For 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.
| Word | Hebrew | Strong’s | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| cast | וַתַּשְׁלִיכֵ֤נִי va.tash.li.Khe.ni | H7993 | to throw out · conjunction + verb, hiphil sequential imperfect, 2nd person masculine singular + pronominal suffix |
| deep | מְצוּלָה֙ me.tzu.Lah | H4688 | a deep place (of water or mud) · noun, common feminine singular absolute |
| midst | בִּלְבַ֣ב bil.Vav | H3824 | the heart (as the most interior organ) · preposition + noun, common masculine singular construct |
| seas | יַמִּ֔ים ya.Mim | H3220 | a sea (as breaking in noisy surf) or large body of water · noun, common masculine plural absolute |
| floods | וְנָהָ֖ר ve.na.Har | H5104 | a stream (including the sea · conjunction + noun, common masculine singular absolute |
| compassed | יְסֹבְבֵ֑נִי ye.soe.Ve.ni | H5437 | to revolve · verb, piel imperfect, 3rd person masculine singular + pronominal suffix |
| billows | מִשְׁבָּרֶ֥יךָ mish.ba.Rei.kha | H4867 | a breaker (of the sea) · noun, common masculine plural construct + pronominal suffix, 2nd person masculine singular |
| waves | וְגַלֶּ֖יךָ ve.ga.Lei.kha | H1530 | something rolled · conjunction + noun, common masculine plural construct + pronominal suffix, 2nd person masculine singular |
| over | עָבָֽרוּ 'a.Va.ru | H5674 | to cross over · verb, qal perfect, 3rd person common plural |
Strong's Exhaustive Concordance (James Strong, 1890/1894), public domain; digitized by Open Scriptures (CC BY-SA). KJV word tagging: eBible.org (public domain). Original-language text, parsing and brief lexicon: STEPBible.org data from Tyndale House, Cambridge (CC BY 4.0).
Cross-references from OpenBible.info (CC BY), in the lineage of the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge (public domain).
thou hadst cast . . . thy billows . . . thy waves--Jonah recognizes the source whence his sufferings came. It was no mere chance, but the hand of God which sent them. Compare Job's similar recognition of God's hand in calamities, ; ; and David's, .
All thy billows and thy waves passed over me - This may be understood literally; while the fish, in whose belly he was, sought its pleasure or sustenance in the paths of the deep, the waves and billows of the sea were rolling above. This line seems borrowed from Psa 42:7.
For thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas,.... Though the mariners did this, yet Jonah ascribes it to the Lord; he knew it was he, whom he had sinned against and offended; that he was he that sent the storm after him into the sea; that determined the lot to fall upon him; that it was not only by his permission, but according to his will, that he should be east into it, and overcame the reluctance of the men to it, and so worked upon them that they did it; and therefore Jonah imputes it to him, and not to them; nor does he complain of it, or murmur at it; or censure it as an unrighteous action, or as hard, cruel, and severe; but rather mentions it to set off the greatness…
Read the whole note in the consoleJonah 2:3 3. For 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. 3. Atqui projeceras me in profundum, in cor marium, et fluvius circumdedit me; omnes conflictus tui (sed hac voce intelligit undas quae inter se confligunt; scimus enim esse varias collisiones, ideo vertunt aliqui, contritiones tui, nam schr significat proprie confligere et frangere; perinde est igitur ac si diceret, omnes fracturae tuae et collisiones super me transierunt, et explicat quid velit, quum dicit) fluctus tui super me transierunt. In this verse are set forth his difficulties: for Jonah, for the sake of amplifying, refers…
he cried with the whole passion of his heart, according to the Apostle who says, "You have received a spirit of adoption as sons, by virtue of which we cry, 'Abba, Father!'"
"For you had cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas; and the floods compassed me about." LXX: 'you cast me into the deep of the heart from the sea, and the waves surrounded me'. The interpretation of the person of Jonah is not difficult: from the moment when he was closed in the stomach of the whale and found himself at the deepest and middle of the sea, he was surrounded by waves. For the Lord, the Saviour, prefiguring psalm 68 in which he says, "I am enshrouded in the deep mud where there is no ground. I have come to the deepest part of the sea and the storm engulfs me" [Ps. 68:3]. It is said of him in another psalm: "but you, you have rejected, despised and disquieted your Christ; you have cursed the covenant of your master, you have dishonoured his sacred place on earth, you have destroyed all its walls" [Ps. 88:39-41], and so on. For in this comparison of divine blessing and that place about which is written, "his home is in sacred peace" [Ps. 75:3], all habitation on earth is full of waves, full of storms. And the "heart of the sea" means hell, for which we read in the Gospel, "in the heart of the earth" [Mt. 12:40]. For just as the heart is at the middle of animal, so we say that hell is in the middle of the earth. Or according to anagoge he recalls that he is "in the heart of the sea", that is in the middle of temptations. However, although he has been among the bitter waters and been tempted by all things without sin, he has not felt the bitter waters, but has been surrounded by the waves about which we read elsewhere, "an impetuous wave rejoices in the city of God" [Ps. 45:5]. Others drank the salty waves; myself, surrounded by temptation, I endured sweeter currents. And do not think what the Lord says now is impious: "you have cast me into the deep", who says in the psalm, "for they have followed him that you smote" [Ps. 68:27], according to the phrase which in Zechariah is spoken by the Father: "I will smite the shepherd, and the flocks will be scattered" [Zechariah 13:7]. "All thy billows and thy waves passed over me." LXX: 'all your whirlwinds and your waves passed over me'. No one can doubt that the swelling waves of the sea encompassed Jonah, that there was fierce thunder in the storm. But we ask how all the whirlwinds, billows and the waves of God encompassed the Saviour. "The life of men on earth is temptation" [Job 7:1], or as…
The Church Fathers: public-domain translations (Ante-Nicene and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers), verse-indexed by SermonIndex (CC BY 4.0).
Dictionary: Easton's (1897) and Smith's (1863), public domain. Topics: Nave's Topical Bible (1896) and Torrey's Topical Textbook (1897), public domain. Both as parsed by NEUU (CC BY 4.0).
3 Thou castedst me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, And the stream surrounded me; All Thy billows and Thy waves went over me. 4 Then I said, I am thrust away from Thine eyes, Yet I will look again to Thy holy temple. The more minute description of the peril of death is attached by Vav consec., to express not sequence in time, but sequence of thought. Jehovah cast him into the depth of the sea, because the seamen were merely the executors of the punishment inflicted upon him by Jehovah. Metsūlâh, the deep, is defined by "the heart of the seas" as the deepest abyss of the ocean. The plural yammı̄m (seas) is used here with distinct significance, instead of the singular, "into the he…
Read the whole note in the consoleJonah’s psalm-prayer opens by recalling a previous prayer that was not so polished yet was all the more fervent—his cry for help while on the verge of drowning. • from the land of the dead (literally from the belly of Sheol): Sheol was thought to be the abode of the dead (see Isa 14:15; Ezek 31:15-17). The belly metaphor for Sheol is found nowhere else in the Old Testament; it pictures Jonah’s experience of being delivered from Sheol through the belly of a fish.
from the belly of the grave—From the belly of the fish, which is to me as the grave.
Henry, Jamieson-Fausset-Brown, Clarke, Gill, Calvin and Keil & Delitzsch are in the public domain; Tyndale Open Study Notes © Tyndale House Publishers, CC BY-SA 4.0 — all from the Free Use Bible API (bible.helloao.org). Rashi: the Rosenbaum & Silbermann Pentateuch (public domain) and the Judaica Press and Metsudah Tanakh (CC BY), via Sefaria. Spurgeon's Treasury of David: public domain (lyteword's markdown edition, CC0).
