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Jonah

About this book
Chapter 2

1 Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the stomach of the fish⁠ 2 and said, “I called out to the Lord from my distress, and he answered me; from the belly of Sheol I cried out for help,⁠ and you heard my prayer. 3 You threw me into the deep waters, into the middle of the sea; the ocean current engulfed me; all the mighty waves you sent swept over me.⁠ 4 I thought I had been banished from your sight and that I would never again see your holy temple.⁠ 5 Water engulfed me up to my neck; the deep ocean surrounded me; seaweed was wrapped around my head.⁠ 6 I went down to the very bottoms of the mountains; the gates of the netherworld barred me in forever,⁠ but you brought me up from the Pit,⁠ O Lord, my God.⁠ 7 When my life was ebbing away, I called out to the Lord. And my prayer came to you, to your holy temple.⁠ 8 Those who worship worthless idols forfeit the mercy that could be theirs.⁠ 9 But as for me, I promise to offer a sacrifice to you with a public declaration of praise; I will surely do what I have promised.⁠ Salvation belongs to the Lord!”⁠ 10 Then the Lord commanded the fish and it vomited Jonah out onto dry land.

Texts in conversation

Compare Psalm 18:4 and Jonah 2:5

Hebrew Bible

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Summary

Jonah describes rising waters and seaweed pulling him down into Sheol, under the earth. Psalm 18 uses similar language to show someone overwhelmed by danger, following the same poetic tradition that describes threat and near death.

Passages

Psalm 18:4

Hebrew Bible
2 The Lord is my high ridge, my stronghold, my deliverer. My God is my rocky summit where I take shelter, my shield, the horn that saves me, and my refuge. 3 I called to the Lord, who is worthy of praise, and I was delivered from my enemies. 4 The waves of death engulfed me, the currents of chaos overwhelmed me. 5 The ropes of Sheol tightened around me, the snares of death trapped me. 6 In my distress I called to the Lord; I cried out to my God. From his heavenly temple he heard my voice; he listened to my cry for help.
600–201 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in Psalms

Jonah 2:5

Hebrew Bible
3 You threw me into the deep waters, into the middle of the sea; the ocean current engulfed me; all the mighty waves you sent swept over me. 4 I thought I had been banished from your sight and that I would never again see your holy temple. 5 Water engulfed me up to my neck; the deep ocean surrounded me; seaweed was wrapped around my head. 6 I went down to the very bottoms of the mountains; the gates of the netherworld barred me in forever, but you brought me up from the Pit, O Lord, my God. 7 When my life was ebbing away, I called out to the Lord. And my prayer came to you, to your holy temple.
300–201 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in Jonah

References

"... Currently, there are forty-eight known cases of geminate ballast and clustering in the Hebrew Bible, of which twelve occur in a single verse. Twenty also constitute geminate parallelism. Only three appear in prose. While fifteen occur in prophetic texts, the majority appear in the Psalms. While the creativity with which the Israelites integrated geminate ballast and clustering appears to have known no bounds, the repeated parallelism of some geminate roots in different texts (Both Ps 18:4–6 and Jonah 2:6 employ the geminates ‘engulf’ and ‘surround’ in parallel), the use of rare lexemes and verbal formations and the frequency with which some true and imitation geminate forms appear, demonstrate the underlying existence of a learned convention. In my previous examination, I concluded that the device’s use in Ugaritic and Akkadian texts similarly suggests that it was passed down in scribal circles along with other compositional techniques. I also noted that while it relates in some ways to parallelism and alliteration, strictly speaking, it does not belong to either. Instead, geminate ballast and clustering is fundamentally a form of repetition ... If we consider also that many passages had a musical setting, then we might opine whether the geminates served a rhythmic or accentual function. Of course, this assessment is only preliminary since it is likely that many more examples await discovery ..."
Scott B. Noegel, “More Geminate Ballast and Clustering in Biblical Hebrew,” in History, Memory, Hebrew Scriptures: A Festschrift for Ehud Ben Zvi, ed. Ian Douglas Wilson and Diana V. Edelman (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2015), 417–432.

References are not endorsements of their contents. Read each reference in full to understand its author's intentions in using these texts.

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Psalm 18:4 and Jonah 2:5

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