbatim — הַסַּעַר הַגָּדוֹל, “the great storm,” from v. 4, now fixed by a demonstrative: this great storm.

Third, the verse says nothing about repentance. Jonah knows the cause and offers a remedy, but he does not ask the sailors to pray for him, does not pray himself, and does not propose turning the ship toward Nineveh. The text leaves his motive unstated, and the apparatus should not supply one.

The syntax is tight: two imperatives, then a waw + imperfect that functions as the purpose or consequence of obeying them — “throw me in, and then the sea will fall quiet.” It is not a wish; it is a stated outcome.

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

Two imperatives, 2mp, each with a 1cs object suffix.

שָׂאוּנִי (śāʾûnî), qal imperative of נָשָׂא, “lift, pick up, carry.” The verb is ordinary; what makes it weigh here is that it recurs in v. 15, where the sailors finally do it: wayyiśʾû ʾet-yônâ — “and they lifted Jonah.” The narrative executes Jonah’s imperative word for word.

וַהֲטִילֻנִי (wahăṭîlunî), hiphil imperative of טוּל. HALOT gives the hiphil as “throw, hurl, fling,” a verb of forceful casting, not of gentle lowering. It is a marked lexical choice in Jonah: it occurs at 1:4 (YHWH hurled a great wind at the sea), 1:5 (the sailors hurled the vessels into the sea), here at 1:12, and 1:15 (they hurled him into the sea). Four occurrences in one chapter for a verb that is not common elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. Rendering it uniformly as “hurl” in the literal line keeps the chain intact; “throw” in the modern line is the natural English, and the chain is noted rather than forced.

The form הֲטִילֻנִי shows the expected hiphil imperative of a hollow root with a suffix. Note the composite shewa under the ה after the conjunction — standard before a guttural.

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וְיִשְׁתֹּק is waw + qal imperfect 3ms of שָׁתַק, “be quiet, grow still.” The root is rare — a handful of occurrences, including Ps 107:30, where God stills the storm for seafarers, and Prov 26:20, of a quarrel dying down. It is not the usual verb for calming water; the more expected root would be from the domain of דָּמַם or שָׁקַט. Its choice here is deliberate and the same clause is placed in the sailors’ mouths in v. 11, so Jonah is answering them in their own words.

The construction — imperative(s) + waw + imperfect — is the standard Hebrew way of expressing the consequence or purpose of a command. Grammatically it can be read two ways, and the difference is small but real:

מֵעֲלֵיכֶם is a double preposition, מִן + עַל, literally “from upon you.” The idiom pictures the storm as a weight resting on the sailors that will be lifted off them. The same phrase with a 1cp suffix stood in v. 11. The literal line keeps “from upon you”; the modern line gives “for you,” with the image noted here rather than lost silently. Observe that the verse closes with the bare עֲלֵיכֶם, “upon you” — the weight named at the end as it was named at the start, framing the sentence.

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Participle + independent pronoun, in that order. A finite verb (yādaʿtî) was available; the participial clause instead presents the knowing as a standing state rather than a completed act — “I am one who knows,” “I know, and have known.”

The word order is worth noting. The normal order for a participial clause is pronoun + participle (as in v. 9, אֲנִי יָרֵא, “I fear”). Here the participle is fronted. Fronting in a participial clause typically throws weight onto the predicate: the knowing is what is being asserted, over against the sailors’ ignorance and their frantic casting of lots. The irony is sharp — Jonah has known the cause of the storm since v. 4 and said nothing until the lot exposed him.

The contrast with v. 9 is structural: there אֲנִי יָרֵא (“I fear YHWH”), here יוֹדֵעַ אָנִי (“I know”). Jonah’s two first-person self-descriptions in the chapter are a confession of reverence and a confession of culpability, and the narrative lets them stand side by side without comment.

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Four morphemes: בְּ + שֶׁ (the short relative) + לְ + 1cs suffix. Literally something like “in that which pertains to me,” hence “on my account, because of me.”

This compound is very rare. The only other occurrence in the Hebrew Bible is five verses earlier, in the sailors’ question בְּשֶׁלְּמִי הָרָעָה הַזֹּאת לָנוּ — “on whose account is this evil upon us?” (v. 7). Jonah’s answer is the sailors’ question with the interrogative replaced by the first person. The link is invisible in most English renderings and is the main reason to keep a single English equivalent (“on account of”) at both verses.

The short relative שֶׁ (rather than אֲשֶׁר) is a feature of later Biblical Hebrew and of northern/colloquial usage; its presence in Jonah is one of the data points in the long argument over the book’s date and dialect. It is evidence worth naming and not worth over-reading — a handful of forms cannot settle a date on their own.

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סַעַר is the storm-wind; with the article, the adjective גָּדוֹל, and the demonstrative, Jonah points to the specific storm introduced in v. 4: wayᵉhî saʿar-gādôl bayyām, “and there was a great storm on the sea.”

Per the binding glossary decision, גָּדוֹל is rendered “great” at every occurrence. Jonah uses the word as a leitwort — the great city (1:2), the great wind and great storm (1:4), the great fear (1:10, 16), this great storm (1:12), the great fish (1:17). Substituting “violent,” “mighty,” or “fierce” for stylistic variety would destroy the pattern, which is the point of fixing the gloss.

The demonstrative הַזֶּה is doing real work. It is not decorative: it identifies the storm the sailors are standing in with the storm the narrator attributed to YHWH in v. 4, and so it makes Jonah’s statement an identification of divine agency as well as of personal guilt. He does not say “a storm”; he says this one, the one you are all in.

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Jonah accepts responsibility and proposes the remedy. He does not repent, does not pray, and does not offer to go to Nineveh. The text is silent on his motive, and the silence is sustained — nothing in ch. 1 fills it in, and the psalm of ch. 2 looks backward from inside the fish rather than explaining this moment.

What the verse does establish is the moral geography of the chapter: the pagan sailors will shortly refuse to do what the Hebrew prophet tells them to do, and will pray to YHWH before Jonah does (v. 14).

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

The Greek runs closely with the Hebrew: καὶ εἶπεν Ιωνας πρὸς αὐτούς Ἄρατέ με καὶ ἐμβάλετέ με εἰς τὴν θάλασσαν, καὶ κοπάσει ἡ θάλασσα ἀφ᾽ ὑμῶν· διότι ἔγνωκα ἐγὼ ὅτι δι᾽ ἐμὲ ὁ κλύδων ὁ μέγας οὗτος ἐφ᾽ ὑμᾶς ἐστιν.

Three points of interest.

1. The Greek supplies the subject Ιωνας, where the Hebrew has only the 3ms verb. This is ordinary translational explicitation in the Twelve, not evidence of a different Hebrew text.

2. κοπάσει (“will cease, abate”) for וְיִשְׁתֹּק renders the result as a plain future indicative, which is one of the two readings the Hebrew allows (see the syntax section). The translator has taken the consequence sense rather than the purposive. This is interpretation, not a variant.

3. κλύδων (“surge, rough water”) for סַעַר shifts the image slightly from the wind to the agitated water. Compare the LXX’s κλύδων in the same chapter at v. 4. The underlying Hebrew is the same word; the translator has chosen a sea-noun rather than a wind-noun throughout.

The perfect ἔγνωκα (“I have come to know, I know”) is a reasonable equivalent for the Hebrew participial clause, and may even preserve something of its stative force.

Nothing in the Greek here requires a Hebrew Vorlage different from WLC. The verse is textually quiet in BHS; where a reading in the Dead Sea Twelve-Prophets material or in the Targum, Peshitta or Vulgate bears on the verse, it would need checking against the apparatus of BHQ before being asserted.

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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 verse is built almost entirely out of words already used in ch. 1.

• הֵטִיל — v. 4 (YHWH hurls the wind), v. 5 (sailors hurl the gear), here, v. 15 (sailors hurl Jonah).
• סַעַר גָּדוֹל — v. 4, verbatim, now with the article and demonstrative.
• בְּשֶׁל- — v. 7, in the sailors’ question; the compound occurs nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible.
• יִשְׁתֹּק הַיָּם מֵעָלֵינוּ / מֵעֲלֵיכֶם — v. 11, the sailors’ clause, repeated back with the suffix changed.
• נָשָׂא — picked up in v. 15 when the sailors obey.

The effect is that Jonah has almost no words of his own in this verse: he answers the sailors in their vocabulary and the narrator’s. The one thing he adds is the first-person pronoun.

On the wider canonical background, the idea that one man’s presence brings judgment on a company is the pattern of Achan (Josh 7), where lots are also cast to identify the guilty party — the closest structural parallel to Jonah 1:7–12 in the Hebrew Bible.

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

This section records how later readers used the verse. It is not evidence for what the Hebrew means in its own setting.

Rabbinic. Jewish tradition generally reads Jonah’s request as an act of self-sacrifice rather than evasion, and the chapter as a whole is read in the synagogue as the haftarah for the afternoon service of Yom Kippur — a context in which the sailors’ turning to God and Jonah’s acceptance of responsibility both carry penitential weight. Midrashic and targumic material on Jonah 1 is substantial; specific locators should be verified in the editions before being cited.

Early Church. Patristic readers overwhelmingly took the descent into the sea and the fish as a figure of the burial and resurrection, on the authority of Matt 12:39–41, where Jesus names “the sign of Jonah.” Jerome’s commentary on Jonah treats the prophet’s offer of himself as a voluntary act prefiguring a voluntary death, and that typological reading runs through later Western exegesis. The New Testament itself makes no use of this verse specifically; the sign of Jonah concerns the three days and nights of 1:17 (Heb 2:1).

Caution. The Christological typology is reception, not exegesis of the Hebrew. The Hebrew of 1:12 says only that Jonah knew the storm was on his account and told the sailors to throw him overboard; it does not comment on the moral quality of the offer.

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Proposed — pending reviewJerome, Commentarius in Ionam prophetam (Commentary on Jonah), ed. Yves-Marie Duval, Sources chrétiennes 323, Paris: Cerf, 1985.

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.