וַיִּירְאוּ הַמַּלָּחִים וַיִּזְעְַקוּ אִישׁ אֶל־אְֶלֹהָיו וַיָּטִלוּ אֶת־הַכֵּלִיָם אְַשֶׁר בָּאְָנִיָּה אֶל־הַיָּם לְהָקֵל מֵעְַלֵיהֶם וְיוּנָה יָרַד אֶל־יַרכְּתֵי הַסְּפִינָה וַיִּשְׁכַּב וַיֵּרָדַם
Jonah 1:5, BHS [1]
Then the mariners were afraid, and each cried out to his god. And they hurled the cargo that was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them. But Jonah had gone down into the inner part of the ship and had lain down and was fast asleep.
Jonah 1:5, ESV
I’m a member of the Veggietales generation, meaning that very often, the mental image I get when reading the book of Jonah involves Archibald Artichoke (as Jonah) and his friend having a conversation with the traveling sales-worm Khalil while the Pirates who Don’t Do Anything prepare their ship for sailing to Tarshish. The two “heroes” of the story would then fall asleep only to wake up in the middle of a violent storm in which their ship is caught, and the passengers on the ship would all play an epic game of Go Fish! to determine on whose account the storm came.
Now vegetables and card games aside, Veggietales does a reasonable job of describing the events in the Biblical narrative. Its family-friendly fun, however, tends to downplay the magnitude and implications of Jonah’s attempt to flee from the presence of God. As such, it, along with all the major translations of the Bible, it seems, interprets Jonah’s actions in verse 5 to be past perfect, happening before the storm occurred. This, however, is not necessarily the case. The semantic and syntactical nature of the verbs in the clause describing Jonah’s actions in the narrative may indeed be translated in the past perfect tense, yet in doing so, I argue, one privileges less common usage of the syntactical structure and diminishes the role of the shift in word order in emphasizing Jonah’s actions in contrast to those of the sailors. Such an action may be done in following with traditional interpretations of the story, which put Jonah in a better light than to suggest the alternative that I propose: that in the face of the massive storm sent by the LORD, Jonah deliberately does not act to save his life nor those of the sailors, but then goes down into the belly of the ship to sleep. Such a translation better fits the themes developed in the story and is more faithful to the intent of the original author [2] and should therefore be adopted [3].
For one, such an outrageously defeatist and extreme act better fits the way in which the author describes Jonah’s journey as a series of descents [4]. In Biblical Hebrew, verbs of motion often also contain additional information about the change in relative geographic elevation that results from one’s travel. This phenomenon has been famously enshrined in the negro spiritual “Go Down Moses”, which recalls God’s command to Moses to go back to Egypt from his current location in the wilderness of Midian. While a translation that pyrrhically wishes to hold to the dictionary definition of the verb ירד (yah-RAD) would retain the “down” in “go down”, a more accurate translation could reduce the command down to “Go”. The reason for the use of ירד, to go down, instead of the more neutral הלך (hah-LACH), to go, is because Egypt is of lower elevation than the wilderness of Midian, and not because Egypt is in some way “spiritually lower”, although past interpreters may have construed it in such a way [5].
But whereas the use of ירד to talk about going to Egypt is justified because of geography, one cannot necessarily draw the same conclusion when talking about Jonah. The text of Jonah persistently uses the verb ירד, to go down, seemingly to emphasize that Jonah’s running away from God results in his effective running down to death [6]. Jonah rises up to flee from the presence of the LORD and goes down to Joppa, goes down into the ship (v. 3), goes down into the belly of the ship to sleep, and finally, he metaphorically makes the final descent into the sea and, presumably, to death. The poem in chapter two seems to confirm this sequence by noting that he is calling out of the “belly of Sheol” (2:2), with the belly of the fish acting metaphorically as the depths of the underworld [7].
Thus characterized, Jonah’s action to take a nap in the face of impending death is not as outrageous as it would seem. If his entire journey to Tarshish is characterized by his journey away from the LORD to death, for him to go to sleep after the onset of the storm makes sense. His choice to sleep is again, an act of resignation in conscious affirmation of this choice of death, which is repeated again when he tells the sailors to throw him into the sea. Remember that Jonah should have absolutely no reason to expect that God would save him by means of the big fish and as such, his recommendation of such an action is an incredibly suicidal and defeatist statement. If the Jonah of chapter one is being characterized as a man running to death, I see no reason that the author would prefer to make Jonah’s slumber in the midst of the storm an accident as opposed to a deliberate choice.
A second objection to the past perfect translation of ירד, referring to Jonah’s going down into the ship to sleep, lies in the story’s emphatic, and also ironic, contrast between the actions of Jonah and the actions of the sailors. Indeed, the syntactical structure of the verse seems to suggest such an opposition. Past narrative in Biblical Hebrew is always marked by the morphological form wayyiqtol (also called the imperfect waw-consecutive), which is the form of the verbs at the beginning of verse 5, describing the actions of the sailors in response to the storm. These clause-initial forms which represent what would be the simple past tense maintain the typical Biblical Hebrew word order of Verb-Subject-Object in their temporally sequential description of events: Then the sailors were afraid; then each man cried out to his gods; then they tried to lighten the ship. When the verse comes to Jonah, however, the author puts an emphasis on the contrast between him and the sailors by inverting the word order to Subject (Jonah)-Verb (went down)-Object (into the belly of the ship). In fitting with this change, the verb takes the qatal morphological form, which is the complement of the wayyiqtol. After this action, the narrative returns to using the wayyiqtol form to tell of Jonah’s lying down and falling asleep, continuing the narrative.
This shift into qatal is by no means unusual in the Biblical text. Biblical Hebrew is a language far different than most modern languages for the reason that it basically only has two morphological aspects–the perfective (qatal) and the imperfective (yiqtol)–which nevertheless cover a wide variety of semantic meanings [8]. For example, the qatal can be used to mean a variety of completed actions [9] ranging from the stative perfect (an expression of state–i.e. he was fat), a performative perfect (an action that is performed by the act of speech–i.e. Bless you!), our everyday simple past (i.e. I wrote this essay), and, yes, various senses of anteriority–what we know in English as the past perfect (I had written), present perfect (I have written), and future perfect tenses (I will have written). These uses convey the temporal information that the even they are referring to happens before (more in the past) as another event which they are referencing [10].
The problem with this is, of course, that there is no morphological way of identifying which use of the qatal form means what. In other words, there is no way to tell through merely parsing a verb and examining it in isolation whether it is simple past, past perfect, or some other use of the perfective. Instead, as scholars now argue, Biblical Hebrew also makes use of syntax (the word order in a sentence) and discourse mode (the type of writing that it occurs in–narrative, dialogue, etc.) in order to narrow down the possible meanings of a verb. Now, it is pretty clear that the discourse mode of this passage is narration. We have an absent narrator who is recounting a series of events using the wayyiqtol form, the marker of past narrative [11]. Within the discourse mode of narrative, the syntactical structure of wayyiqtol…we (the conjunction “and”)…noun phrase…qatal, which just happens to be the one that we have here in Jonah 1:5 ([actions of the sailors]…[and][Jonah][went down]), limits the qatal to three temporal senses:
1. Simultaneity (the tense would be the simple past, but the event described by the qatal verb would happen at the same time as the previous wayyiqtol verb)
2. Anteriority (the event described by the qatal verb happens before the previous wayyiqtol verb(s))
3. Cognitive Stop
The cognitive stop is a pragmatic neutral construction used to express that there is something special happening at this point in the narrative. This is used when one wants to introduce a new topic or character into the narrative, to put emphasis on the contrast between given information and new information, to mark the end of a narrative unit, or to indicate a peak within the narrative. If you’re a bit confused by all of this linguistic talk, a combination of the simultaneous and constrastive use of the cognitive stop is the meaning that I argue the turn in Jonah 1:5 should be translated. Most translations (such as the ESV quoted above), however, choose to use the anterior meaning of the verb in order to suggest that Jonah’s actions are a sort of parenthetical for what had happened before the storm started.
Those who choose to translate using the anterior sense often cite traditional rabbinic discussion as well as argue for their position by citing that they make such a translation choice in order that we not “get the unjustifiable meaning that Jonah went down at the time of the storm when the others were doing all they could to save the ship. This is most improbable.” [12] I have, however, already demonstrated above that the metaphoric link between Jonah’s running away from God and running to death provide sufficient justification for Jonah’s actions. Translating in the simultaneous sense of the qatal allows the action to take on a contrastive nature, emphasizing the difference between the sailors’ and Jonah’s reaction to the storm, and thus accords with one of the reoccurring themes in the book of Jonah–the ironic contrast of the supposedly pious Jonah’s disobedience with pagan reverence and obedience.
Even translations which select the anterior sense of the shift to qatal recognize the contrastive nature of the narrative flow by choosing to transition to Jonah’s actions with a “but” [13]. In choosing to locate Jonah’s actions before the onslaught of the storm, however, the main force of the contrast is lost [14]. Instead of a contrast between how the two parties, the Hebrew and the pagans, react to a supernatural squall, it merely becomes a juxtaposition of actions which achieves its contrastive sense in that sleeping is not something one would typically do in a storm [15].
The book of Jonah, however, over and over again emphasizes the ironic distinction between the reaction of the holy prophet and the reaction of the unholy pagans. While Jonah sleeps and clearly cares little for the lives of the sailors, the sailors care immensely for his life and see him with eyes of mercy even though he brought them into such a situation, as they refuse to throw him into the sea until it is clear that there is no other choice. While Jonah declares himself to be a Hebrew who fears the LORD God of heaven who made the sea and the dry land–which he obviously doesn’t, as he is running away–the pagan sailors fear him, making offerings to the LORD and making vows after the sea becomes calm. In his prayer from within the belly of the fish, Jonah contrasts “those who pay regard to vain idols” as having “forsaken their hope of steadfast love” with himself, who will “sacrifice to the LORD” and fulfill his vows. Ironically enough, what happened in the story has basically the characters reversed. In Nineveh, the pagan, evil Assyrians immediately repent with fasting and sackcloth before Jonah even goes through a third of the city. They are, again, those who seek mercy from the LORD. Ironically enough, it is again Jonah who just doesn’t seem to get it and becomes angry about the fact that God is going to spare the city [16].
In light of this reoccurring contrast between the actions of Jonah and the actions of the pagans, it is only natural to translate Jonah 1:5 as having Jonah’s actions simultaneous to those of the sailors. While the sailors see the storm and are filled with fear and work desperately to save the ship, Jonah resigns himself (and everyone else) to death and takes a nap. If anything, the “but Jonah” contrast may not be strong enough, with a more effective translation using stronger language. As such, we reach our final translation:
Then the sailors were afraid and each man cried out to his gods. They hurled the cargo that was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them. Jonah, on the other hand, went down into the inner part of the ship. He lay down and fell asleep.
Notes:
[1] The BHS follows the Masoretic Text, the oldest complete Hebrew manuscript of the Old Testament. Note that this argument is made without any reference to the Greek Septuagint, whose equivalent translation may contradict the point made here. I don’t have the expertise nor research tools to integrate it into this note. It may very well be that it agrees, or, if it does not, it might be possible to make the argument that the translators of the Septuagint translated with a hermeneutic that emphasized the integrity of Biblical prophets and would thus make translation choices that put them in a better light insofar as it does not do extensive violence to the text. A dating of Jonah could also have significant bearing on the argument, especially if it has a later composition date which is not too far removed from the book’s rabbinic commentators or translation into Greek.
[2] I use “author” as a neutral term that neither affirms or rejects Jonah’s authorship of the book that bears his name.
[3] Alright. I’ll admit that perhaps I stated it a bit more ambitiously than I should have, as I have not done the extensive research that one really ought to do before making such a claim, but due to my inability to conduct such research in the first place, I plead your forgiveness. Nor do I know if this argument has already been conclusively made or refuted. If there is anyone who is interested in helping me conduct the proper research, by all means, I would love your input and help, if this argument is indeed convincing.
[4] I would also argue that the outrageous nature of such an action better fits the literary genre into which Jonah falls. I follow James Ackerman in his argument within The Literary Guide to the Bible ed. Alter and Kermode that Jonah is an example of a satirical short story. As one could imagine, this is a rather extensive argument to make and is not essential to the current argument, and as such, will not be included.
[5] I have not exhausted the Biblical text, but I’m pretty sure that the Bible uses ירד almost every time it refers to going to Egypt for the reason aforementioned. It is also used in other similar situations to express the same thing. Another reason הלך is probably not used is that it tends to express the sense of walking, as opposed to traveling long distances.
[6] The Israelite underworld, Sheol, seems to exist in a sort of nether region below the ground. One may recall the incident in the book of Samuel when Saul, in consulting a medium to call the spirit of Samuel up from the dead, ends up using a ritual pit (1 Samuel 28:8, NET), presumably to get closer to the spirit realm.
[7] I am, again, in the debt of James Ackerman for these observations (see [4]). The ESV study bible also makes note of the association between going down and death in its footnotes for this section.
[8] This is a gross simplification, but for the purposes of this essay, the general sense is to express the difficulty in establishing the exact temporal meanings of verbal forms in Biblical Hebrew.
[9] Those more familiar with linguistics may prefer the definition that the reference time encloses the event time. I will also apologize in advance for my mutilation of disciplinary terms. I’m not much of a linguist.
[10] In terms of reference time, the relation between Speech Time (ST), Reference Time (RT) and Event Time (ET) of the first verb determines whether the perfective is past, present or future. That the verb of interest (verb2) has a ST2 = ST1, RT2 = ET1, and ET2 < RT2.
[11] The wayyiqtol form is not mentioned in the aforementioned discussion. Scholars conjecture that it arose from an old preterit independent of the qatal, so although its meaning somewhat overlaps with that of the qatal, it cannot be lumped in with it. However, as a Biblical Hebrew tense, it is the simplest to translate because it basically only has one common meaning–that of the simple past to designate narrative. Old Testament scholars LOVE the wayyiqtol because it grounds us temporally.
[12] From Bewer, 1912, p.34. Quote obtained from Jack M. Sasson, The Anchor Bible Commentary on Jonah: A New Translation with Introduction, Commentary, and Interpretation (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 99. Wolff also cites a similar reason in his 1986 article.
[13] Biblical Hebrew basically only has one conjunction that is commonly used to connect independent clauses, we, which basically only expresses some sort of relation between the two clauses without specifying whether it is a constructive or contrastive. As such, it can be translated either “and” or “but”.
[14] This temporal location is not explicitly clear in most English translations due to the lack of a specific reference to when in the past Jonah had gone down into the hold of the ship. The NET translation, however, in a translation note explicitly confirms that it has translated the second half of verse five as a sort of parenthetical informing readers of what Jonah had done before the onset of the storm.
[15] Insightful readers may note the close parallel to the New Testament stories of Jesus calming the sea, in that contrast is generated by the fact that he is able to accomplish the odd task of sleeping in the midst of a life-threatening storm. Although one may argue that Matthew 8:24, Mark 4:37-38, and Luke 8:23 may shed light on Jonah’s actions, as the sudden storm, the panic of the disciples, and Jesus’ sleeping can be seen as the fulfillment of Jonah’s situation, the position is weak. For one, it is not clear that Mark or Luke intended to allude back to this passage, as Luke has Jesus sleeping before the storm arises, instead of following the word order described in Jonah–first the storm, then the sailor’s response, then what Jonah was doing/did. Matthew and Mark mention that Jesus was sleeping on the stern after the storm breaks out, but they leave out a description of the response of the disciples between. In addition, Mark’s description of what Jesus’ disciples say in the midst of the storm “Do you not care that we are perishing?” seems to imply that Jesus is conscious of the storm and yet purposely chooses not to act until after his care for the disciples is challenged.
[16] For more on the theme of mercy, see my other note, Jonah: The Price of Mercy.
