The lot has fallen on Jonah (v. 7), and the sailors now interrogate him. The verse is a volley of questions — five of them in the Masoretic text — fired in rapid succession, with no narrative breath between. That barrage is the point: these men are frightened, methodical, and polite (נָּא, “please”), and they are trying to establish, by the ordinary means available to ancient mariners, which god has been offended and by whom.

Two things in the verse need care. First, the opening clause בַּאֲשֶׁ֛ר לְמִי־הָרָעָ֥ה הַזֹּ֖את לָ֑נוּ is syntactically awkward and is absent from several witnesses; it may be an expansion drawn from v. 7, or it may be an authentic resumption of the lot-casting question. Second, רָעָה here carries the same ambiguity it has carried since v. 2 — the “evil” of Nineveh and the “disaster” at sea are the same Hebrew word, and the book exploits that.

The questions move outward in widening circles: trade, point of departure, homeland, ethnic identity. Jonah’s answer in v. 9 ignores four of the five and answers the last one — and then goes beyond it, naming not his nation but his God.

נָגַד in the hiphil means to make known, declare, report — the standard verb for conveying information someone does not yet have. The form here is a 2ms imperative with the lengthened (paragogic) -â ending, which softens the command somewhat; combined with the particle נָא it is a request rather than a demand. These sailors are not torturing a prisoner. They are asking.

The root returns at the end of v. 10: כִּ֥י הִגִּ֖יד לָהֶֽם — “for he had told them.” The narrator thereby confirms that Jonah answered this interrogation more fully than the quoted speech of v. 9 records. The repetition is worth preserving in English with the same verb (“tell” / “told”).

Literally בַּאֲשֶׁר is “in/on that which” — the preposition ב with the relative אֲשֶׁר — and לְמִי is “to/belonging to whom.” Stacked together the clause reads, woodenly, “on account of whom-to-whom this evil is to us.” The doubled interrogative-relative is the difficulty.

Two analyses are current. One takes בַּאֲשֶׁר as a causal conjunction (“on account of the fact that”) governing an indirect question: “Tell us on whose account this disaster has come upon us.” The other reads the whole as a slightly redundant idiom equivalent to בְּשֶׁלְּמִי in v. 7 — the sailors simply repeating to Jonah’s face the question they had just put to the lots.

The parallel inside the chapter is decisive for the sense, whatever the syntax: v. 7 בְּשֶׁלְּמִ֛י הָרָעָ֥ה הַזֹּ֖את לָ֑נוּ and v. 12 כִּ֣י בְשֶׁלִּ֔י הַסַּ֧עַר הַגָּד֛וֹל הַזֶּ֖ה עֲלֵיכֶֽם use the ש-relative with ב for exactly this “because of whom / because of me” sense. Jonah’s confession in v. 12 answers the question of v. 8 in its own vocabulary.

Built onwaltke-oconnor · jouon-muraoka · bdb · halot

The clause בַּאֲשֶׁ֛ר לְמִי־הָרָעָ֥ה הַזֹּ֖את לָ֑נוּ is not represented in some witnesses, and its absence has long been noticed: it duplicates v. 7 almost word for word, it sits oddly before the four crisp questions that follow, and without it the verse is a clean series of four questions.

The apparatus of BHS and BHQ should be consulted directly for the precise distribution of witnesses; the Qumran evidence for Jonah (the Twelve Prophets scrolls from Cave 4 and the Wadi Murabbaʿat scroll) is fragmentary, and the state of this clause in them needs checking against the editions rather than asserting here. The rendering above keeps the clause, since the WLC is the base text and is not corrected toward the versions.

Built onbhs · bhq

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

רָעָה is one of the load-bearing words of Jonah, and English cannot hold both of its senses at once. In 1:2 it is moral: כִּֽי־עָלְתָ֥ה רָעָתָ֖ם לְפָנָֽי, the wickedness of Nineveh risen before God. Here and in v. 7 it is calamitous: the storm as misfortune falling on the crew. The same noun will carry both senses again in chs. 3–4 (Nineveh turning from its evil way; the thing being “evil” to Jonah).

The lexicons agree on the breadth of the range (HALOT and BDB both list “evil, wickedness” alongside “distress, calamity, misfortune”), and the word’s semantics do not force a choice: what a people do and what befalls them are one word in Hebrew. The study rendering keeps “evil” so the thread from v. 2 is visible; the modern rendering uses “disaster,” which is what the sailors mean. The gap between the two lines is itself the data.

Built onhalot · bdb · dch

מְלָאכָה is work in the sense of occupation, business, craft, or the task assigned to someone — the noun used of the creation work God finished in Gen 2:2 and of the skilled labour of the sanctuary craftsmen. Applied to a person with the second-person suffix, it asks about trade or errand: “What is your line of work?” or, in a maritime setting, possibly “What is your business [on this voyage]?”

There is irony the sailors cannot hear. Jonah’s מְלָאכָה is prophecy; he is on this ship precisely to avoid it. He answers nothing about his occupation in v. 9 — he answers about his God, which is the same answer differently given.

Built onhalot · bdb

The yiqtol תָּבוֹא is not a future. Hebrew’s imperfective here covers present and ongoing circumstance: “where are you coming from,” that is, what is your point of origin on this journey. The literal line renders “do you come” to keep the aspect unresolved rather than imposing an English tense.

Some read the question as geographical (“what port did you sail from?”), parallel to the next question about homeland; others as a request for present provenance distinct from ancestral land. The sequence — trade, origin of journey, land, people — reads as a widening inquiry, each question larger in scope than the last.

Built onwaltke-oconnor · jouon-muraoka

אֵי מִזֶּה is a set interrogative phrase, “from what place / from which,” found elsewhere in narrative questions of origin. Here it governs עַם, “people” — not “country,” which was the previous question, but ethnic-national identity. This is the question Jonah answers, and his answer (v. 9) is עִבְרִ֣י אָנֹ֑כִי, “I am a Hebrew” — the term Israelites characteristically use of themselves when speaking to foreigners.

The final clause is verbless: interrogative phrase + noun + pronoun. The pronoun אָתָּה standing last gives the question its point; the whole interrogation narrows to you.

Built onwaltke-oconnor · bdb

The Greek of the Twelve renders the verse as a series of questions, and the long opening clause of the Masoretic Text (“on whose account this evil is upon us”) is not represented in the same form across the Greek tradition — part of the evidence sometimes marshalled for regarding the clause as an expansion in the Hebrew. The Göttingen edition of the Twelve Prophets is the place to establish what the critical Greek text actually reads and what the hexaplaric and Lucianic material adds; the distribution should be checked there rather than asserted from memory.

Where the Greek does render the questions, the vocabulary is unremarkable: ἐργασία or a cognate for מְלָאכָה (“trade, business”), πόθεν for מֵאַיִן, χώρα for אֶרֶץ, λαός for עַם. None of these suggests a different Hebrew Vorlage; they are ordinary equivalences.

The Vulgate renders the questions straightforwardly; the Targum of the Minor Prophets (Targum Jonathan) renders Jonah with its characteristic mild expansion. Neither the Vulgate nor the Targum should be cited for a specific variant here without checking the editions.

Built ongoettingen-lxx-xii · muraoka-lxx · bhq

Proposed — pending reviewKevin J. Cathcart and Robert P. Gordon, The Targum of the Minor Prophets, The Aramaic Bible 14, Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1989.

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 interrogation follows a recognizable logic. In a polytheistic Mediterranean world, every people has its gods, and offence against a god is territorial and ethnic as much as moral. To find out whose god has been angered, you find out whose man this is. Hence: trade (what are you doing that might offend?), origin of voyage, homeland, people. The lot has identified the man; the questions are to identify the god.

This makes Jonah’s answer in v. 9 devastating in a way the sailors do not expect. He names a God who is not territorial at all — אֱלֹהֵ֤י הַשָּׁמַ֨יִם֙ … אֲשֶׁר־עָשָׂ֥ה אֶת־הַיָּ֖ם וְאֶת־הַיַּבָּשָֽׁה, the God of heaven who made the sea and the dry land. The category the sailors’ questions assume collapses. There is no port out of this God’s jurisdiction, which is the thing Jonah himself has been slowest to grasp.

Note too the restraint of the portrayal. The pagan crew is courteous (נָא), procedurally fair, and later reluctant to shed innocent blood (v. 14). The book’s moral contrast between these men and the fleeing prophet is built quietly, verse by verse, and the translation should neither flatten their courtesy nor sharpen it into sentiment.

Rabbinic tradition found the sailors’ interrogation a natural hook for expansion. Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer — a late midrashic work, not an early one — develops the sea narrative at length, including the sailors’ testing of Jonah and their eventual conversion; the details there are haggadic elaboration and carry no weight for the sense of the Hebrew. Jewish interpreters also noticed the redundancy of the opening clause and offered harmonizing readings of בַּאֲשֶׁר לְמִי rather than treating it as a textual problem.

Among Christian readers, Jerome’s commentary on Jonah treats the sailors’ questions as evidence of their reasonableness and good faith, contrasting the Gentile crew favourably with the prophet — the same contrast the narrative itself constructs, read in his case as a figure of the nations receiving what Israel declined. Jerome’s commentary should be cited for the general thrust of his reading; specific chapter references need checking against the edition.

The verse itself is not quoted in the New Testament. The Jonah material the Gospels take up is the sign of the three days (Matt 12:40, citing Jonah 1:17) and the repentance of Nineveh (Matt 12:41; Luke 11:32) — not the shipboard scene. Any Christological reading of the sailors’ questions is reception, not exegesis of the Hebrew.

Proposed — pending reviewJerome, Commentarii in Ionam prophetam, ed. Y.-M. Duval, Sources Chrétiennes 323, Paris: Éditions du 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.