The king’s response to Jonah’s five-word oracle becomes an official edict. Three things carry the verse.

First, the form: וַיַּזְעֵק וַיֹּאמֶר is the hiphil of the distress-verb זָעַק — “he had it cried out” — followed by the content. The heading מִטַּעַם הַמֶּלֶךְ וּגְדֹלָיו (“from the decree of the king and his great ones”) is the diplomatic formula of a royal rescript, and the body is three jussive clauses under אַל.

Second, the wordplay: the decree is a ṭaʿam and it forbids ṭāʿam, tasting. Hebrew makes the king’s authority and the fast the same word.

Third, the scope: the fast is extended to animals — הָאָדָם וְהַבְּהֵמָה, then specified as herd and flock. This is not comic excess in the narrator’s framing; it is the ancient pattern of total mourning, and it sets up the closing argument of the book, where YHWH’s pity reaches “much cattle” as well (4:11).

The third jussive, אַל־יִרְעוּ (“let them not graze”), applies only to animals, which confirms that the animals are genuinely included in the preceding prohibition and not merely mentioned.

The qal of זָעַק is the distress cry — the sailors’ cry in Jonah 1:5, fixed in the glossary as “cry out.” Here the stem is hiphil (OSHB Vhw3ms), which is causative-declarative: to have a cry raised, to summon or proclaim by herald. Compare the hiphil used of mustering by proclamation in Judges (e.g. Judg 4:10, 13).

The king does not personally shout. He causes the crying-out. The English must carry that: “he had it cried out” / “he had a proclamation cried.”

The choice of root is pointed. The verb of the sailors’ terror and of Nineveh’s own appeal (the crowd will cry to God in v. 8, with קָרָא) is the verb by which the king now issues law. Distress and decree share a voice.

טַעַם basically means taste, flavour (Exod 16:31; Num 11:8), and by extension discernment or judgment (1 Sam 21:14 [Heb 21:14]; Ps 119:66). The sense “decree, official order” is narrow and administrative, and is the regular meaning of the Aramaic cognate טְעֵם in Daniel and Ezra (e.g. Dan 3:10; Ezra 4:21, with שִׂים טְעֵם, “issue a decree”).

HALOT and BDB both recognize the decree-sense here; DCH lists it under the same lexeme with the administrative gloss. The construction מִטַּעַם + authority is the rescript heading: the order proceeds from the king.

The play matters more than the etymology. מִטַּ֧עַם at the head of the decree and יִטְעֲמוּ֙ in its first clause are the same consonants. The king’s ṭaʿam forbids all ṭāʿam. No English rendering reproduces it; the literal line keeps “decree … taste” and this note carries the loss.

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

גָּדוֹל is the leitwort of Jonah — the great city (1:2; 3:2, 3; 4:11), the great wind and great storm (1:4), the great fear (1:10, 16), the great fish (1:17), and at 3:5 “from their great one to their small one.” Here the masculine plural with a suffix is substantival: the king’s great ones, his magnates or nobles.

The binding glossary decision renders גָּדוֹל “great” at every occurrence. That is kept in the literal line (“his great ones”), with “nobles” in the modern line, since English “his greats” is not usable. The repetition is the point: in a great city, the great ones join the small ones in sackcloth.

Note also that the edict is issued jointly. Assyrian practice knew royal orders promulgated with the magnates, and the Hebrew formula names them; the king is not an absolute lone voice but the head of a court that signs with him.

הָאָדָם וְהַבְּהֵמָה is a fixed Hebrew pair for the whole of terrestrial living creation under judgment or under mercy — Gen 6:7; Exod 9:25; Jer 21:6; Zeph 1:3. Here it is the comprehensive formula, then narrowed by apposition: הַבָּקָר וְהַצֹּאן, herd and flock, the domestic animals actually present in a city’s economy.

הָאָדָם with the article and no plural is generic humankind, not a male individual (§3: the referent is genuinely and only generic). The literal line keeps “the man” to show the singular collective; the modern line gives “human being.”

בָּקָר and צֹאן are both collective singulars of common gender — cattle (bovines) and small livestock (sheep and goats). They are not two more items in a list of four but a specification of בְּהֵמָה: the beasts in question are the herds and flocks.

The syntactic position of all four nouns is fronted, before the negated verb, and that fronting is what makes the sentence a formal edict rather than a request.

The verse has three layers.

1. Narration: וַיַּזְעֵק וַיֹּאמֶר בְּנִינְוֵה. Two wayyiqtols for one act. The prepositional phrase בְּנִינְוֵה (“in Nineveh”) attaches to the proclaiming, not to the decree’s origin.
2. Rescript heading: מִטַּעַם הַמֶּלֶךְ וּגְדֹלָיו לֵאמֹר. This is the authority formula, and לֵאמֹר opens the quotation (glossary: retained as “saying” rather than a colon).
3. Body: four fronted subjects, then three jussive clauses, each negated by אַל.

On the negation: אַל + jussive is the prohibition of immediate, specific command (Waltke–O’Connor §34.2.1b; Joüon–Muraoka §114i), distinct from לֹא + yiqtol, which states permanent law. The king is not legislating a standing statute on fasting; he is ordering this fast, now. “Let them not taste” is exactly right; “they shall not taste” would overstate it.

The third clause fronts וּמַיִם before its verb — “and water, let them not drink.” Hebrew reserves that position for emphasis, and water is the last and hardest item to withhold. The edict ends at its severest point.

יִרְעוּ is qal jussive 3mp of רָעָה II, “to pasture, graze” (OSHB marks it 7462 b, the homonym distinct from רֵעַ / רָעָה I). The subject can only be the animals; humans do not graze.

That is the decisive internal evidence for reading the animals as real participants in the fast rather than a rhetorical flourish. The decree gives them a prohibition that applies to them alone.

There is also an unwritable echo. The consonants רעה here are the pasturing root; the book’s other רעה — רָעָה, “evil” (1:2, 7, 8; 3:8, 10; 4:1, 6) — is spelled identically. One verse later the Ninevites turn from their דַּרְכּוֹ הָרָעָה, their evil way. Hebrew does not conflate the two words, and this note does not claim a deliberate pun; it records that the eye meets the same three letters in consecutive verses, and the reader of the consonantal text would have felt it.

Extending mourning rites to livestock is not otherwise attested in the Hebrew Bible, but it is attested outside it. Herodotus (Histories 9.24) reports the Persians shearing their horses and baggage animals in mourning for Masistius, which shows the practice of drawing animals into human grief in the same cultural world. Mesopotamian lament literature likewise associates the silencing of herds with public calamity.

Within Jonah’s own argument, the detail is doing structural work. The animals are the last word of the book: “and also much cattle” (4:11). The king’s decree already reckons the beasts into Nineveh’s repentance; YHWH’s closing question reckons them into his pity. A reading that treats v. 7 as satire has to explain why 4:11 takes the same creatures seriously.

Proposed — pending reviewHerodotus, Histories, Book 9, ed. and trans. A. D. Godley, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press · Hans Walter Wolff, Obadiah and Jonah: A Commentary, trans. Margaret Kohl, Continental Commentaries, Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1986

The Greek reads καὶ ἐκηρύχθη καὶ ἐρρέθη ἐν τῇ Νινευῇ παρὰ τοῦ βασιλέως καὶ παρὰ τῶν μεγιστάνων αὐτοῦ λέγων· Οἱ ἄνθρωποι καὶ τὰ κτήνη καὶ οἱ βόες καὶ τὰ πρόβατα μὴ γευσάσθωσαν μηδὲν μηδὲ νεμέσθωσαν μηδὲ ὕδωρ πιέτωσαν.

Three differences bear on meaning.

1. The two active verbs become passives (ἐκηρύχθη … ἐρρέθη, “it was proclaimed and it was said”). The translator has read the hiphil correctly as causative and resolved it impersonally, which loses the king as grammatical subject but keeps the sense.
2. מִטַּעַם is rendered simply παρά, “from,” with no noun. The decree-word disappears, and with it the ṭaʿam / ṭāʿam wordplay — unreproducible in Greek. This is translational, not evidence of a different Hebrew text.
3. The fronted nouns become plurals (οἱ ἄνθρωποι, τὰ κτήνη), normalizing the Hebrew collective singulars.

γευσάσθωσαν for יִטְעֲמוּ is a precise equivalent (γεύομαι, “taste”). The chain μηδέν … μηδέ … μηδέ renders the three אַל clauses well. Nothing here warrants correcting the Hebrew.

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 Vulgate reads et clamavit et dixit in Nineve ex ore regis et principum eius dicens: homines et iumenta et boves et pecora non gustent quicquam nec aquam bibant. Jerome renders מִטַּעַם idiomatically as ex ore regis, “from the mouth of the king” — an authority formula rather than a lexical equivalent — and his Latin does not represent a separate clause for אַל־יִרְעוּ, folding the prohibitions together. Whether that reflects his Hebrew exemplar or his Latin style would need checking against the critical edition of the Vulgate; it is not a basis for suspecting the Hebrew.

The Targum and Peshitta readings of this verse should be verified against the apparatus before being cited; the Aramaic cognate of טַעַם makes the Targum’s treatment of מִטַּעַם of particular interest, but I will not state its wording without checking it.

No variant at this verse is recorded in BHS’s apparatus that affects sense.

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.

Rabbinic. The Ninevites’ repentance is treated as the paradigm of accepted repentance in the Mishnah’s liturgical tradition for public fasts (Taʿanit 2:1 cites Jonah 3:10 as the model in the fast-day prayers). Rabbinic discussion also attends to the thoroughness of the animal fast; one line of tradition reads it as separating young from their mothers so that the cries of both would rise, treating the edict as earnest rather than absurd. The specific locators for that tradition should be verified before citation.

New Testament. Jesus holds up the men of Nineveh as those who repented at Jonah’s preaching and will rise in judgment against his own generation (Matt 12:41; Luke 11:32). The citation is of the repentance as a whole; v. 7’s details are not in view.

Early Church. Jerome’s commentary on Jonah treats the king as a figure of a Gentile ruler shamed into penitence and reads the inclusion of animals as a measure of the sincerity of the fast rather than as excess. Patristic preaching on Lenten fasting returned repeatedly to Nineveh’s example; the Nineveh fast became a fixed liturgical observance in the Syriac churches (the Rogation or Fast of the Ninevites), which is reception of the chapter, not of the Hebrew’s own claim.

Proposed — pending reviewJerome, Commentarii in Ionam prophetam (Commentary on Jonah), ed. and trans. in Jérôme, Commentaire sur Jonas, Sources Chrétiennes 323, Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1985 · Mishnah, Taʿanit 2:1, in The Mishnah: A New Translation, trans. Jacob Neusner, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988

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.