This prayer by Jonah was not a plea for deliverance for there were no petitions in it. The prayer is a psalm of thanksgiving (v. 9) to God for using the fish to save him from drowning. The prayer was made while Jonah was in the fish’s stomach (v. 1) but it was written of course after he was expelled from the fish’s stomach. Sensing that the great fish was God’s means of delivering him, Jonah worshiped God for His unfathomable mercies. Jonah praised God for delivering him from death (cf. Ps. 30:3) in a watery grave (cf. Bernhard W. Anderson, Out of the Depths. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1974, pp. 84–6). The contents of Jonah 2 correspond in several ways to the contents in chapter 1:

The Sailors

1:4

Crisis on the sea

1:14

Prayer to Yahweh

1:15b

Deliverance from the storm

1:16

Sacrifice and vows offered to God

The Prophet

2:3–6a

Crisis in the sea

2:2, 7

Prayer to Yahweh

2:6b

Deliverance from drowning

2:9

Sacrifice and vows offered to God

He accepted God’s discipline (Jonah 2:3). The sailors didn’t cast Jonah into the stormy sea; God did. “You hurled me into the deep … all your waves and breakers swept over me” (v. 3, NIV, italics mine). When Jonah said those words, he was acknowledging that God was disciplining him and that he deserved it.

How we respond to discipline determines how much benefit we receive from it. According to Hebrews 12:5–11, we have several options: we can despise God’s discipline and fight (v. 5); we can be discouraged and faint (v. 5); we can resist discipline and invite stronger discipline, possibly even death (v. 9)11; or we can submit to the Father and mature in faith and love (v. 7). Discipline is to the believer what exercise and training are to the athlete (v. 11); it enables us to run the race with endurance and reach the assigned goal (vv. 1–2).

The fact that God chastened His servant is proof that Jonah was truly a child of God, for God disciplines only His own children. “But if you are without chastening, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate and not sons” (v. 8). And the father chastens us in love so that “afterward” we might enjoy “the peaceable fruit of righteousness” (v. 11).

THE PRAYER IS in the form of a psalm with five stanzas and a refrain.6 The five stanzas begin with 2:2 and proceed, one verse at a time, through 2:6. In the first stanza, Jonah summarizes the basic situation (2:2): “I called … and you heard my voice.” In the second through the fifth stanzas, Jonah describes his progressive descent into his watery grave. In stanza 2 he is on the surface of the water (2:3). Jonah is hurled overboard, pulled by currents, and battered by breaking waves on the surface of the sea. In stanza 3 he is in the midst of the seas (2:4). While sinking, he feels banished from Yahweh, yet looks toward his presence. In stanza 4 Jonah is near the bottom (2:5). He is engulfed and surrounded by water, sinking to the seaweed at the bottom. By the last stanza he is drowning (2:6). The sands (bars) of the floor of the sea will be his grave, but Yahweh brings him up (by a fish).

2:4 I have been expelled from Your sight. In 1:3, Jonah ran from the Lord’s presence; here he realizes that the Lord has temporarily expelled him.

“I am cast out of thy sight,” Jonah prayed despairingly, but as he hammered at the heart of God with verse after verse of Scripture, he had a flash of hope. He clung at once to what he was sure would carry weight with God. Remembering Solomon’s prayer at the dedication of the temple, Jonah added, “Yet I will look again toward thy holy temple” (Jonah 2:4). Solomon had prayed:

What prayer and supplication soever be made by any man, or by all thy people Israel, which shall know every man the plague of his own heart, and spread forth his hands toward this house: Then hear thou in heaven thy dwelling place, and forgive (1 Kings 8:38–39).

Jonah did not know where he was in relation to the temple in Jerusalem, but metaphorically he stretched out his hand toward it and had a sudden surge of hope that he would yet be able to “spread forth his hands” literally in the right direction.

2:5 point of death. Lit. “soul.” This describes Jonah’s total person—both physically and spiritually (cf. v. 7).

Then he plunged back into the horror of what and where he was—a rebel in the hands of an angry God. He had a foretaste of Hell: “The depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head. I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars was about me for ever” (Jonah 2:5–6). That is what Jonah reaped. Having gloated over the nasty medicine that God had bottled for Nineveh, he was forced to take a large dose of it himself.

1:17 a great fish. The species of fish is uncertain; the Heb. word for whale is not here employed. God sovereignly prepared (lit. “appointed”) a great fish to rescue Jonah. Apparently Jonah sank into the depth of the sea before the fish swallowed him (cf. 2:3, 5, 6). three days and three nights. See note on Mt 12:40.

In some translations of Matthew 12:40 we are told that a whale swallowed Jonah, but the Greek word rendered “whale,” ketos, can refer to any large sea monster. The word cetaceor, which is related to the word ketos, signifies the mammalian order of fish.

Ignorant people have said that a whale could not swallow a man, but a giant sperm whale that certainly could have swallowed a man is exhibited in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. Captured off Knight’s Key, Florida, in 1912, this whale is forty-five feet long, has a mouth thirty-eight inches wide, and weighs thirty thousand pounds. A fish in its stomach at the time it was captured, weighed about fifteen hundred pounds.

In February 1891 the crew of the whaling ship Star of the East sighted a large sperm whale off the Falkland Islands. They harpooned the whale and in its death throes it swallowed a man named James Bartley. A day and a half later his shipmates, who thought he had drowned—found him unconscious in the whale’s belly. Bartley lived to tell about it and his story was published in the newspapers. Describing his sensations as he slid into the innermost part of the whale, he said he could breathe easily, but the heat was unbearable. His whole appearance was changed by the ordeal, for his neck, face, and hands, which had been exposed to the whale’s gastric juices, were permanently bleached to a livid whiteness. This story gives us an idea of what Jonah experienced when he was imprisoned in the “great fish.”

Jonah was in his prison “three days and three nights” and much debate centers around whether or not he died while he was there. The Lord referred to Jonah’s ordeal as a type of His death, burial, and resurrection. In Matthew 12:40 the parallel is exact: “As Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” A man who was miraculously kept alive for three days and three nights does not seem to be an exact parallel of the Lord, who was dead and buried for three days and three nights. So the likelihood is that Jonah died in the belly of the fish and was miraculously resurrected at the end of the third night. Probably Jonah uttered his prayer just before he lost consciousness. The Hebrew idiom translated “three days” can refer to parts of three days, but the expression translated “three days and three nights” must be taken literally.

Some expositors believe that Jonah actually died and was resurrected, and base their interpretation on statements in his prayer like “From the depths of the grave [Sheol-the realm of the dead] I called for help” (2:2, NIV) and “But You brought my life up from the pit” (v. 6, NIV). But Jonah’s prayer is composed of quotations from at least fifteen different psalms, and while some of these psalms describe near-death experiences, none describes a resurrection miracle. The reference to Sheol in verse 2 comes from Psalm 30:3 (and see 16:10 and 18:4–6), and the reference to “the pit” comes from 49:15, both of which were written by David. If these two psalms describe Jonah’s resurrection, then they must also describe David’s resurrection, but we have no evidence that David ever died and was raised to life. Instead, these psalms describe frightening experiences when God delivered His servants from the very gates of death. That seems to be what Jonah is describing as he quotes them in his prayer. Furthermore, if Jonah died and was resurrected, he could not be an accurate type of Christ (Matt. 12:39; 16:4; Luke 11:29); for types picture the antitype but don’t duplicate it, for the antitype is always greater. It’s a dangerous thing to build an interpretation on the poetic language of Scripture when we don’t have a clear New Testament interpretation to lean on.

For a little while Jonah was allowed to reap what he had sowed. He had rejoiced at the thought of God’s judgment being poured out on Nineveh. Now he found out what it was like to be under God’s judgment. General Booth, founder of The Salvation Army, used to say that he wished all his soldiers could be hung over the environs of Hell for an hour so that they, having seen the torments of the damned, might have greater zeal for the salvation of men. God gave Jonah a taste of the horrors of Hell, Jonah’s prayer was evidently written in retrospect. “I cried He heard,” the prophet recorded (2:2). “Thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas; and the floods compassed me about: all thy billows and thy waves passed over me” (2:3). We can sense a feeling of horror in his memories.

The prophet’s prayer included a number of quotations from the Psalms. Parallels to Jonah 2 can be found in Psalms 3, 5, 18, 31, 42, 69, 77, 116, and 120. We see in dying Jonah a man whose soul was saturated with the Scriptures. The Lord Jesus also turned to the Psalms in His dying hours. Happy indeed is the person who has stored up the Word of God in his heart, for in the hour of death he has a rich treasury upon which to draw.

From an experience of rebellion and discipline, Jonah turns to an experience of repentance and dedication, and God graciously gives him a new beginning. Jonah no doubt expected to die in the waters of the sea,10 but when he woke up inside the fish, he realized that God had graciously spared him. As with the Prodigal Son, whom Jonah in his rebellion greatly resembles (Luke 15:11–24), it was the goodness of God that brought him to repentance (Rom. 2:4). Notice the stages in Jonah’s spiritual experience as described in his prayer.

2:2 from the depth of Sheol. The phrase does not necessarily indicate that Jonah actually died. “Sheol” frequently has a hyperbolic meaning in contexts where it denotes a catastrophic condition near death (Ps 30:3). Later Jonah expressed praise for his deliverance “from the pit” (v. 6), speaking of his escape from certain death.

However, in spite of the fact that he prayed, Jonah still wasn’t happy with the will of God. In chapter 1, he was afraid of the will of God and rebelled against it, but now he wants God’s will simply because it’s the only way out of his dangerous plight. Like too many people today, Jonah saw the will of God as something to turn to in an emergency, not something to live by every day of one’s life.

Jonah was now experiencing what the sailors experienced during the storm: he felt he was perishing (1:6, 14). It’s good for God’s people, and especially preachers, to remember what it’s like to be lost and without hope. How easy it is for us to grow hardened toward sinners and lose our compassion for the lost. As He dropped Jonah into the depths, God was reminding him of what the people of Nineveh were going through in their sinful condition: they were helpless and hopeless.

In 2:2 Jonah uses two other birthing words that develop this poetical image of his deliverance. (1) When he says “in my distress” (ṣarah, 2:2a), he uses a word that is specifically used of the “travail” of childbirth. It signifies being bound up or being tied in a tight place.4 Jonah is alluding to the distress of a child about to be born (see Bridging Contexts section for further comments). (2) When he says, “from the depths [beṭen] of the grave” (2:2b), he literally says, “from the womb [belly] of Sheol” (Sheol is the place of the dead in the Old Testament).5 This Hebrew phrase “womb of Sheol” is the only time “womb/belly” is used with “Sheol” in Scripture. It continues the image of Jonah’s birthing. He is as good as dead but may be reborn.

God heard Jonah’s cries for help. Prayer is one of the constant miracles of the Christian life. To think that our God is so great He can hear the cries of millions of people at the same time and deal with their needs personally! A parent with two or three children often finds it impossible to meet all their needs all the time, but God is able to provide for all His children, no matter where they are or what their needs may be. “He who has learned to pray,” said William Law, “has learned the greatest secret of a holy and happy life.”

He accepted God’s discipline (Jonah 2:3). The sailors didn’t cast Jonah into the stormy sea; God did. “You hurled me into the deep … all your waves and breakers swept over me” (v. 3, NIV, italics mine). When Jonah said those words, he was acknowledging that God was disciplining him and that he deserved it.

How we respond to discipline determines how much benefit we receive from it. According to Hebrews 12:5–11, we have several options: we can despise God’s discipline and fight (v. 5); we can be discouraged and faint (v. 5); we can resist discipline and invite stronger discipline, possibly even death (v. 9)11; or we can submit to the Father and mature in faith and love (v. 7). Discipline is to the believer what exercise and training are to the athlete (v. 11); it enables us to run the race with endurance and reach the assigned goal (vv. 1–2).

The fact that God chastened His servant is proof that Jonah was truly a child of God, for God disciplines only His own children. “But if you are without chastening, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate and not sons” (v. 8). And the father chastens us in love so that “afterward” we might enjoy “the peaceable fruit of righteousness” (v. 11).

THE PRAYER IS in the form of a psalm with five stanzas and a refrain.6 The five stanzas begin with 2:2 and proceed, one verse at a time, through 2:6. In the first stanza, Jonah summarizes the basic situation (2:2): “I called … and you heard my voice.” In the second through the fifth stanzas, Jonah describes his progressive descent into his watery grave. In stanza 2 he is on the surface of the water (2:3). Jonah is hurled overboard, pulled by currents, and battered by breaking waves on the surface of the sea. In stanza 3 he is in the midst of the seas (2:4). While sinking, he feels banished from Yahweh, yet looks toward his presence. In stanza 4 Jonah is near the bottom (2:5). He is engulfed and surrounded by water, sinking to the seaweed at the bottom. By the last stanza he is drowning (2:6). The sands (bars) of the floor of the sea will be his grave, but Yahweh brings him up (by a fish).

2:4 I have been expelled from Your sight. In 1:3, Jonah ran from the Lord’s presence; here he realizes that the Lord has temporarily expelled him.

“I am cast out of thy sight,” Jonah prayed despairingly, but as he hammered at the heart of God with verse after verse of Scripture, he had a flash of hope. He clung at once to what he was sure would carry weight with God. Remembering Solomon’s prayer at the dedication of the temple, Jonah added, “Yet I will look again toward thy holy temple” (Jonah 2:4). Solomon had prayed:

What prayer and supplication soever be made by any man, or by all thy people Israel, which shall know every man the plague of his own heart, and spread forth his hands toward this house: Then hear thou in heaven thy dwelling place, and forgive (1 Kings 8:38–39).

Jonah did not know where he was in relation to the temple in Jerusalem, but metaphorically he stretched out his hand toward it and had a sudden surge of hope that he would yet be able to “spread forth his hands” literally in the right direction.

2:5 point of death. Lit. “soul.” This describes Jonah’s total person—both physically and spiritually (cf. v. 7).

Then he plunged back into the horror of what and where he was—a rebel in the hands of an angry God. He had a foretaste of Hell: “The depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head. I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars was about me for ever” (Jonah 2:5–6). That is what Jonah reaped. Having gloated over the nasty medicine that God had bottled for Nineveh, he was forced to take a large dose of it himself.

“When my soul fainted within me I remembered the LORD: and my prayer came in unto thee, into thine holy temple.” Jonah remembered the name for God that the benighted heathen sailors had so eagerly grasped: Jehovah, the God of the covenant, the great ever-present I AM.

“I remembered the LORD,” wrote Jonah. God was not far away. He was “a very present help in trouble” (Psalm 46:1). He was with the prophet even in the belly of the whale. Jonah could have added Psalm 139 to his list of Psalms most applicable to his situation.

Jonah said, “They that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercy.” The lying vanity to which he had paid court was his self-will displayed in his refusing the opportunity to be a channel of mercy for Nineveh. Like Solomon, Jonah now wrote “vanity of vanities” over his stubborn rebellion. He had been chasing the wind, and as long as he continued on that course, he was forsaking his own mercy. That is, as long as he was a candidate for God’s judgment, what he needed more than anything else was God’s mercy.

Now at last Jonah could see where his sinful pride and self-will had brought him, and he repented. At the end of his tether in that dark prison, he repented with his dying breath. He acknowledged his sin. He acknowledged God’s justice that had given him just what he had wanted others to receive. He acknowledged that he had no hope other than the salvation over which God had an absolute monopoly. Certainly Jonah could not save himself.

Now Jonah admits that there were idols in his life that robbed him of the blessing of God. An idol is anything that takes away from God the affection and obedience that rightfully belongs only to Him. One such idol was Jonah’s intense patriotism. He was so concerned for the safety and prosperity of his own nation that he refused to be God’s messenger to their enemies the Assyrians. We shall learn from chapter 4 that Jonah was also protecting his own reputation (4:2), for if God spared Nineveh, then Jonah would be branded a false prophet whose words of warning weren’t fulfilled. For somebody who was famous for his prophecies (2 Kings 14:25), this would be devastating.

2:9 I have vowed. Jonah found himself in the same position as the mariners: offering sacrifices and making vows (cf. 1:16). In light of 3:1–4, Jonah’s vow could well have been to carry out God’s ministry will for him by preaching in Nineveh (Pss 50:14; 66:13, 14).

We read of his surrender in Jonah 2:9: “I will pay that that I have vowed.” Jonah had evidently done what so many have done in their extremity: he had made a vow to God. “Lord, get me out of here,” he had said in effect, “and I’ll do anything you want me to do!” The Lord says to all such people, “Defer not to pay thy vows” (see Ecclesiastes 5:4). To give Jonah his due, he kept his word and paid his vow. He came to the place of surrender and offered thanksgiving, praise, and obedience to the Lord.

We also read of his salvation. Dredging up the words of David from somewhere in his reeling, failing mind, Jonah testified, “Salvation is of the Lord” (compare Psalm 3:8 and Jonah 2:9).

Jonah closes his prayer by uttering some solemn vows to the Lord, vows that he really intended to keep. Like the psalmist, he said: “I will go into Your house with burnt offerings; I will pay You my vows, which my lips have uttered and my mouth has spoken when I was in trouble” (Ps. 66:13–14, NKJV). Jonah promised to worship God in the temple with sacrifices and songs of thanksgiving. He doesn’t tell us what other promises he made to the Lord, but one of them surely was, “I will go to Nineveh and declare Your message if You give me another chance.”

2:10 the LORD commanded. Just as God calls the stars by name (Is 40:26; cf. Ps 147:4), so He speaks to His creation in the animal world (cf. Nu 22:28–30). Most likely, Jonah was vomited upon the shore near Joppa.

2:10. After the deliverance of Jonah from the watery grave, the LORD commanded the fish to deposit the prophet safely on dry land, presumably on the coast of Palestine after the three-day return journey (cf. 1:17). Seven miracles have taken place already in this short narrative: God caused a violent storm (1:4), had the lot fall on Jonah (1:7), calmed the sea when Jonah was thrown overboard (1:15), commanded the fish to swallow Jonah (1:17), had the fish transport him safely, had the fish throw Jonah up on dry land, and perhaps greatest of all, melted the disobedient prophet’s heart (evidenced by his thanksgiving prayer in chap. 2).

Jonah couldn’t save himself, and nobody on earth could save him, but the Lord could do it, for “salvation is of the Lord!” (Jonah 2:9b, NKJV) This is a quotation from Psalms 3:8 and 37:39 and it is the central declaration in the book. It is also the central theme of the Bible. How wise of Jonah to memorize the Word of God; because being able to quote the Scriptures, especially the Book of Psalms, gave him light in the darkness and hope in his seemingly hopeless situation.