This is the floor of the psalm and the floor of the book. Three movements in one verse:

1. Descent completed. יָרַדְתִּי (“I went down”) is the same verb Jonah used going down to Joppa, down into the ship (1:3), and down into the vessel’s innermost parts (1:5). Here it bottoms out at the base of the mountains — in the Hebrew cosmology, the pillars on which the dry land stands, rooted in the deep.
2. Imprisonment sealed. The earth is pictured as a walled city or a fortress whose gate-bars have shut behind him — לְעוֹלָם, “forever.” That word ends the colon, and the athnach puts the full weight of the pause on it. It is the language of no return.
3. Reversal. Against that “forever” stands a single verb: וַתַּעַל, “and you brought up.” The direction of the whole book reverses in one hiphil. Jonah has been the subject of every descent; here God is the subject, and Jonah’s life is the object.

The verse closes with the vocative יְהוָה אֱלֹהָי — the first direct address of God by name inside the psalm’s body, matching the narrator’s framing in 2:1 (“to YHWH his God”).

Two lexical cruxes carry the section work: קִצְבֵי הָרִים, a phrase found nowhere else, and שַׁחַת, “the Pit,” which in this context means the grave, not “corruption.”

The noun קֶצֶב is rare. Elsewhere it appears in the sense of a measured shape or cut form (the architectural measurements of the temple basins, 1 Kgs 6–7 usage of the root), and the verbal root קצב means “to cut off” (2 Kgs 6:6, of cutting a stick). The plural construct קִצְבֵי occurs only here.

Two senses are defensible and the lexicons split the emphasis:

• “Extremities / farthest ends” — the places where the mountains are cut off, i.e. their bases where they meet the deep. HALOT and BDB both arrive here, and it fits the parallel with יָרַדְתִּי: he has gone down as far as the mountains themselves go.
• “Roots / foundations” — the same place, but named by its function. The mountain-roots descend into the subterranean waters (cf. Ps 18:15 [Heb 18:16], the “foundations of the world”; the “pillars of the earth,” 1 Sam 2:8).

Both converge on the same location; the difference is whether the image is a cutting-off or a footing. The literal line keeps the morphological force (“cuttings-off”), the modern line gives the sense (“roots”).

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.

יָרַדְתִּי is the keyword the glossary pinned at 1:3. Trace it:

• 1:3 — he went down to Joppa
• 1:3 — he went down into the ship
• 1:5 — he had gone down into the innermost parts of the vessel
• 2:6 — he went down to the cuttings-off of the mountains

Four descents, each lower than the last, and the last one geological. The chain is invisible in any English that varies the verb (“travelled to,” “boarded,” “sank”), which is why the single rendering is binding.

The counter-movement is וַתַּעַל here and וַיַּעַל of the fish vomiting him onto dry land in 2:10 — Jonah never ascends under his own power. Note also the structural rhyme with 1:5: he went down into the יַרְכְּתֵי הַסְּפִינָה (“innermost parts of the vessel”) and slept the sleep of a man beyond rousing; here he goes down to the foundations of the world and is beyond rescue. Both times someone else has to act.

Built onwaltke-oconnor

The word order is awkward in Hebrew and the awkwardness is real, not a corruption.

הָאָרֶץ stands first, undetermined by any preposition, followed by בְּרִחֶיהָ (“her bars”) with a resumptive feminine suffix. Two analyses:

• Casus pendens (“as for the earth — her bars were behind me”). The fronted noun is picked up by the suffix on the following word. This is standard Hebrew topicalization, and the disjunctive accent on הָאָרֶץ supports a break after it.
• Adverbial accusative of place (“the earth, with her bars, was behind me”), taking הָאָרֶץ as locative: “the earth [with] her bars [was] behind me.”

Either way the picture is the same. בְּרִיחַ is the bar that drops across a city gate (Deut 3:5; 1 Kgs 4:13; Neh 3:3) — the earth is a fortified city, and Jonah is on the inside of a gate now barred. בַּעַד regularly means “behind, over, about” of something that encloses or shuts in (Gen 7:16, YHWH shuts the door בַּעֲדוֹ, “behind him”; 2 Kgs 4:4–5). The Genesis parallel is pointed: there the shut door preserves, here it entombs.

No finite verb stands in the clause. Hebrew supplies none; the state is simply asserted. The literal line leaves the copula bracketed.

Built onjouon-muraoka · waltke-oconnor · bdb

שַׁחַת names the grave-pit, a near-synonym of שְׁאוֹל (v. 2) and בּוֹר. It is the hole dug in the ground for a corpse, used by metonymy for the realm of the dead (Ps 16:10; 30:9 [Heb 30:10]; Job 33:22, 24, 28).

The derivation is disputed. If from שׁוּחַ (“sink down”), the sense is “pit.” If from שָׁחַת (“ruin, destroy”), the sense could be “destruction, corruption.” The lexicons favour “pit”, and the contexts — always of graves, always paired with death vocabulary — favour it decisively here, standing as it does at the end of a descent to the mountain-roots.

Built onhalot · bdb · dch

Proposed — pending reviewNicholas J. Tromp, Primitive Conceptions of Death and the Nether World in the Old Testament, Biblica et Orientalia 21, Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1969.

A hiphil wayyiqtol, second masculine singular: “and you brought up.” The subject is God, named in the vocative at the verse’s end.

The form is worth care. OSHB parses Vhw2ms — hiphil sequential imperfect, 2ms. The consonants וַתַּעַל are ambiguous in isolation (they could be read as 3fs, “and she went up,” in the qal), but the hiphil pointing with the vocative יְהוָה אֱלֹהָי following settles it: the addressee is the one who acts. Jonah is not reporting that his life rose; he is telling God that God raised it.

The wayyiqtol in a poetic, non-narrative context like this does not mark simple past sequence. It reports a completed act within the prayer’s retrospective frame — the deliverance is spoken of as accomplished. This is the standard grammar of the thanksgiving psalm: the speaker recounts the rescue as done.

Built onjouon-muraoka · waltke-oconnor

יְהוָה אֱלֹהָי closes the verse as a vocative — the last two words, bearing the final accent.

This matches the narrator’s framing exactly: 2:1 says Jonah prayed אֶל־יְהוָה אֱלֹהָיו, “to YHWH his God.” What the narrator said about him in the third person, Jonah now says to God in the first. The psalm’s body reaches its theological point not in a statement but in an address.

Per the divine-name policy, יהוה is rendered YHWH and אֱלֹהִים is rendered “God,” kept lexically distinct. The possessive suffix matters: this is the covenant name with a personal claim attached. The Hebrew who fled מִלִּפְנֵי יְהוָה (1:3) and who told the sailors אֶת־יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵי הַשָּׁמַיִם אֲנִי יָרֵא (1:9) now addresses that same God as his own.

Built onbdb · halot

The Greek runs along the Hebrew but softens two points.

• κατέβην εἰς γῆν ἧς οἱ μοχλοὶ αὐτῆς κάτοχοι αἰώνιοι — “I went down into the earth, whose bars are eternal restraints.” The translator has taken קִצְבֵי הָרִים as an obstacle rather than a location, or has read the clause boundaries differently, folding the mountains into the earth-and-bars image. The resulting Greek makes γῆ the destination of the descent, where the Hebrew makes the mountain-bases the destination and the earth’s bars a separate, following clause. This looks like the translator resolving a hard phrase, not a different Hebrew text — but the possibility of a differently-divided Vorlage cannot be excluded.
• ἀναβήτω ἐκ φθορᾶς ἡ ζωή μου — “let my life come up from corruption,” with κύριε ὁ θεός μου. Two shifts: φθορά for שַׁחַת (see the שַׁחַת section), and a third-person imperative in place of the Hebrew’s second-person hiphil. The Greek turns a report of what God did into a petition for what God should do. That is a theologically significant difference, and it goes with the proleptic reading of the Hebrew perfective rather than the retrospective one — but it is the Greek’s choice, and the Hebrew stands as it is.

The Vulgate keeps the Hebrew’s structure here (et sublevabis de corruptione vitam meam), though it follows the Greek on corruptio; Jerome’s rendering of שַׁחַת shows how far the φθορά line had travelled. The Hebrew is not corrected toward either.

Built ongoettingen-lxx-xii · muraoka-lxx · bhs

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 stable; BHS records no significant variant for this verse, and the Minor Prophets scroll evidence from the Judaean Desert, where legible, does not disturb it. The difficulties here are interpretive, not text-critical.

Two places where the pointing rather than the consonants carries the weight:

• וַתַּעַל — the consonants admit a qal 3fs reading (“and my life went up from the Pit”) as well as the Masoretic hiphil 2ms. The Masoretic vocalization is almost certainly right: the vocative יְהוָה אֱלֹהָי at the end has no function unless God is the addressed subject. Recorded because the points are the Masoretes’ and the consonants are older.
• לְקִצְבֵי — some have proposed emending toward a more familiar noun. There is no manuscript warrant for it, and the rarity of קֶצֶב is not a reason to remove it. The harder reading stands.

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.

Jonah 2 is stitched from the vocabulary of the thanksgiving psalms, and this verse is dense with it:

• Descent to the mountain-roots and the deep — Ps 18:15–16 (Heb 18:16–17): the channels of waters and the foundations of the world laid bare, and YHWH reaching down to draw the speaker out of many waters.
• Bars and gates of the underworld — the imagery behind Isa 38:10 (Hezekiah at the gates of Sheol) and Job 38:10 (bars set for the sea). The underworld-as-barred-city is a shared ancient Near Eastern picture, not a Jonah invention.
• Brought up from the Pit — Ps 30:3 (Heb 30:4), “YHWH, you brought up my nepeš from Sheol”; the verb there is also עָלָה hiphil with מִן. This is the closest verbal parallel in the Psalter.

The question of whether Jonah’s psalm is a composition quoting the Psalter, a traditional psalm inserted into the narrative, or a composition in the psalmic idiom is genuinely disputed and belongs to the chapter introduction rather than to this verse. What is clear at the verse level is that no phrase here is unprecedented except קִצְבֵי הָרִים.

Built onbdb · dch

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

Reception records how the verse was later read; it is not evidence for what the Hebrew says.

Jewish tradition. The Targum to Jonah renders the verse in its characteristic expansive manner, making the underworld imagery explicit. Rabbinic midrashic treatment of Jonah’s descent (notably in the Jonah material of Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer) elaborates the fish as a guided vehicle taking Jonah on a tour of the deep, including the foundations of the earth and the pillars on which the world stands — an imaginative expansion built directly on this verse’s cosmology. The dating of that material is late and it should not be used to date or explain the Hebrew.

Early Church. The Fathers read Jonah’s descent-and-raising through Matt 12:40, where Jesus names Jonah’s three days and nights in the fish as the sign of his own burial. Jerome, in his commentary on Jonah, treats this verse’s descent to the mountain-roots and the bars of the earth as speaking of the descent to the dead, and reads de corruptione (following the Greek φθορά) as a resurrection text. Cyril of Alexandria’s commentary on the Twelve takes a similar line. It should be said plainly that the “corruption” on which much of that reading rests is the Septuagint’s rendering of שַׁחַת, not the Hebrew’s plain sense, and that the Hebrew here is a thanksgiving for rescue from drowning.

Later use. The verse’s “bars of the earth” supplied imagery for the medieval harrowing-of-hell tradition, where the gates and bars of the underworld are broken from the outside. That is reception at several removes.

Built onbdb

Proposed — pending reviewJerome, Commentarius in Ionam prophetam, in S. Hieronymi Presbyteri Opera, Pars I: Opera Exegetica 6, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 76, Turnhout: Brepols, 1969. · Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on the Twelve Prophets, trans. Robert C. Hill, Fathers of the Church, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007–2008. · 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.