Jonah’s prayer of complaint (v. 2) turns in v. 3 into a petition, and the petition is for death. The verse has three moves: a discourse pivot (וְעַתָּה, “and now”), a vocative address to YHWH, and an imperative softened by נָא — take my life from me — grounded by a כִּי clause with a comparative adjective: my death is better than my life.

Three things carry weight. First, נֶפֶשׁ here is the living self under threat, not an immortal soul; the glossary rendering “life” holds. Second, טוֹב is not absolute (“death is good”) but comparative, because of the מִן on מֵחַיָּי — Jonah is weighing two bad options, not praising death. Third, the whole line is formulaic: it echoes the despairing death-wishes of Moses (Num 11:15) and Elijah (1 Kgs 19:4), and Jonah will repeat its second half verbatim in v. 8. The narrator is quoting the prophetic tradition and letting the reader notice that Jonah’s grief has no comparable cause.

The petition is also, pointedly, the reverse of the book’s own logic: Jonah asks YHWH to take a נֶפֶשׁ after the sailors begged him not to charge them with innocent נֶפֶשׁ (1:14) and after YHWH brought Jonah’s own life up from the Pit (2:6-7).

וְעַתָּה is not a time-word here so much as a discourse hinge: having stated the grievance (v. 2), the speaker now draws the consequence. It regularly introduces the operative request or demand at the end of a stated rationale (Gen 31:44; Exod 32:34; 1 Sam 12:16). Rendering it “and now” keeps the logical pivot audible; “therefore” would over-specify and “now then” would lower the register.

The disjunctive accents support this reading of the verse’s shape: zaqef qaton on יְהוָ֔ה closes the address, tipḥa on מִמֶּ֑נִּי (with atnaḥ) closes the petition, and the כִּי clause stands as the second half. The Masoretic phrasing and the syntax agree.

Built onwaltke-oconnor · jouon-muraoka · bhs

קַח is the qal imperative of לָקַח, maqqef-joined to נָא. The particle נָא is not simple courtesy; the grammars describe it as marking the request as bearing on the speaker’s own situation or interest — an appeal, not a formality. “Please” is the least intrusive English equivalent available; “I pray” is kept for the liturgical line.

נַפְשִׁי follows the binding glossary decision: nepeš is rendered “life,” the animated living self, not “soul.” Jonah has used נֶפֶשׁ twice already in the sense of life-under-threat-of-drowning (2:5, 7), and the sailors used it of liability for a life (1:14). “Take my soul” would import a body-soul dualism the Hebrew does not carry and would sever the link to the drowning imagery of ch. 2.

The added מִמֶּ֑נִּי (“from me”) is redundant in English but is part of the Hebrew idiom of the death-request; compare the same construction with נֶפֶשׁ as object in 1 Kgs 19:4. It makes the life something detachable, held and now surrendered.

Built onhalot · bdb · dch · jouon-muraoka · waltke-oconnor

A verbless comparative clause: predicate adjective ט֥וֹב fronted, subject מוֹתִ֖י, and the standard of comparison marked by מִן on מֵחַיָּֽי. Hebrew has no comparative morphology; the מִן does all the work. So the sense is “my death is better than my life,” not “my death is good.”

That distinction matters theologically. Jonah does not say that death is a good; he says it is the preferable of two states. The comparison is between two of his own conditions — מוֹתִי and חַיָּי, both suffixed, both his. The infinitival feel of the nouns justifies the gerunds in the literal line (“my dying … my living”), which also keeps the two words in parallel shape.

חַיִּים (“life”) is formally plural (here plural construct with 1cs suffix); the plural is an abstract/intensive formation and carries no plurality of referent. English must use the singular, and the form is recorded here rather than forced into the rendering.

The same clause recurs word for word at Jonah 4:8 (ט֥וֹב מוֹתִ֖י מֵחַיָּֽי), where the cause is a withered plant and a hot wind rather than the sparing of a city. The repetition is the narrator’s argument; the English must be identical at both verses.

Built onwaltke-oconnor · jouon-muraoka · halot

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

יְהוָ֔ה stands here as a vocative, the second in two verses (v. 2 opens אָנָּ֤ה יְהוָה֙). Jonah addresses YHWH by the covenant name — the name attached to the mercy formula he has just quoted. The chapter then alternates deliberately: YHWH speaks in v. 4, יְהוָה־אֱלֹהִים appoints the plant (v. 6), הָאֱלֹהִים the worm (v. 7), אֱלֹהִים the wind (v. 8) and speaks in v. 9, and YHWH closes the book in vv. 10-11. Per the standing glossary, the names are never harmonized; the distribution is data.

Jonah’s petition is stitched from two earlier prophetic death-wishes, and in both the Hebrew overlaps.

• Num 11:15 — Moses, crushed by the burden of the people, asks YHWH to kill him outright rather than let him see his own misery. The construction there uses הרג, not לקח, but the situation is identical: a prophet asking God to end his life because his commission has become unbearable.
• 1 Kgs 19:4 — Elijah under the broom tree asks YHWH to take his נֶפֶשׁ. This is the closest parallel: same noun as object, same request, same setting of a prophet sitting alone outside after a confrontation and waiting (compare Jonah’s booth east of the city, v. 5).

The echo is pointed rather than flattering. Moses and Elijah despair under the weight of hostile or unfaithful hearers; Jonah despairs because his hearers repented. The narrator puts a venerable prophetic idiom in his mouth and lets the mismatch do the work. The same inversion is why the book ends with a question rather than a vindication.

The wider substrate is the mercy formula Jonah quoted in v. 2 (Exod 34:6-7), which makes v. 3 a complaint about the very attribute Israel’s liturgy celebrates.

Built onbdb · halot

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

LXX reads, in substance, καὶ νῦν, δέσποτα κύριε, λάβε τὴν ψυχήν μου ἀπ’ ἐμοῦ, ὅτι καλὸν τὸ ἀποθανεῖν με ἢ ζῆν με.

Three observations:

1. The Greek renders the vocative with δέσποτα κύριε, a double honorific where the Hebrew has the single divine name. This is the translator’s reverential expansion, not evidence of a longer Hebrew text; the Twelve Prophets translator handles the Tetragrammaton with κύριος throughout, and the added δέσποτα is a stylistic amplification of direct address to God.
2. נַפְשִׁי is rendered ψυχήν μου — the standard equivalence, and precisely the point at which later readers in Greek and Latin heard “soul.” The Hebrew means the life; the Greek equivalence should not be read back into it.
3. The comparative is rendered with καλόν … ἤ, Greek’s ordinary way of handling Hebrew comparative מִן. Note that the nouns become infinitives (ἀποθανεῖν / ζῆν): the translator read מוֹתִי and מֵחַיָּי as verbal, which supports the gerund rendering in the literal line.

The Vulgate (tolle quaeso animam meam a me, quia melior est mihi mors quam vita) follows the Hebrew closely, with melior … quam for the comparative and a dative mihi supplied. No meaningful variant is in view; the Hebrew and the versions agree on the sense of the verse.

Built ongoettingen-lxx-xii · muraoka-lxx · 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.

WLC presents no difficulty here, and no variant affecting sense is known to me in this verse. The orthography מֵחַיָּֽי (plural construct with 1cs suffix) is the expected form. The identical clause at 4:8 is written the same way, which is itself a small confirmation of careful transmission of a deliberately repeated line. BHS records nothing requiring comment; BHQ should be checked for any note on the accentuation of קַח־נָ֥א.

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.

Later readers used the verse mainly to explain Jonah’s motive, which the Hebrew leaves bare.

• Targum Jonathan renders the clause in line with the Hebrew; the Targumic tradition generally expands Jonah’s complaint in the direction of concern for Israel’s standing — Jonah would rather die than have Israel judged by comparison with a repentant Nineveh. The Mekhilta tradition on Jonah as the prophet who sought the honor of the son (Israel) over the honor of the Father belongs to this stream. The specific locators should be verified before being cited.
• Rabbinic reading more broadly treats the verse as evidence that Jonah’s flight was not cowardice but a reasoned position, which coheres with the Hebrew’s כִּי יָדַעְתִּי in v. 2 — though it supplies a motive the text does not.
• Jerome, in his commentary on Jonah, reads the death-wish together with Elijah’s and takes Jonah to be objecting to what he regards as a slander on God’s truthfulness: a threat announced and not executed. Jerome also connects the prophet’s reluctance to the fate of Israel.
• Later Christian reading generally pairs v. 3 with Elijah under the broom tree as a case study in prophetic despair, and reads YHWH’s question in v. 4 as the pastoral answer to it.

None of this is evidence for what the Hebrew says. The Hebrew says only that Jonah asked for death and thought it preferable to life.

Proposed — pending reviewJerome, Commentarius in Ionam prophetam (Commentary on Jonah), in S. Hieronymi Presbyteri Opera, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 76; Turnhout: Brepols. · 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.