Jonah 2:4

"Jonah prayed to Jehovah his God out of the fish's belly." The prayer which follows (Jon 2:2-9) is not a petition for deliverance, but thanksgiving and praise for deliverance already received. It by no means follows from this, however, that Jonah did not utter this prayer till after he had been vomited upon the land, and that v. 10 ought to be inserted before v. 2; but, as the earlier commentators have shown, the fact is rather this, that when Jonah had been swallowed by the fish, and found that he was preserved alive in the fish's belly, he regarded this as a pledge of his deliverance, for which he praised the Lord. Luther also observes, that "he did not actually utter these very words with his mouth, and arrange them in this orderly manner, in the belly of the fish; but that he here shows what the state of his mind was, and what thoughts he had when he was engaged in this conflict with death." The expression "his God" (אלהיו) must not be overlooked. He prayed not only to Jehovah, as the heathen sailors also did (Jon 1:14), but to Jehovah as his God, from whom he had tried to escape, and whom he now addresses again as his God when in peril of death. "He shows his faith by adoring Him as his God" (Burk). The prayer consists for the most part of reminiscences of passages in the Psalms, which were so exactly suited to Jonah's circumstances, that he could not have expressed his thoughts and feelings any better in words of his own. It is by no means so "atomically compounded from passages in the Psalms" that there is any ground for pronouncing it "a later production which has been attributed to Jonah," as Knobel and De Wette do; but it is the simple and natural utterance of a man versed in the Holy Scripture and living in the word of God, and is in perfect accordance with t…

2:4 On the brink of drowning, Jonah called out for help, for life, and for God’s renewed presence. It is ironic that Jonah spoke of God as driving Jonah from his presence, for that was Jonah’s own aim in fleeing to Tarshish (1:3). • I will look once more: Either Jonah was confident that he would be rescued and thus worship again in the Temple in Jerusalem, or he was calling to the Lord in his Temple from the sea (cp. 2:7).