YHWH speaks for the last time but one. The verse is the first half of a single argument that runs on into v. 11 — an a fortiori from the small case to the great: you pitied a plant; I pity a city. Four things carry the weight.

First, the speaker is YHWH, named for the first time since v. 6 (and there in the compound YHWH-ʾĕlōhîm). Through the plant, worm and wind of vv. 7–8 the narrator used ʾĕlōhîm; now the covenant name returns for the closing argument.

Second, the verb חַ֨סְתָּ, ḥastā, “you had pity.” YHWH gives Jonah’s anger a generous name. Jonah said nothing about pitying the plant; he said he was hot with anger over losing it (v. 9). YHWH re-describes that attachment as pity — the very disposition Jonah had complained about in v. 2 — and then takes it as the premise of his own case.

Third, the two disqualifiers: Jonah did not labor for the plant and did not make it grow. The second verb, giddaltô, is the piel of the root behind the book’s drumbeat word גָּדוֹל, “great.” Jonah did not make the plant great; the great city is not his either.

Fourth, the idiom שֶׁבִּן־לַ֥יְלָה הָיָ֖ה וּבִן־לַ֥יְלָה אָבָֽד, literally “which was a son of a night and a son of a night perished.” Hebrew uses בֵּן for age and duration; the plant was a one-night thing. The verb אָבָד is the same verb the sailors feared (1:6) and the Ninevites hoped to escape (3:9). What perished was a weed.

Proposed — pending reviewMichael H. Floyd, Minor Prophets, Part 2, Forms of the Old Testament Literature 22, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000

Jonah 4 distributes the divine names with evident care:

• v. 2 Jonah prays to YHWH;
• v. 4 YHWH asks the first question;
• v. 6 יְהוָה־אֱלֹהִים, the compound, appoints the plant;
• v. 7 הָאֱלֹהִים (articular) appoints the worm;
• v. 8 אֱלֹהִים (anarthrous) appoints the wind;
• v. 9 אֱלֹהִים asks the second question;
• v. 10 YHWH delivers the verdict, and speaks on through v. 11.

The pattern is not random: the dismantling of Jonah’s comfort is done by ʾĕlōhîm, God as the one who disposes of creatures; the gift of the plant and the final appeal to mercy belong to YHWH. Per the project’s divine-name policy the two are never harmonized, and the English keeps them lexically distinct so the distribution stays visible to the reader.

The perfect חַ֨סְתָּ already carries its 2ms subject; the independent pronoun אַתָּ֥ה before it is therefore not required by grammar and is doing contrastive work. It is answered at the head of v. 11 by וַאֲנִי, “But I.” The two pronouns are the hinges of one sentence:

אַתָּה חַסְתָּ … וַאֲנִי לֹא אָחוּס … “You had pity … and I — should I not have pity …?”

Syntactically v. 10 is the protasis of an unmarked a fortiori argument and v. 11 the apodosis, framed as a question. The Masoretic accents keep the two verses separate (silluq at אָבָֽד), but the וַאֲנִי of v. 11 only functions as the second limb of what begins here. The literal line keeps the redundant “You — you,” the modern line lets the English stress fall naturally.

Note also the contrast with v. 9, where the same pronoun pattern is absent: there God asks about Jonah’s anger; here he reclassifies it.

Proposed — pending reviewPhyllis Trible, Rhetorical Criticism: Context, Method, and the Book of Jonah, Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994

חוּס is a verb of sparing — withholding destruction from something one has power over — and it is construed with עַל, “upon, over,” as here. It is the standard verb of the eye that spares in the Deuteronomic formula (Deut 7:16; 13:8), of Ezekiel’s refusal to spare (Ezek 5:11; 7:4; 8:18; 9:5), and of divine sparing in Joel 2:17. HALOT and BDB agree on the semantic core: feel compassion in a way that issues in not destroying.

Two points matter here.

(1) It is not a word for mere fondness. English “feel sorry for” is too thin; the verb implies a withholding of the hand. Jonah had no hand to withhold over the plant, which is part of the irony: he is credited with a sparing he could not have performed.

(2) Jonah never used it. The narrator reports Jonah’s joy over the plant (שִׂמְחָה גְדוֹלָה, v. 6) and his anger at its loss (v. 9). YHWH supplies the word חוּס, and in doing so grants Jonah the moral position he had refused to grant God in v. 2. The rhetorical move is a concession, not a description: YHWH argues from Jonah’s own case as generously construed as possible.

The verb recurs once more, in the first person, at v. 11 — the only two occurrences in the book. One English rendering at both is therefore essential.

The plant-name occurs five times, all in Jonah 4 (vv. 6, 7, 9, 10), and nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible. It is effectively a hapax lexeme confined to one chapter.

Per §9, a culturally specific term with no secure target-language equivalent is transliterated and glossed rather than force-fitted. The rendering keeps qiqayon with “-plant” appended in the modern line so the reader knows what kind of thing it is without the English committing to a species the Hebrew does not name. Jerome’s choice here produced one of the most famous translation controversies of antiquity (see Reception).

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

The two relative clauses name precisely what Jonah lacks: productive investment.

עָמַל is toil — wearying, often thankless labor (the cognate noun עָמָל is Qoheleth’s word for the burden of work). With בְּ it means to labor at or on something. Jonah did not put work into the plant.

גִדַּלְתּ֑וֹ is the piel of גָּדַל with a 3ms suffix: “you did not make it great / cause it to grow.” The piel of this root is used of rearing children (2 Kgs 10:6; Isa 1:2; 49:21) and of raising plants (Isa 44:14; Ezek 31:4), and that double range is exactly to the point — the next verse will speak of a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell right hand from left.

The lexical link is worth saying plainly: גָּדַל is the verbal root of גָּדוֹל, the leitwort of Jonah (the great city, the great wind, the great fish, the great fear, the great evil, the great joy). Jonah did not make the plant great; and the city he resents is called הָעִיר הַגְּדוֹלָה in the very next clause. The English “make grow” is necessary for sense, but the note records that the Hebrew says “make great,” and the literal line keeps it.

Two features of this clause deserve comment.

The relative particle. The verse uses אֲשֶׁר twice and then the short form שֶׁ־ (prefixed, with doubling of the following consonant: šebbin). The alternation inside a single verse is striking. The short relative is frequent in late Biblical Hebrew, in Qoheleth and Song of Songs, and in northern/colloquial material; Jonah has it also at 1:7 and 1:12 in the compound בְּשֶׁל־.

בִּן־לַיְלָה. Hebrew idiomatically uses בֵּן, “son,” plus a time-word to express age or duration (“a son of eight days,” Gen 17:12; “a son of a hundred years,” Isa 65:20). Here the construct is written with the shortened vowel בִּן before the maqqef, as in בִּן־נוּן. The plant was “a son of a night”: a creature whose whole existence spanned one night.

The repetition — son of a night it came to be, son of a night it perished — is a balanced pair, and the second limb depends on the first for its force. The literal line keeps the kinship idiom per §9 (precise kinship vocabulary is not collapsed into a generic); the modern line gives “overnight,” which is what the idiom means, and the note carries the image.

אָבָֽד (pausal for אָבַד) closes the verse. The verb is already fixed in the project glossary as “perish,” and the reason is on display here: it binds the three parties of the book together.

• The captain, 1:6: “that we may not perish.”
• The sailors, 1:14: “let us not perish for this man’s life.”
• The king of Nineveh, 3:9: “that we may not perish.”
• The plant, 4:10: it perished.

Three times human beings dread perishing and are spared; the one thing in the book that actually perishes is a weed, and Jonah’s grief is reserved for it. The English must use one word at all four places or the argument of the last verse loses its footing.

The masculine singular verb agrees with קִיקָיוֹן through the relative clause; no subject is expressed, which tightens the line.

The consonantal text is stable and the WLC presents no difficulty. Points worth recording:

• חַ֨סְתָּ: qal perfect 2ms of the hollow root חוּס, with the expected ḥolem-less contracted form. No variant.
• שֶׁבִּן: BHS records no significant variant; the short relative with the following doubled bet is the reading of all primary witnesses.
• אָבָֽד: pausal vocalization (qameṣ for pataḥ) at silluq. This is a Masoretic phonological feature of the verse-end, not a different form.
• No portion of Jonah 4:10 is preserved in a way that affects the reading in the Dead Sea material known to me; the Judean Desert Minor Prophets evidence for Jonah should be checked directly against the apparatus before any claim is made about it here.

The accents divide the verse: zaqef qaton at יְהוָ֔ה and at הַקִּ֣יקָי֔וֹן, tipḥa-based division at the relative clauses, atnaḥ at גִדַּלְתּ֑וֹ, so that the Masoretes read the two בִּן־לַיְלָה clauses together as the closing colon. That phrasing supports taking the final pair as a single balanced unit.

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 Jonah 4:10 reads, in substance: καὶ εἶπεν κύριος· σὺ ἐφείσω ὑπὲρ τῆς κολοκύνθης, ὑπὲρ ἧς οὐκ ἐκακοπάθησας ἐπ᾿ αὐτὴν καὶ οὐκ ἐξέθρεψας αὐτήν, ἣ ἐγενήθη ὑπὸ νύκτα καὶ ὑπὸ νύκτα ἀπώλετο.

Three observations.

κολοκύνθη, “gourd,” renders קִיקָיוֹן. This is an identification, not a translation: the Greek translator chose a known Mediterranean plant. It is an interpretive decision and must not be read back into the Hebrew, which names no species.

ἐφείσω (φείδομαι, “spare”) for חוּס is apt and confirms the “spare” side of the Hebrew verb’s range; ἐκακοπάθησας (“suffer hardship”) for עָמַל catches the toil sense well; ἐξέθρεψας (“rear, nourish”) for גִדַּלְתּוֹ takes the piel in its child-rearing sense, which is a reasonable reading of the Hebrew and loses the link with μέγας / גָּדוֹל.

ὑπὸ νύκτα for בִּן־לַיְלָה renders the idiom temporally (“in the course of a night”) rather than reproducing the “son of” figure — the normal fate of this Hebrew construction in Greek. There is no sign of a different Hebrew text behind any of this; the differences are the translator’s handling of idiom and realia. The Göttingen edition should be consulted for the detail of the Greek witnesses, including the Twelve Prophets scroll tradition.

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.

Vulgate. Jerome renders the plant hedera, “ivy,” departing from the Old Latin cucurbita (“gourd,” following LXX κολοκύνθη). Augustine reported to Jerome that a North African congregation rioted when the new reading was read out; Jerome defended himself in his correspondence, arguing that the Hebrew word denoted a shrub he had seen in Palestine and that no Latin plant-name matched it exactly. The episode is one of the clearest ancient illustrations of why untranslatable realia are better transliterated than identified (§9), and it is recorded here as versional and reception history, not as evidence for the Hebrew.

Targum Jonathan paraphrases in its usual manner; the plant-name is carried over rather than botanically identified. The precise Aramaic wording should be verified in a critical edition before being quoted.

Peshitta agrees with the Hebrew in substance; I do not state its plant-term here without checking the apparatus.

Proposed — pending reviewAugustine, Epistulae 71 and 82 (correspondence with Jerome on the translation of the plant in Jonah 4), in Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 34, Vienna

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.

Verse 10 is not a rebuke. It is the minor premise of an argument, and its generosity is the point: YHWH grants Jonah’s case before answering it. Jonah’s attachment to the plant is granted the name חוּס — pity, sparing — and then measured.

The measure has two terms: investment (you did not labor, you did not make grow) and duration (a night’s existence, a night’s end). Both are disqualifiers of claim, not of feeling. The implicit logic is that the right to grieve a thing’s loss tracks one’s stake in its making. Jonah had no stake in the qiqayon and grieved it to the point of wanting death (v. 9). YHWH made Nineveh’s hundred and twenty thousand and the beasts besides.

Two things the Hebrew does not say should be stated plainly, since both are often read in:

• It does not say Jonah was wrong to pity the plant. The argument needs the pity to be legitimate.
• It does not say the plant was worthless. It says it was brief and not Jonah’s doing.

The book ends on the unanswered question of v. 11, and this verse is what makes that question unanswerable in Jonah’s favor. The reader is left holding the comparison the prophet would not make.

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

Rabbinic. The qiqayon episode attracted attention in the rabbinic discussion of Jonah’s complaint, with the broad tendency being to read vv. 10–11 as YHWH’s vindication of mercy over the prophet’s concern for his own reputation. Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer’s Jonah material and the Jonah haftarah tradition for the afternoon of Yom Kippur place the whole chapter in a penitential frame: the verse is heard annually as an argument for divine compassion toward the repentant. (Specific tractate locations for the plant’s identification are not cited here; the Talmudic discussions of the Jonah narrative should be checked directly before any locator is given.)

Liturgical. Because Jonah is read in full as the haftarah of Yom Kippur afternoon in Jewish practice, vv. 10–11 function as the climax of a liturgical reading about repentance and mercy, not as a conclusion about a prophet’s temperament.

Patristic. The Fathers read the pair of verses as the moral of the book: God’s mercy exceeds the servant’s sense of justice. Jerome’s Commentary on Jonah treats the plant as the shade of consolation withdrawn so that Jonah may learn mercy, and is also the place where he defends his hedera. Augustine’s letters to Jerome preserve the controversy over the plant-name (Ep. 71 and 82 in the standard numbering of their correspondence) and are frequently cited as the first recorded congregational revolt over a translation choice. Theodore of Mopsuestia and Cyril of Alexandria both commented on the Twelve and read Jonah’s ending as instruction about the breadth of divine pity.

New Testament. The Gospels invoke Jonah (Matt 12:39–41; 16:4; Luke 11:29–32) for the sign of the three days and for the Ninevites’ repentance, not for this verse. No New Testament text cites Jonah 4:10. The verse’s argument — divine pity measured against human investment — stands on its own ground.

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

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.