The storm has stopped (v. 15) and the narrator reports the pagan crew’s response in three clipped clauses, each built the same way — verb plus a noun from the verb’s own root: they feared a fear, they sacrificed a sacrifice, they vowed vows. Hebrew uses this cognate-accusative construction to intensify, and three in a row is a drumbeat. The sailors do what Jonah would not: they turn to YHWH by name.

Three things carry the verse. First, the fear vocabulary completes a chain: in v. 5 the sailors feared (object unstated, each crying to his own god); in v. 10 they feared a great fear at Jonah’s disclosure; here they fear a great fear — YHWH. The object of their fear has been named. Second, the direct-object marker אֶת before יְהוָה makes the Name grammatically the object of the verb “feared,” which is the Hebrew idiom for worship, not terror. Third, sacrifice and vows are covenantal, cultic acts — and the narrator records them without a word of comment, no approval and no critique.

The irony is structural, not stated. The Hebrew prophet who confessed in v. 9 “YHWH… I fear” fled; the Gentile sailors, having met YHWH in a storm, fear him in deed.

Three wayyiqtol clauses, each with a cognate accusative (the figure Latin grammar calls schema etymologicum):

The construction functions adverbially and intensively: the noun does not add a new referent but reinforces the verbal action (Waltke–O’Connor on the accusative of the internal object; Joüon–Muraoka on the figura etymologica). English has no clean equivalent, which is why the literal line keeps the awkward doubling (“feared a great fear,” “sacrificed a sacrifice,” “vowed vows”) and the modern line converts the first to an adverbial phrase while retaining the sense.

Note the asymmetry in the third clause: no modifier, no indirect object, no adjective. The sentence narrows to two words and stops. The clause structure itself slows and then halts, which is how the scene ends — and the next verse (1:17, Heb 2:1) begins again with YHWH as subject.

The accents support this reading of the first clause: the darga/tebir sequence on הָאֲנָשִׁים… גְדוֹלָה holds יִרְאָה גְדוֹלָה together as a unit, with the atnaḥ on יְהוָ֑ה closing the first half-verse.

Proposed — pending reviewBruce K. Waltke and M. O'Connor, An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax, Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1990 — §10.2.1 on the accusative of the internal object.

אֶת־יְהוָ֑ה is the direct-object marker plus the Name. The question is what it is the object of.

The natural reading takes it as the object of וַיִּֽירְאוּ, with יִרְאָה גְדוֹלָה as the internal (cognate) accusative standing between verb and object: “they feared YHWH [with] a great fear.” A verb can govern both an internal accusative of intensification and an external accusative of the thing acted upon; יָרֵא regularly takes a direct object (frequently with אֶת of the person feared or revered). This explains the word order without strain: the intensifying phrase is fronted before the object for emphasis, so the verse builds — feared… a great fear… YHWH.

An alternative construes the sense as objective-genitival, “a great fear of YHWH,” but Hebrew would ordinarily express that with the construct (יִרְאַת יְהוָה, as at Isa 11:2–3; Prov 1:7), not with אֶת. The presence of the object marker rather than a construct chain is the decisive datum.

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

The root ירא runs through Jonah 1 as a structural thread:

• v. 5 וַיִּֽירְאוּ הַמַּלָּחִים — the sailors fear; each cries to his own god.
• v. 9 יְהוָה… אֲנִי יָרֵא — Jonah’s confession, participial: “YHWH… I am one who fears,” said by a man in flight.
• v. 10 וַיִּֽירְאוּ הָֽאֲנָשִׁים יִרְאָה גְדוֹלָה — fear at what Jonah has told them, object unexpressed.
• v. 16 וַיִּֽירְאוּ הָאֲנָשִׁים יִרְאָה גְדוֹלָה אֶת־יְהוָה — the same phrase, now with YHWH as the stated object.

Verse 16 repeats v. 10 verbatim and adds three words. That addition is the point: the fear has found its proper object. HALOT and BDB both distribute יָרֵא across “be afraid” and “stand in awe of, revere,” with the religious sense dominant when God is the object; DCH similarly separates the construction with a personal/divine object from absolute uses of terror. The lexical range is not in doubt; what is contested is which end of it the narrator intends, and he has deliberately used a phrase that was plain alarm six verses earlier.

גְדוֹלָה is the feminine of גָּדוֹל, Jonah’s leitwort — the great city (1:2), the great wind and great storm (1:4), great fear (1:10, 16), the great fish (1:17). Per the binding glossary it is rendered “great” at every occurrence so that the drumbeat survives in English, even where “intense” or “overwhelming” would read more smoothly.

זָבַח / זֶבַח. The verb means to slaughter an animal for sacrifice (as against שָׁחַט, ordinary slaughter, and עָלָה hiphil, to offer up a whole burnt offering). זֶבַח typically denotes the shared sacrifice whose meat is eaten by the worshipper — the communion or peace-offering type (HALOT, BDB). Whether these sailors could in fact perform such a rite aboard ship, or whether the narrator telescopes a vow performed later on land, the Hebrew does not say. The verse reports the act and says nothing about place, altar, or priest; the silence is the text’s, and filling it is interpretation.

נָדַר / נֶדֶר. A vow in Israelite practice is a conditional promise made to God, commonly “if you deliver me, I will…,” and it creates a binding obligation (Lev 27; Num 30; Deut 23:21–23). The plural נְדָרִים suits a crew: each man binds himself. Note that Jonah himself will use the same vocabulary in the psalm of ch. 2 — vows and sacrifice, there in the mouth of the prophet, here in the mouths of Gentiles.

Both nouns stand as cognate accusatives, so the pairing is not “they offered something called a zebaḥ and separately made vows” but the idiomatic intensive: the sacrificing was real sacrificing, the vowing real vowing.

The Westminster Leningrad Codex text here is stable and raises no consonantal difficulty; BHS records nothing requiring decision in this verse, and the morphology is straightforward throughout. The pointing לַֽיהוָ֔ה (preposition ל with patach rather than expected shewa) follows the standard Masoretic convention for the Name read as ʾădōnāy — it is a feature of the reading tradition, not of the consonants, and carries no exegetical weight.

Whether any Dead Sea Scroll fragment of the Twelve preserves this verse should be checked against the apparatus before anything is claimed; the Murabbaʿat and Naḥal Ḥever materials cover parts of the Minor Prophets, but no reading here can be asserted on memory.

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 Greek (Jonah 1:16 LXX) reads, in substance: καὶ ἐφοβήθησαν οἱ ἄνδρες φόβῳ μεγάλῳ τὸν κύριον καὶ ἔθυσαν θυσίαν τῷ κυρίῳ καὶ ηὔξαντο εὐχάς — a close, clause-for-clause rendering.

Two features are worth noting. First, the translator reproduces the Hebrew cognate accusatives with Greek datives of manner and cognate objects (φόβῳ μεγάλῳ, θυσίαν… ἔθυσαν, εὐχάς ηὔξαντο), retaining the figure rather than smoothing it — characteristic of the Twelve Prophets translator’s close technique. Second, φοβέομαι with τὸν κύριον as direct object matches the Hebrew אֶת־יְהוָה precisely, confirming that the translator read the Name as the object of the verb and not as a genitive after φόβος. That is independent ancient support for the syntactic analysis above.

There is no evidence here of a different Hebrew text or a different vocalization; the differences are purely those of Greek idiom. The Göttingen edition should be consulted for the detail of the apparatus before any variant is asserted.

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.

Rabbinic. Jewish tradition read the sailors’ sacrifice and vows as genuine turning to the God of Israel; a line of midrashic and later exegetical comment takes the vows as vows of conversion, the sailors going up to Jerusalem to fulfil them. The tradition is well attested in the mediaeval commentators who cite it, but it should be described rather than pinned to a locator unless the source is verified. The Targum of the Minor Prophets, in keeping with its general practice, renders the verse closely; its treatment of the fear vocabulary is worth checking in the apparatus rather than asserting.

Early Church. Jerome, commenting on Jonah, reads the sailors as a figure of the nations who come to faith while the prophet sleeps and flees — the Gentile crew’s sacrifice standing over against Israel’s reluctance. Early Christian reading of Jonah concentrates overwhelmingly on the fish and the three days (Matt 12:40), so this verse receives comparatively little patristic attention in its own right.

As reception, not exegesis. None of this is evidence for what the Hebrew says. The Hebrew records three acts and passes no verdict; the later readings supply the verdict. Keeping that line clear matters especially here, where the attractiveness of a conversion reading can easily be read back into a narrator who declined to give one.

Proposed — pending reviewJerome, Commentarii in Ionam prophetam (Commentary on Jonah), in Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 76; English translation in Jerome, Commentaries on the Twelve Prophets. · 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 chapter is built on reversals, and this verse is where they land.

• Jonah goes down (ירד, vv. 3, 3, 5) and sleeps; the sailors cry out and act.
• Jonah confesses the right creed in v. 9 (“YHWH, God of the heavens… who made the sea and the dry land”) while fleeing from its implications; the sailors meet the maker of the sea and worship him.
• The captain’s instruction to Jonah in v. 6 — קוּם קְרָא אֶל־אֱלֹהֶיךָ — echoes YHWH’s own commission in v. 2, קוּם לֵךְ… וּקְרָא. The Gentile unknowingly repeats God’s command.
• In v. 5 each man cries to his own gods (אֱלֹהָיו); in v. 16 they all sacrifice to YHWH. The movement from the plural pantheon to the Name is the chapter’s arc for the crew.

That arc anticipates ch. 3, where another body of Gentiles — a whole city — responds, and ch. 4, where the prophet resents it. The sailors are the first instalment of the book’s argument about God’s reach beyond Israel.

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