Six words, five of them a verbatim repeat of Jonah 1:1. The verse is the hinge of the book: the commission that Jonah fled in chapter 1 is reissued, unaltered in form, to a prophet who has just been vomited onto dry land. Everything of interest is in what changes and what does not.

• What is identical to 1:1: וַיְהִ֧י דְבַר־יְהוָ֛ה אֶל־יוֹנָ֖ה … לֵאמֹֽר — the standard prophetic word-event formula, word for word.
• What is added: שֵׁנִ֥ית, “a second time.” The narrator will not let the reader forget that this is a repetition.
• What is dropped: בֶּן־אֲמִתַּ֖י, “son of Amittai” (1:1). The reader no longer needs introducing to Jonah; the patronymic has done its work.

The rendering decisions are therefore almost entirely decisions about consistency: the same English words must be used here as at 1:1, or the repetition that is the verse’s whole point disappears in translation.

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

The word-event formula (Wortereignisformel), the ordinary Hebrew way of reporting that prophetic speech has been given: הָיָה + דְּבַר־יְהוָה + אֶל + recipient (1 Sam 15:10; 1 Kgs 17:2, 8; Jer 1:4; Ezek 1:3; Zech 4:8, and dozens more).

Two points about the rendering, both already settled earlier in the book and followed here:

1. הָיָה is eventive, not copular. The clause does not say the word “was to” Jonah but that it came to him — a thing happened at a point in the narrative. HALOT and BDB both list this collocation under the sense of coming to pass or befalling.
2. דְּבַר־יְהוָה is rendered “the word of YHWH” at every occurrence. Jonah 1:1 and 3:1 are the only two, and the identity of wording in Hebrew is the device; a stylistic variation in English (“a message from YHWH,” “YHWH spoke”) would destroy it.

דְבַר here is unpointed with dagesh-free ḇ after the construct reduction (dəḇar), joined to the divine name by maqaf, which the cantillation treats as one accentual unit under the darga/tevir pair.

Built onhalot · bdb · waltke-oconnor

The feminine ordinal שֵׁנִ֥ית used adverbially: “a second time.” The feminine singular form functions as an adverbial accusative, a normal Hebrew construction (compare Gen 22:15; 1 Kgs 19:7; Jer 13:3, all of a divine word or messenger coming again).

The sense is numerical, not merely iterative. Hebrew has other ways to say “again” — יָסַף hiphil with an infinitive (used in Jonah 2:4), or עוֹד — and the narrator chose none of them. שֵׁנִית counts. It presupposes a first time and insists that the reader hold 1:1 in view while reading 3:1.

Hence the rendering “a second time” rather than “again.” “Again” would be lexically defensible and idiomatically smoother, but it loses the counting, and the counting is the point: this is commission number two, not a vague resumption.

Built onhalot · bdb · dch · jouon-muraoka

Jonah 1:1 reads אֶל־יוֹנָ֥ה בֶן־אֲמִתַּ֖י, “to Jonah son of Amittai.” Here the patronymic is gone. This is not an abbreviation of convenience but the normal narrative economy of Hebrew: a character is identified fully on introduction and thereafter by name alone.

It is worth resisting two over-readings. The absence does not signal a different source, and it does not signal that Jonah has lost his lineage or his standing. It signals that the narrator has already told us who he is. Note also what the narrator does not do: he does not call Jonah “the prophet,” and he does not comment on the three days inside the fish. The verse is deliberately flat.

Built onwaltke-oconnor

YHWH stands here, not אֱלֹהִים. This matters because the distribution in Jonah is deliberate and this verse sits at a seam. Chapter 3 will shift almost entirely to הָאֱלֹהִים / אֱלֹהִים once the Ninevites are in view (3:5, 8, 9, 10), while the commissioning frame uses YHWH (3:1, 3). The covenant name commissions; the generic name is what the Gentile city believes in and what relents over the city.

Rendered YHWH in the English text per project policy §1, kept lexically and typographically distinct from any rendering of אֱלֹהִים or אֲדֹנָי.

Preposition ל + qal infinitive construct of אָמַר, the standard quotation marker introducing direct speech. Syntactically it is loose — not governed by וַיְהִי as a complement but functioning as a frozen discourse particle.

English could drop it and use a colon. Per the binding glossary it is retained as “saying,” so that the shape of the formula survives and so that 1:1 and 3:1 read identically. The cost is slight stiltedness in the modern line; the gain is that the reader sees the Hebrew formula rather than a translator’s punctuation.

Built onwaltke-oconnor · jouon-muraoka

The WLC text is unproblematic. The consonantal text raises no questions, the vocalization is standard, and no variant worth reporting is known to me in the Hebrew witnesses for this verse. The Dead Sea material for Jonah (the Minor Prophets scrolls from Wadi Murabbaʿat and the Naḥal Ḥever Greek text) should be checked against the apparatus by an editor before this note is promoted; I do not state a reading for them.

The accentuation (darga on דְבַר-group, tevir, tipḥa, merkha, silluq) divides the verse as: word-of-YHWH / to-Jonah / a-second-time / saying — which is how the rendering phrases it.

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.

LXX: Καὶ ἐγένετο λόγος κυρίου πρὸς Ιωναν ἐκ δευτέρου λέγων.

A close, formulaic rendering with nothing suggesting a different Hebrew text:

• ἐγένετο … λόγος κυρίου πρός — the Greek translators’ fixed equivalent for the word-event formula throughout the Twelve; ἐγένετο takes the eventive sense of הָיָה, confirming that this is how the collocation was read in the second century BC.
• ἐκ δευτέρου — “for the second time,” a Greek idiom rendering adverbial שֵׁנִית. It preserves the numbering rather than flattening to πάλιν (“again”), which supports the “second time” rendering above.
• λέγων — masculine nominative participle agreeing with λόγος, a literalism for לֵאמֹר.
• κυρίου — the Greek translator’s standard equivalence for the Tetragrammaton. Per project policy the Hebrew is not corrected toward it, and the English here reads YHWH.

The Vulgate (et factum est verbum Domini ad Ionam secundo dicens) follows the same path, with secundo for שֵׁנִית.

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 force of the verse lies in its sameness. The commission comes a second time, in the identical words, to the identical man. The narrator does not say that YHWH changed his plan, chose another prophet, or softened the charge. Nor does he say that Jonah has been reformed — chapter 4 will show he has not.

Two things are being asserted at once, and the translation should not resolve either:

1. The word is not withdrawn. Flight did not cancel the commission; it delayed it. The same word that was fled from is the word that is given again.
2. The prophet is not replaced. The disobedient messenger remains the messenger. Whatever the fish episode accomplished, it did not produce a new commission for a new man.

The English must therefore be a word-for-word match with 1:1 wherever the Hebrew is, since the theological claim is carried by the repetition itself and not by anything the narrator says about it.

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

Later readers almost all read this verse as the moment of restoration rather than as mere narrative resumption — a reading that goes beyond what the Hebrew asserts.

• Rabbinic tradition treats Jonah as an exemplar in the Yom Kippur liturgy, where the whole book is read as the haftarah of the afternoon service; the second commission functions within that liturgical setting as evidence that repentance is received. This is the book’s liturgical use, not an exegesis of the verse.
• Targum Jonathan renders the verse within its standard treatment of the prophetic formula, using circumlocution for the divine name (“the word of prophecy from before YHWH”); the wording should be verified against a critical edition before being quoted.
• Jerome, in his commentary on Jonah, reads the second word as mercy toward the prophet as well as toward the city, and connects the renewal of the commission to the preaching that follows the resurrection imagery of chapter 2. His Commentarii in Ionam is the fullest patristic treatment of the book.
• The New Testament does not quote this verse. Its interest in Jonah is the three days (Matt 12:40) and the Ninevites’ repentance (Matt 12:41; Luke 11:30, 32) — the latter is reception of the effect of this second commission rather than of the verse itself.

None of this is evidence for what the Hebrew of 3:1 says; it is a record of how it was read.

Built onbhq

Proposed — pending reviewJerome, Commentarii in Ionam prophetam (Commentary on Jonah), ed. Y.-M. Duval, Sources Chrétiennes 323, Paris: Éditions du Cerf · Kevin J. Cathcart and Robert P. Gordon, The Targum of the Minor Prophets, The Aramaic Bible 14, Edinburgh: T&T Clark

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.