Jonah 1:7-16--Jonah Is Thrown into the Sea

​Jonah 1:7-16
English Standard Version

Jonah Is Thrown into the Sea
7 And they said to one another, “Come, let us cast lots, that we may know on whose account this evil has come upon us.” So they cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah. 8 Then they said to him, “Tell us on whose account this evil has come upon us. What is your occupation? And where do you come from? What is your country? And of what people are you?” 9 And he said to them, “I am a Hebrew, and I fear the LORD, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.” 10 Then the men were exceedingly afraid and said to him, “What is this that you have done!” For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the LORD, because he had told them.

11 Then they said to him, “What shall we do to you, that the sea may quiet down for us?” For the sea grew more and more tempestuous. 12 He said to them, “Pick me up and hurl me into the sea; then the sea will quiet down for you, for I know it is because of me that this great tempest has come upon you.” 13 Nevertheless, the men rowed hard to get back to dry land, but they could not, for the sea grew more and more tempestuous against them. 14 Therefore they called out to the LORD, “O LORD, let us not perish for this man's life, and lay not on us innocent blood, for you, O LORD, have done as it pleased you.” 15 So they picked up Jonah and hurled him into the sea, and the sea ceased from its raging. 16 Then the men feared the LORD exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the LORD and made vows.

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I touched on this passage a bit yesterday as many of us probably know this story well.  We ended yesterday with the captain of the ship coming to Jonah to ask him to cry out to his god because everyone else had cried out to their gods with no avail and the captains saying, "Arise, call out to your god! Perhaps the god will give a thought to us, that we may not perish.”  In the mind of the captain, the LORD is just one of many gods on equal footing with all the other gods worshiped by all the other men from various people groups on board that ship.  However, Jonah knows differently as we see from his no-answer here.  He does not respond to the plea of the captain because he does not speak to the LORD, he probably feels worthy of death, and given what we see in other places in the book, he probably wouldn't feel too bad about a ship full of godless pagans going down with him.

So, the LORD puts it in the minds of the people on the ship to cast lots to see who is responsible for this calamity that has come upon them.  To most, this would appear to be pure divination and attributing meaning to things that were random chance, but that's part of the pagan ideas--they worshiped The Fates and believed that their gods could control seemingly random events to communicate with them.  This is a perversion of something we know to be true about the LORD-"The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD." (Proverbs 16:33).  Only the LORD can control the outcome of this lot that is being cast (just like He did on Purim, which is literally a word for a lot being cast) because these other gods are powerless idols.  However, Jonah should know that He's in trouble here as he should have known of stories like that of Achan's sin when the LORD used lots to reveal to the community the guilty party.

Just like Achan, Jonah does not tell the truth about what is going on until the lot falls on him--he hopes somehow that the lot might fall on someone else and they might be punished for the wrongdoing he has done (or he seriously thinks he has done nothing wrong until the lot falls on him because his heart is cold).  They then ask for an explanation.  They want to know who he is, what he does for a living, where he has come from, what people he belongs to, and what he has done that might cause this evil to come upon them.  He tells them that he is a Hebrew and fears the LORD (though it doesn't look like it in this moment).  He refers to the LORD as "The God of heaven who made the sea and dry land" as most of these pagans would not be familiar with the LORD or His covenant Name that He had revealed to His people. 

The men on the ship are then exceedingly afraid and ask Jonah, "What have you done?"  They realize that a god who is able to speak everything into existence out of nothing is not a god to be trifled with.  Notice the one question Jonah didn't want to answer is "What is your occupation?"  Imagine how they would react if he said, "I'm a prophet of the LORD," because they already knew he was trying to run away from the LORD.  Even the pagan people on this ship can see how Jonah's rebellion would anger the LORD, and they didn't even worship the LORD.

They ask Jonah what they should do to him so that the LORD would be appeased and Jonah claims they should pick him up and throw him into the sea (a kind of pagan sacrifice they would recognize to try to appease the god of the sea).  Jonah knows the LORD is not appeased by human sacrifice, but Jonah does not want to repent and is probably hoping that he would die at sea and never have to go to to Nineveh.  He knows he is at fault--at least he is willing to admit that much, but he is unwilling to say "Turn the ship around so that I can be obedient instead of disobedient."  Then, the pagans start crying out to the LORD asking Him to save them because they do not want to be held accountable for Jonah's sins--this is amazing stuff that the very people Jonah saw as godless and was willing to let them die condemned are, without much help from Jonah, seemingly on the path to recognizing that the LORD is the only one who can save them and on the path to asking Him for salvation and understanding the concepts of sin being an offense to the LORD worthy of death and eternal punishment.  Don't lose this, as this as this is a microcosm of something we'll see on a macro-scale later in the book.  God is using the pagans to do a work on Jonah, not the other way around (which is what we would expect).

They ask that the LORD not charge the death of Jonah against them because they see what they are doing as just punishment for his sins/crimes and that they don't see this as the shedding of innocent blood, and then they picked up Jonah and threw him into the raging sea.  Not only did the storm immediately stop (which we know is not normal, and the men realize this because they truly began to fear the LORD, and they offered sacrifices to Him in worship (and they likely understood the idea of blood sacrifices for the forgiveness of sin as that idea was as old as the Garden of Eden and the idea probably was passed to all peoples, even the people that came from Noah and his sons after the Flood that were divided and confused at the Tower of Babel).  For now, we'll leave Jonah being thrown into the sea, but the LORD is not going to let Jonah get off that easy.  If you already know this story, you know what is coming next.