The sailors have just been told by Jonah exactly what to do (v. 12: throw me into the sea). Verse 13 is their refusal to do it. Instead of taking the easy, self-serving option they fight the water to get this foreign fugitive back to shore alive — and fail. The verse is one long frustrated effort: a vivid, unparalleled verb for their exertion (וַיַּחְתְּרוּ), an unexpressed object (the ship), a flat statement of defeat (וְלֹא יָכֹלוּ), and a causal clause that repeats v. 11 almost word for word, except that the sea is now עֲלֵיהֶם, against them.

Two things carry the theological weight. First, the narrator lets pagan sailors behave better than the prophet: they are unwilling to shed blood to save themselves (cf. v. 14). Second, they row for הַיַּבָּשָׁה, “the dry land” — the very thing Jonah had just told them his God made (v. 9). They are rowing toward a refuge that belongs to the God they are fleeing from on Jonah’s behalf, and it is withheld. Human effort cannot undo what YHWH has set in motion.

Built onbhs

Proposed — pending reviewHans Walter Wolff, Obadiah and Jonah: A Commentary, Continental Commentaries, Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1986.

וַיַּחְתְּרוּ is the crux. The root חָתַר elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible means to dig or break through: digging through a wall (Ezek 8:8; 12:5, 7, 12), the burglar breaking in (Job 24:16), and in Amos 9:2 digging down to Sheol. Nowhere else is it used of rowing, and this is its only occurrence in a maritime setting.

HALOT and BDB both recognize the sense here as “to row,” on the strength of context (they are at sea, trying to make land) and of the Mishnaic/Aramaic evidence where the root is associated with rowing and with the oar. DCH likewise lists the nautical sense as distinct to this verse. The underlying image is plausibly the oar-blade “digging” into the water — but note that this is an inference from the root’s basic sense, not independent attestation, and the project’s rule against root-based overreach applies: what is secure is that the verb denotes strenuous physical effort to move the ship, not the precise metaphor.

Built onhalot · bdb · dch

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

לְהָשִׁיב is a hiphil infinitive construct, “to cause to return, to bring back,” with no stated object. Hebrew tolerates this where the object is obvious from the scene; here it is the ship (אֳנִיָּה, vv. 3–5). Some read the infinitive as intransitive/reflexive in force — “to get back” (themselves, ship and all) — which comes to the same thing. The literal line supplies “[the ship]” in brackets rather than resolving it silently.

Note also the shift in verbal form: the chain of wayyiqtol verbs (וַיַּחְתְּרוּ) breaks for וְלֹא יָכֹלוּ, waw + negative + qal perfect. This is the standard way Hebrew negates within a narrative sequence, and it also has the effect of stating the failure as a settled fact rather than as the next event in the chain.

Built onwaltke-oconnor · jouon-muraoka

הַיָּם הוֹלֵךְ וְסֹעֵר repeats v. 11 exactly, with only the final prepositional phrase changed (v. 11: מֵעָלֵינוּ … then הוֹלֵךְ וְסֹעֵר; here עֲלֵיהֶם). The construction is the participle of הָלַךְ used as an auxiliary with a second participle to express progressive intensification: not “the sea went and stormed” but “the sea was growing more and more stormy.” Compare the same idiom in Gen 26:13 and 2 Sam 3:1, where a thing “goes and grows great.”

וְסֹעֵר is cognate with סַעַר, the noun for the “great storm” of v. 4 and “this great storm” of v. 12. The verb keeps the storm vocabulary of the chapter intact. The modern rendering “growing wilder and wilder” preserves the progressive force; the literal line keeps the Hebrew shape (“going and storming”), with the auxiliary visible.

Built onwaltke-oconnor · jouon-muraoka · halot

הַיַּבָּשָׁה (“the dry land”) occurs in Jonah only twice: in Jonah’s creed — YHWH “who made the sea and the dry land” (v. 9) — and here, as the place the sailors cannot reach. The repetition is not decorative. The sailors are trying to reach a place that the God of the man in their hold made, by their own strength, against a sea that the same God made and has stirred up (v. 4). Their failure in v. 13 is the practical demonstration of Jonah’s doctrine in v. 9, and it produces the prayer of v. 14, where they address YHWH by name and concede that he does whatever he pleases.

יַבָּשָׁה is also the creation/deliverance word of Gen 1:9 and Exod 14:16, 22, 29 — dry ground that appears when God divides water. Here the water does not divide. The reader who knows the Exodus vocabulary is meant to feel the withholding.

Built onbdb · halot

LXX reads καὶ παρεβιάζοντο οἱ ἄνδρες ἐπιστρέψαι πρὸς τὴν γῆν καὶ οὐκ ἠδύναντο, ὅτι ἡ θάλασσα ἐπορεύετο καὶ ἐξηγείρετο μᾶλλον ἐπ᾽ αὐτούς — “and the men strained hard to turn back to the land, but they could not, for the sea was going and rising up all the more against them.”

Three observations. (1) παραβιάζομαι, “to use force, press hard, strain,” is an interpretation of וַיַּחְתְּרוּ by its sense of exertion rather than an attempt at the digging image; the translator understood effort, not excavation. (2) ἐπιστρέψαι renders לְהָשִׁיב intransitively (“to turn back”), resolving the missing object the other way — a translator’s decision, not evidence of a different Hebrew text. (3) μᾶλλον (“all the more”) makes the intensifying force of הוֹלֵךְ וְסֹעֵר explicit, which is good evidence that the idiom was read as progressive in antiquity. γῆν for הַיַּבָּשָׁה loses the link to v. 9, where LXX has τὴν ξηράν.

No variant Hebrew text need be posited anywhere in the verse; the differences are all translational. The Vulgate’s et remigabant viri (“and the men were rowing”) is the clearest ancient witness to the nautical reading of חָתַר, though as a 4th–5th-century AD rendering it reflects Jerome’s exegesis rather than independent textual evidence.

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.

The consonantal text is uncontested and BHS reports no significant variant here. The accentuation divides the verse at the ʾatnaḥ on יָכֹ֑לוּ, putting the sailors’ effort and failure in the first half and the reason in the second — exactly the logical structure of the clause, and worth following in the rendering.

One point of care: the OSHB row parses יָכֹ֑לוּ as qal perfect 3cp, which is correct; the accompanying וְ belongs to וְלֹ֣א (conjunction + negative), not to the verb, so this is not a weqatal form.

Built onbhs · bhq

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.

Early and medieval readers fixed on the sailors’ reluctance. The Targum Jonathan rendering of the verse and the rabbinic tradition generally treat the rowing as evidence of the sailors’ righteousness — they would not take a life while any alternative remained — and the midrashic tradition on Jonah develops their eventual conversion from this restraint and from v. 16. The specific midrashic expansions (for example the tradition that they tested the sea by lowering Jonah by stages) are later and should be read as homiletical development, not exegesis of v. 13.

Among the Fathers, Jerome’s commentary on Jonah takes the sailors’ rowing as the type of men who try every human expedient before submitting to God’s will, and reads their failure as proof that no effort avails against the divine decree. Theodore of Mopsuestia and Cyril of Alexandria, in their commentaries on the Twelve, likewise treat the verse as establishing the sailors’ innocence of Jonah’s blood, which is the point v. 14 then makes explicit.

No New Testament text cites or echoes this verse.

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, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 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.