1. And the LORD set out. This term (m-n-h) recurs in the subsequent story, highlighting God’s supervisory control over all living constituents of creation: animal, vegetable, and human.

a great fish. Although this could conceivably be a whale, as traditional understandings of the story imagine—perhaps most vividly in Moby-Dick—the Hebrew employs the unspecific generic term for sea creature.

three days and three nights. Many events in biblical narrative are said to occur in precisely this time span. What is distinctive here is the emphatic addition of three nights to three days, inviting us to envisage Jonah’s terror imprisoned in the dark belly of the big fish three long nights and three long days, during which he of course has no way of distinguishing between day and night.

2. the LORD his God. Now, as if to confirm Jonah’s declaration of faith to the mariners, the LORD is reported to be his God.

3. I called out from my straits / to the LORD, and He answered me. As is the regular practice in biblical narrative, a poem is inserted that was originally composed for another context (compare Hannah’s thanksgiving psalm, 1 Samuel 2:1–10). This poem is a psalm of thanksgiving, exhibiting many of the formulas and metaphors of that genre. It fits the narrative situation somewhat imperfectly because, while it is introduced as Jonah’s prayer from the belly of the fish, it is not actually a plea for deliverance but the rendering of thanks to God for having already delivered the speaker, as this opening line at once makes clear. The image of almost drowning in the depths of the seas as a metaphor for near death (often because of a grave illness) is conventional in thanksgiving psalms, but here it is made to apply literally to Jonah’s desperate aqueous plight. Not surprisingly, the inserted psalm makes no mention of being swallowed by a fish because the maws of gigantic fish do not figure in thanksgiving psalms. Nevertheless, the poem does incorporate several relevant points of connection with Jonah’s story.

You heard my voice. Having first referred to God in the third person, the speaker now intimately addresses Him directly.

4. All your breakers and waves / streamed over me. This vivid image of drowning invokes, as noted, a conventional trope of the thanksgiving psalm.

5. And I thought: / I am banished from before Your eyes. Death is the ultimate separation from God in the biblical worldview. But the psalm also provides a geographical orientation for Jonah’s story: fleeing God’s presence, which has its territorial focus in the Jerusalem Temple on Mount Zion, Jonah finds himself in the watery depths, at the antipodes from God’s holy place. He has manifestly “gone down” (compare verse 7, “to the roots of the mountains I went down”) from Jerusalem.

Yet again will I look / on Your holy temple. The speaker expresses faith against odds that he will live and return to worship God in His temple. Jonah, who has fled from the divine presence, now affirms the desire to return and enjoy it.

6. weed was bound round my head. This strong image of the head entrammeled in seaweed amplifies the conventional metaphor of sinking into the depths. The clause is rhythmically compact and assonant in the Hebrew—suf ḥavush lero’shi—an effect the translation tries to emulate.

7. underworld’s . . . / the Pit. Because the sea as a site of drowning is the metaphorical equivalent of death, the poem naturally moves from the watery abyss to the underworld, just as it began by placing the speaker in “the belly of Sheol.”

8. my prayer came unto You, / to Your holy Temple. The Temple is where prayer is most readily heard by God. We have here a cosmic reach from the roots of the mountains, the bottom of the sea, to the Temple on Mount Zion.

9. Those who look to vaporous lies. This phrase replicates a phrase that occurs in Psalm 31:7.

will turn away from their mercy. The wording in the Hebrew is cryptic and has encouraged diverse interpretations. The least strained, which this translation seeks to register, is that the idol worshippers (clearly the referent of “those who look to vaporous lies”) at some point will be compelled to recognize that the purported deities from whom they seek mercy are mere illusions, and thus they will abandon their futile worship. The possessive pronoun “their” (in Hebrew merely a suffix) attached to “mercy” would refer to the idolators. In all this, as both medieval and modern commentators have noted, there is some relevance to Jonah and the sailors: each of the mariners calls upon his own God, but to no avail; after hearing Jonah’s words, they implore YHWH instead, Who in the end saves them.

10. And I with a voice of thanksgiving. One of the conventions of the thanksgiving psalm is to announce thanks or acclamation (todah, which is also the designation of the thanksgiving sacrifice) at the end of the poem.

let me sacrifice . . . / let me pray. Existing translations render this as a simple future, but that misses the nuance of the Hebrew because both verbs show the suffix that is the marker of the optative mode. What the speaker declares is that he wishes to offer sacrifice. Presumably, we will carry out his desire, but that is different from a simple statement of the future tense.

11. And the LORD spoke to the fish. Just as He assigns the fish to swallow Jonah at the beginning of the episode, now He gives word to the fish to spew out Jonah. God’s omnipresent control of all things is again manifest.

vomited. As Sasson observes, this unpleasant verb is perfectly appropriate for a kind of indignity to which Jonah is subjected in the very act of being rescued.