Four Hebrew words, and the shortest verse in the psalm — but the hardest. The line is the one place in Jonah’s prayer where the speaker looks outward at other people instead of up at God or down at the water. Everything hangs on three decisions.

First, הַבְלֵי־שָׁוְא, “vapors of emptiness,” is a stock Israelite insult for idols, piling two words for nothingness on top of each other. Second, מְשַׁמְּרִים is a piel participle of a verb that normally means “keep, guard, observe”; used with idols as its object it carries the sense of paying regard, giving allegiance. Third, and genuinely unresolved, חַסְדָּם — “their ḥesed.” If the suffix is subjective, idolaters abandon the loyalty they owe; if objective, they abandon (and so forfeit) the loyal love God has toward them. The second reading gives the line its sharpest point and best fits the psalm, where deliverance is wholly unearned, but the Hebrew does not decide it.

Note also the syntax: there is no finite verb for the participle. The participle stands as a bare subject phrase, fronted before the object and verb of the second half — terse, proverbial, and unmarked by “but” or “as for.” The literal line keeps that terseness; the modern line supplies the connective English requires.

The verb שָׁמַר is overwhelmingly qal in the Hebrew Bible: guard, keep, observe, watch. The piel is rare, and HALOT and BDB both treat the handful of piel forms as semantically close to the qal — “pay heed to, keep watch over, give regard to.” That is the sense here: with idols as the object, keeping watch over them is cultic attention, allegiance, the giving over of one’s religious regard.

The irony is sharp and probably deliberate. The same root in Jonah’s mouth describes guarding, the posture of a worshipper tending a shrine. What these people guard is vapor. And what they let slip is the only thing worth keeping.

הֶבֶל is breath, vapor, the thing you exhale on a cold morning and cannot grasp — hence “futility, nothingness.” It is the keyword of Qoheleth, but its other main home is prophetic polemic against idols: Jeremiah repeatedly calls foreign gods הֶבֶל, and the plural הֲבָלִים functions almost as a noun for “idols” (Deut 32:21; 1 Kgs 16:13, 26; Jer 8:19; 10:8; 14:22).

שָׁוְא is the second half of the insult: emptiness, falsehood, worthlessness — the word in the commandment against bearing a name שָׁוְא, and in “in vain” constructions. Here it stands in the genitive after הַבְלֵי, an attributive construct: “vapors consisting of emptiness,” that is, vapors that are nothing at all. Two synonyms for nothing, stacked.

Strictly the phrase does not say “idols.” It says “empty nothings,” and the referent is supplied by the idiom’s well-attested use. The literal line therefore keeps “vapors of emptiness”; the modern line says “worthless idols,” since that is what an Israelite hearer would have understood and the psalm is set against a backdrop of Gentile sailors who each cried to his own god (Jonah 1:5).

The maqqeph joining the two words, with the ʾatnaḥ falling on שָׁוְא, shows the Masoretes read the pair as one unit closing the first half-line.

חֶסֶד is loyal love within a relationship of obligation — covenant kindness, steadfast commitment. It is not simply “mercy,” and not simply “kindness”: it names faithfulness to a bond. In Jonah it returns at 4:2, where Jonah quotes the creedal formula calling YHWH רַב־חֶסֶד, “abundant in ḥesed,” as his reason for fleeing. That link is load-bearing: the word Jonah uses here of what idolaters throw away is the same word he will complain about God having too much of.

The interpretive knot is the 3mp suffix.

The translation above takes the objective reading in the modern line (“the covenant-love that is theirs”) with deliberately open phrasing, and leaves the literal line untranslated at the key word — ḥesed is retained as a transliterated technical term per §4, with this glossary entry, rather than force-fitted.

Proposed — pending reviewJack M. Sasson, Jonah: A New Translation with Introduction, Commentary, and Interpretation, Anchor Bible 24B, New York: Doubleday, 1990. · Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, The Meaning of Hesed in the Hebrew Bible: A New Inquiry, Harvard Semitic Monographs 17, Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1978.

The verse is a two-member line with no connective:

• A: מְשַׁמְּרִ֖ים הַבְלֵי־שָׁ֑וְא — participle + object
• B: חַסְדָּ֖ם יַעֲזֹֽבוּ — object + finite verb

The participle in A has no copula and no explicit subject pronoun; it functions substantivally, “[those] keeping watch over.” The 3mp verb in B then resumes it. This is the classic terse structure of Hebrew wisdom and psalmody: a nominal phrase naming a class of persons, followed by a clause stating what happens to them or what they do.

Two features of word order carry weight. חַסְדָּם is fronted before its verb, which throws emphasis on the object — it is their ḥesed, of all things, that they let go. And A is itself fronted as the topic of the whole line. Waltke–O’Connor’s treatment of participial subject phrases and Joüon–Muraoka on topicalization both support reading this as marked, not neutral, order.

The yiqtol יַעֲזֹבוּ is not future. In a gnomic statement of this kind it expresses what characteristically happens — hence “they forsake,” not “they will forsake.” Per the care-note on tense, the options are stated and not collapsed: a modal reading (“would forsake”) is grammatically possible but unmotivated here.

There is also no “but” in the Hebrew. The contrast with v. 9 (וַאֲנִי, “But I”) is made by the explicit pronoun there, not by a connective here; v. 8 simply stands, and v. 9 turns against it.

Jonah’s prayer is stitched together out of psalmic language throughout, and v. 8 is the one line that sounds like a wisdom aside rather than a cry. Its closest relatives:

• Psalm 31:6 (Heb 31:7) — “I hate those who keep watch over empty vapors” (שֹׁמְרִים הַבְלֵי־שָׁוְא, with the qal participle and the identical construct pair). This is the nearest parallel in the Hebrew Bible and almost certainly the source of the phrase; the psalmist’s line continues “but I trust in YHWH,” exactly the move Jonah 2:9 makes with וַאֲנִי.
• Jeremiah’s idol polemic, where foreign gods are הֶבֶל and worshippers are said to walk after what does not profit.
• Jonah 4:2, where חֶסֶד returns in the creedal formula. Within the book, the word’s two appearances frame Jonah’s problem: here he knows ḥesed is worth keeping; there he resents that it extends to Nineveh.

The borrowing from Ps 31 matters for translation. Jonah uses the piel participle where the psalm has the qal, and he drops the “I hate” that makes the psalm’s line a declaration of loathing. The result is cooler and more proverbial — a statement about a class of people, not an expression of hatred toward them.

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

LXX reads φυλασσόμενοι μάταια καὶ ψευδῆ ἔλεος αὐτῶν ἐγκατέλιπον — “those guarding vain and false things abandoned their mercy.”

Three things to note. (1) φυλασσόμενοι renders שמר with its standard Greek equivalent, confirming the “keep guard over” sense. (2) The Greek breaks the construct chain into two coordinate adjectives, μάταια καὶ ψευδῆ, “vain and false things”; this is an interpretive unpacking of הַבְלֵי־שָׁוְא rather than evidence of a different Hebrew text. (3) ἔλεος is the LXX’s habitual rendering of חֶסֶד — and notice it leaves the ambiguity of the suffix exactly where the Hebrew leaves it: αὐτῶν could be either whose. The aorist ἐγκατέλιπον flattens the gnomic yiqtol into past narrative, in line with the surrounding aorists of the prayer.

The Vulgate’s qui custodiunt vanitates frustra misericordiam suam derelinquunt likewise keeps the ambiguity (misericordiam suam), and reads frustra adverbially — “keep vanities in vain” — which is a third parsing of the construct pair, not supported by the Masoretic accents.

No Hebrew variant is in view here. The differences among the versions are all attempts to construe a very compressed Hebrew line, and the Greek and Latin disagree with each other in ways that show the difficulty was already felt.

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 verse works by a transaction: something is guarded, something is let go. What is guarded is nothing — vapor stacked on emptiness. What is let go is ḥesed, the one thing in the psalm that actually rescues. The force is not “idolatry is intellectually silly” but “idolatry is a bad exchange,” and the measure of the badness is what it costs.

Set in Jonah’s mouth, inside a fish, the line is also pointed at the speaker. Jonah is a prophet who has just fled from YHWH’s face, while Gentile sailors cried out and then feared YHWH and sacrificed (1:16). He pronounces the line about idolaters; the narrative leaves the reader to wonder who in chapter 1 was actually guarding vapor. The book does not resolve this, and the translation should not resolve it either — hence the neutral, proverbial English rather than a sharpened “they forsake.”

If the objective reading of חַסְדָּם is right, the theology is sharper still: what is forfeited is not the worshipper’s virtue but God’s committed love — not because God withdraws it, but because the hand that grasps vapor is not holding anything else.

Targum Jonathan on the Twelve renders the line in the interpretive direction, identifying the “vapors of emptiness” explicitly with idol-worship and the thing forsaken as the good that would have been theirs; the Targum’s standing habit is to make the idolatry explicit, as here. The precise wording should be checked against a critical edition before being quoted.

Rabbinic tradition on Jonah’s prayer generally reads the chapter as a model of repentance from the depths; the specific use of v. 8 as a proof text against idolatry is a natural extension of Ps 31:6, with which it shares its phrase, but I cannot name a specific locus for it with confidence.

Early Church. Jerome’s commentary on Jonah reads the verse as a contrast between those who serve empty things and the believer who offers sacrifice with thanksgiving in the next verse, and he takes misericordiam suam as the mercy God would have shown them — the objective reading. Patristic exegesis generally, following the Greek μάταια καὶ ψευδῆ, applied the line to pagan cult and later to heresy; Theodore of Mopsuestia and Cyril of Alexandria both commented on the Twelve and treated Jonah’s prayer as typological of resurrection (following Matt 12:40), though v. 8 itself carries little of that weight.

In all of this, note that the later tradition inherited the ambiguity of the suffix rather than resolving it — which is itself evidence that the Hebrew is genuinely open.

Proposed — pending reviewJerome, Commentarii in Ionam (Commentary on Jonah), ed. Yves-Marie Duval, Sources chrétiennes 323, Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1985. · 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.

This verse is Jonah 2:9 in the Hebrew Bible and 2:8 in English Bibles, because the Hebrew counts the narrative introduction (“And Jonah prayed…”) as 2:1 while English makes it the last verse of chapter 1. All cross-references in this apparatus use the English number, with the Hebrew number given in the label.