Jonah 1:3b Septuagint

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]Jonah, chapter 1, verse 3, second half here. The first half of the verse we saw that Jonah does the opposite of what God commands him to do. Instead of going to Nineveh, he heads to Joppa and there is trying to get to Tarshish. And so, once he's at this coastal town, what does he do? Let's read. K edoken ton naulon auto. K en ebe ace alta to plusa met altone ace tharsis ek prosopou kuriou.

[00:00:27]Uh so, again, a bunch of kais here driving the narrative. So, and Jonah does this, and he does this, and he does this. It's a cascade of disobedience, if you will. And first verb here is edoken from didomi, third singular aorist there. So, he gives, or he gave. Now, what does he give? His naulon. This is going to be like your ship fare. Or, uh it's like your ticket, your your right of passage, the passage money. Uh so, he gives his passage money to the ship owners, and then he embainos in ebe there, third singular aorist active indicative. That means to enter, uh typically in a sailing context, or embark. Now, it's interesting, uh if you look this up in the Masoretic, it actually says yarad, which means to go down, which is the same verb that we saw in the prior half of the verse. Some manuscripts instead uh render, instead of en ebe to embark or enter, they render it on ebe, or from anabaino, which means to like go up on it. And that is a pretty common sailing term. We see it, for instance, in Acts 21, where they uh went up onto the boat. Uh typically, you would kind of go up on it, but uh embaino also works. Now, unfortunately, um the the fact that the translator chose a more technical term for going onto the boat actually severes a little running uh kind of word motif that you see in the Masoretic. But, what you see in multiple verses that Jonah goes down, he goes down, he goes down, uh yarad there, over and over again, trying to show how far away he's trying to get from the Lord God. And so unfortunately this translation choice kind of severs that but it is what it is. Okay, so where does he go? Into it. So the alta here is neuter referring back to the ployon the boat in the prior half of the verse. Now why does he embark on the boat to plousai here? This is from pleo and this is going to be an arist arist active infinitive here. You see the psi ending with the purpose genitive article. So he embarks on it that is the boat to sail.

[00:02:28]Now this is kind of interesting choice where the masoretic just has bow here just go but the translator here has picked a more specific sailing or nautical term there. So that's an interesting choice kind of like what they did over here. So they're making a little bit more sailing oriented as opposed to kind of a generic set of action verbs. And he is with them that is with the people who are on that boat to Tarshish or Tharsis here. And then we have the repetition of from the face or away from the face or presence of the Lord. We saw that earlier in this particular verse in part A. So Jonah is now setting sail heading to Tarshish.

[00:03:05]He's doing the best he can to get away from the presence of the Lord. And so we'll see what the Lord's going to do about that in due course but that's Jonah 1:3.