The verse is the hinge of Jonah’s psalm. Everything before it has been descent and engulfment (vv. 2–3); here the speaker reports what he said in that moment, and what he said has two halves that pull against each other: a verdict of banishment (נִגְרַשְׁתִּי מִנֶּגֶד עֵינֶיךָ, “I have been driven out from before your eyes”) and a declaration about the temple (אַךְ אוֹסִיף לְהַבִּיט אֶל־הֵיכַל קָדְשֶׁךָ).

Three things carry the weight.

1. The fronted pronoun וַאֲנִי sets this utterance off as the speaker’s own, over against what God has done to him in v. 3. The same וַאֲנִי opens v. 9, where the vow answers the despair here — the two are a deliberate pair.
2. נִגְרַשְׁתִּי is the language of expulsion, the verb used of driving a person out of a place where he belonged. It names Jonah’s situation in exactly the terms he chose for himself in 1:3, 10 (מִלִּפְנֵי יְהוָה): he fled from before YHWH’s face, and now he finds himself driven from before YHWH’s eyes. The flight has become a sentence.
3. אַךְ is genuinely ambiguous, and the whole sense of the verse turns on it. Read adversatively (“yet”), the line pivots from despair to hope. Read asseveratively (“surely / how shall I ever …”), it continues the lament. The Masoretic pointing and the ancient versions do not agree, and the apparatus below leaves the question open rather than resolving it in the rendering.

The genre is psalmic poetry of the thanksgiving type, reporting a past crisis from the far side of rescue. Grammatically the verbs are perfects and a yiqtol inside reported speech; the yiqtol’s time-reference depends on how אַךְ is read.

The independent pronoun וַאֲנִי is redundant to the morphology of אָמַרְתִּי (which already marks 1cs) and is therefore emphatic by fronting. Joüon–Muraoka and Waltke–O’Connor both treat this construction as contrastive topicalization: the speaker sets himself over against something just said. Here the contrast is with v. 3, where every verb has God or God’s waves as subject (“you cast me … all your breakers … passed over me”). Verse 4 answers: and I, for my part, said …

The same construction opens v. 9 (וַאֲנִי בְּקוֹל תּוֹדָה). The psalm has two “and I” statements: one of despair, one of vow. Preserving the fronting in English (“And I — I said”) in the literal line keeps the pair audible; the modern line relies on the sentence-initial “And I said.”

אָמַרְתִּי with no addressee and no quotative verb of speech directed outward is the standard Hebrew idiom for interior speech — “I said to myself,” “I thought.” The rendering keeps “I said,” since the Hebrew does not mark it as internal and the ambiguity between spoken lament and inward verdict is itself part of the poem.

Built onjouon-muraoka · waltke-oconnor

The niphal perfect of גָּרַשׁ. The qal/piel is the verb of forcible expulsion: driving a person out of a household, a territory, or a sanctuary — HALOT and BDB both gather it around “drive out, expel, banish.” The niphal here is passive, with the agent unstated. Contextually the agent is God, as v. 3 has already made explicit (“you cast me into the deep”), but the Hebrew withholds the subject, which softens nothing and merely makes the sentence a verdict rather than an accusation.

Two resonances matter:

• Expulsion from presence. The combination of this verb with a phrase of divine presence places the speaker in the position of one driven from where he belonged. Jonah had gone to considerable trouble to put himself מִלִּפְנֵי יְהוָה (1:3 twice, 1:10). Now the same relation is expressed passively and as a loss. The irony is the poem’s, not the translator’s, and the rendering should not strengthen it.
• Restless wandering. The participle of the same root describes the sea in Isa 57:20, “like the tossing sea … whose waters toss up mire,” an image not far from Jonah’s setting. This is suggestive rather than probative; do not build on it.

Rendered “I have been driven out” in the literal line (keeping the passive and the force of the stem) and “I have been driven away” in the modern line. “Banished” is defensible and carries the right juridical note; “cast out” is avoided because it would collide with the distinct verb שָׁלַךְ hiphil in v. 3.

Built onhalot · bdb · dch

נֶגֶד means “in front of, opposite, in the sight of”; prefixed with מִן it names removal from that position. With עֵינֶיךָ (“your eyes”) the whole is a live anthropomorphic idiom for being out of someone’s view and so out of their regard.

The project glossary already fixes מִלִּפְנֵי יְהוָה as “from before the face of YHWH” (literal) / “from before YHWH” (modern). This verse uses a different phrase — eyes, not face; נֶגֶד, not פָּנִים — and the difference must survive into English. Literal line: “from before your eyes.” Modern line: “from your sight,” which carries the sense while keeping the organ of vision in view.

The point of the variation is probably not stylistic. In ch. 1 the narrator and the sailors speak of YHWH’s face, which Jonah tried to escape. In the psalm the speaker speaks of YHWH’s eyes, which he fears have stopped resting on him. Flight from a face and loss of a gaze are not the same complaint.

Built onhalot · bdb

One short particle decides the shape of the verse. אַךְ has two well-attested functions, and lexicographers divide the occurrences between them rather than deriving one from the other:

• Restrictive / adversative: “only, however, yet, nevertheless.” On this reading the second half reverses the first: banished — yet I will look again toward your holy temple.
• Asseverative / emphatic: “surely, indeed.” On this reading the particle underlines what follows without reversing what precedes, and the clause can be heard as continuing the lament, especially if the following verb is read as a question.

Built onhalot · bdb · waltke-oconnor · jouon-muraoka

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

אוֹסִיף is the hiphil imperfect 1cs of יָסַף, used here as an auxiliary with a following infinitive construct: “I will add to look” = “I will again look” / “I will continue to look.” This is the ordinary Hebrew way of saying “again,” and the verb carries no independent lexical weight in the clause.

לְהַבִּיט is the hiphil infinitive construct of נָבַט, the standard verb for a directed, deliberate gaze (as distinct from רָאָה, “see”). With אֶל it is “look toward.” The object of the looking is the temple, not God — a precision the English should keep. The speaker does not claim he will see God; he claims he will again face the place where God’s presence is met.

The yiqtol’s time-reference is unfixed by the morphology. As future it is a confession of confidence; as modal it is “may I yet look”; as a question (see אַךְ) it is a despair of ever looking. The rendering takes the simple future, which the adversative reading of אַךְ requires.

Built onhalot · bdb · waltke-oconnor

הֵיכָל (a loanword ultimately from Sumerian é-gal, “great house,” via Akkadian ekallu) means both “palace” and “temple”; with a divine suffix or in a divine construct chain it is the sanctuary. קָדְשֶׁךָ is a construct noun with 2ms suffix, an attributive genitive: “the temple of your holiness” = “your holy temple.” The literal line preserves the Hebrew construction; the modern line gives the attributive sense.

Two questions are worth separating.

• Which temple? The phrase recurs verbatim in v. 7, where the prayer arrives there. In the psalm’s own horizon the natural referent is the Jerusalem sanctuary, toward which a distant Israelite prays — the posture presupposed in Solomon’s dedicatory prayer (1 Kgs 8:38, 42, 44, 48) and in Ps 5:7 (Heb 5:8), which uses the same phrase. The speaker, at the bottom of the sea, claims the orientation of a worshipper in exile.
• Or the heavenly temple? Some readers take הֵיכַל קָדְשֶׁךָ here as God’s heavenly dwelling, as in Ps 11:4 and Mic 1:2, where הֵיכָל is explicitly paired with heaven. The psalm’s vertical geography (depths below, temple above) suits this. The Hebrew does not disambiguate, and the two senses were not sharply separated in Israelite thought; the earthly sanctuary was understood as the counterpart of the heavenly.

The rendering keeps “your holy temple” and leaves the referent where the Hebrew leaves it.

Built onhalot · bdb · dch

The consonantal text is uncontroversial; BHS records no variant requiring decision in the Hebrew witnesses here, and the verse presents no unexpected reading flagged by the editors. The interpretive weight falls on the pointing and the particle, not on the consonants.

One point deserves naming. The parallel in Ps 31:22 (Heb 31:23) — a verse closely similar in content, where the speaker says in his alarm that he has been cut off from before God’s eyes — uses נִגְרַזְתִּי in the Masoretic Text, a form many have taken as an error for נִגְזַרְתִּי (“I have been cut off”). Jonah 2:4 reads נִגְרַשְׁתִּי, with ש, which is a different verb and is well formed. The two verses are related, and it has been proposed in both directions that one should be emended toward the other.

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.

The Old Greek runs, in substance: καὶ ἐγὼ εἶπα ἀπῶσμαι ἐξ ὀφθαλμῶν σου· ἆρα προσθήσω τοῦ ἐπιβλέψαι πρὸς τὸν ναὸν τὸν ἅγιόν σου — “And I said, ‘I have been thrust away from your eyes; shall I then again look toward your holy temple?’”

Three observations.

1. ἀπῶσμαι (perfect passive of ἀπωθέω, “thrust away, reject”) is a reasonable equivalent for niphal גָּרַשׁ and confirms that the translator read the ש-form, not a form of גזר. The Greek supports the Masoretic consonants.
2. ἆρα in place of אַךְ turns the second half into a question. This is the strongest ancient evidence for the lament reading of the particle, and it very probably reflects interpretation rather than a different Hebrew text: the translator took אַךְ asseveratively and supplied the interrogative force that an unmarked Hebrew question would carry. No variant Hebrew consonants are needed to produce it.
3. ἐξ ὀφθαλμῶν σου renders מִנֶּגֶד עֵינֶיךָ without the compound preposition’s “in front of” component — a flattening, not a variant.

The Greek is therefore a witness to how the verse was being read in the second century BC, and a valuable one, but it does not give grounds to repoint or re-read the Hebrew. The Hebrew keeps its ambiguity; the Greek chose one side of it.

The Vulgate renders the second clause positively (“nevertheless I shall see again your holy temple”), taking אַךְ adversatively — the opposite choice from the Greek. The two major ancient versions thus stand on opposite sides of the question, which is itself the best argument that the Hebrew particle is genuinely open.

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 psalm is built out of the common stock of Israelite lament and thanksgiving, and this verse is dense with it.

• Ps 31:22 (Heb 31:23) — “I said in my alarm, ‘I am cut off from before your eyes,’ yet you heard the voice of my supplications.” The structure is the same: a quoted inner verdict of separation from God’s eyes, followed by a reversal. Jonah 2:4 and Ps 31:22 share the quotative frame, the “from before your eyes,” and the pivot. This is the closest parallel in the Hebrew Bible.
• 1 Kgs 8:38–48 — Solomon’s prayer presupposes exactly the posture of 4b: the one far from the land prays toward this house. Jonah, as far from the land as a man can be, adopts it.
• Ps 5:7 (Heb 5:8) — “I will bow down toward your holy temple,” the same construct phrase הֵיכַל קָדְשֶׁךָ with a verb of worshipful orientation.
• Gen 3:24; 4:14, 16 — the expulsion vocabulary of being driven out from before God. Gen 3:24 uses the piel of גָּרַשׁ of the man driven from the garden, and Cain in 4:16 goes out מִלִּפְנֵי יְהוָה, the phrase Jonah’s narrator used in 1:3, 10. The psalm’s נִגְרַשְׁתִּי sets Jonah’s self-imposed exile in that older frame.

Within Jonah itself, the verse is the counterweight to 1:3. There, Jonah paid a fare to go away from before YHWH’s face. Here he reports that he has been driven from before YHWH’s eyes. The second is the first granted — and found unbearable.

Built onbdb · halot

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

Two claims stand in the verse and must not be collapsed into one.

First, the speaker owns the verdict. He does not protest that he has been wrongly expelled; he reports having concluded that he was. Jonah 2 is not a protest psalm. Whatever one makes of the prophet’s sincerity across the book as a whole, within this verse the separation is accepted as real.

Second, the orientation survives the verdict. On the adversative reading of אַךְ, the one who says he is driven out also says he will look toward the sanctuary. The turn is not a denial of the banishment but an act performed in the teeth of it. And the object of the looking is instructive: not God directly, but the place of meeting — the covenantal provision rather than an unmediated access. The speaker reaches for the appointed means precisely where the means is most absurdly out of reach, at the bottom of the sea.

On the minority reading, the verse offers no turn at all, and the psalm’s hinge falls at v. 7 instead. Either way the psalm’s resolution is divine: the prayer arrives at the holy temple (v. 7), which is a thing the speaker could not accomplish by looking.

Built onhalot

How later readers used the verse. This is not evidence for what the Hebrew means.

Targum Jonathan to the Minor Prophets renders Jonah’s psalm with its characteristic expansions, and in this chapter regularly specifies the temple language in terms of the sanctuary in Jerusalem rather than leaving the referent open; the Targum’s handling of Jonah 2 as a whole makes the prophet’s prayer explicitly directed to that sanctuary. The detail of its wording at this verse should be checked against a critical edition before being quoted.

Rabbinic tradition reads Jonah 2 as the model of prayer offered from a place of total helplessness; Jonah’s psalm is read publicly as the haftarah for the afternoon service of Yom Kippur, which gives this verse its enduring liturgical setting in the synagogue — the day on which the congregation itself prays as those cut off and seeking restoration.

Early Church. Christian reading of Jonah 2 runs overwhelmingly through the sign of Jonah (Matt 12:39–41), with the fish’s belly read as the grave and the psalm as the voice of Christ or of the Church in distress. Jerome, who commented on Jonah and whose Latin version takes אַךְ adversatively (“nevertheless I shall see again your holy temple”), is the channel through which the hopeful reading of the second colon entered Western exegesis. Readers in that tradition took the temple of 4b as a figure of the heavenly sanctuary, reached after the descent. That is reception, and a Christological reading of a verse whose own horizon is an Israelite’s prayer toward Jerusalem; it should be labelled as such and not read back into the Hebrew.

Built onbhq

Proposed — pending reviewJerome, Commentarii in prophetas minores: In Ionam, ed. M. Adriaen, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 76, Turnhout: Brepols, 1969. · 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.