Read whole · annotated in the margin

Jonah

All 48 verses, with every genuinely disputed point marked where it occurs.

  • Know where the text is actually open — and, more often, where it is not. Most of what people fear about the Bible being “changed” has a specific, checkable answer.
  • See when your translation decided for you. Four English Bibles answer the same open question four different ways in this book, and none of them says so.
  • Watch us show our work, mistakes included. One claim here is marked wrong and kept, with the reason. That is the point, not an embarrassment.
48 verses
16 claims
6 marked verses
1 retracted, kept
Chapter 117Jonah 1:9 — 1 claimJonah 1:17 — 1 claimChapter 210The psalm at Jonah 2:3-10 is a secondary insertion rather than part of the original composChapter 310Jonah 3:3 — 3 claimsJonah 3:4 — 1 claimThe rhetorical target of the book of Jonah is the prophet himself, and through him Israel,Chapter 411Jonah 4:6 — 3 claimsJonah 4:11 — 1 claimThe rhetorical target of the book of Jonah is the prophet himself, and through him Israel,
sourced contested or partial retracted a claim spanning a passage not yet reviewed
I

Text

in the graph
II

Tradition

in the graph
III

Pulpit

not built
IV

Pew

not built
V

Fruit

not built

Five layers; two exist. The distance between them is what we are building, and we will not draw it before it is there.

Coverage

AN UNMARKED VERSE IS NOT A SETTLED VERSE. 0 of Jonah's 48 verses have been systematically reviewed. Claims here were found where they were looked for. Absence of a mark means nobody has looked.

29of 48 verses carry a claim
0verses systematically reviewed
4claims contested
1retracted and kept
4open verification tasks
What is still unchecked
  • 8HevXIIgr at Jonah 3:4 — covers the verse and would be decisive for the Greek tradition. Needs DJD VIII, a library check.
  • Whether 'eved is physically extant or reconstructed in 4Q76/4Q82 at Jonah 1:9 — only 'no variant recorded' was confirmable.
  • source_type / source_tier on all 56 evidence items — heuristic, pending reviewer confirmation.
  • The balance of scholarly opinion across the five Nineveh explanations — characterised from one scholar's framing, not surveyed.

Counts verses touched by a VERSE-SPECIFIC claim. Claims scoped to the whole book are counted separately and deliberately excluded — including them would report 48 of 48 and make coverage look total when it is not.

Chapter 1

1Now the LORD’s word came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying,

2“Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and preach against it, for their wickedness has come up before me.”

3But Jonah rose up to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the LORD. He went down to Joppa, and found a ship going to Tarshish; so he paid its fare, and went down into it, to go with them to Tarshish from the presence of the LORD.

4But the LORD sent out a great wind on the sea, and there was a mighty storm on the sea, so that the ship was likely to break up.

5Then the mariners were afraid, and every man cried to his god. They threw the cargo that was in the ship into the sea to lighten the ship. But Jonah had gone down into the innermost parts of the ship and he was laying down, and was fast asleep.

6So the ship master came to him, and said to him, “What do you mean, sleeper? Arise, call on your God! Maybe your God will notice us, so that we won’t perish.”

7They all said to each other, “Come! Let’s cast lots, that we may know who is responsible for this evil that is on us.” So they cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah.

8Then they asked him, “Tell us, please, for whose cause this evil is on us. What is your occupation? Where do you come from? What is your country? Of what people are you?”

9He said to them, “I am a Hebrew, and I fear the LORD, the God of heaven, who has made the sea and the dry land.”

10Then the men were exceedingly afraid, and said to him, “What have you done?” For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the LORD, because he had told them.

11Then they said to him, “What shall we do to you, that the sea may be calm to us?” For the sea grew more and more stormy.

12He said to them, “Take me up, and throw me into the sea. Then the sea will be calm for you; for I know that because of me this great storm is on you.”

13Nevertheless the men rowed hard to get them back to the land; but they could not, for the sea grew more and more stormy against them.

14Therefore they cried to the LORD, and said, “We beg you, LORD, we beg you, don’t let us die for this man’s life, and don’t lay on us innocent blood; for you, LORD, have done as it pleased you.”

15So they took up Jonah and threw him into the sea; and the sea ceased its raging.

16Then the men feared the LORD exceedingly; and they offered a sacrifice to the LORD and made vows.

17The LORD prepared a huge fish to swallow up Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.

Chapter 2

1Then Jonah prayed to the LORD, his God, out of the fish’s belly.

2He said, “I called because of my affliction to the LORD. He answered me. Out of the belly of Sheol I cried. You heard my voice.

3For you threw me into the depths, in the heart of the seas. The flood was all around me. All your waves and your billows passed over me.

4I said, ‘I have been banished from your sight; yet I will look again toward your holy temple.’

5The waters surrounded me, even to the soul. The deep was around me. The weeds were wrapped around my head.

6I went down to the bottoms of the mountains. The earth barred me in forever; yet you have brought my life up from the pit, LORD my God.

7“When my soul fainted within me, I remembered the LORD. My prayer came in to you, into your holy temple.

8Those who regard vain idols forsake their own mercy.

9But I will sacrifice to you with the voice of thanksgiving. I will pay that which I have vowed. Salvation belongs to the LORD.”

10Then the LORD spoke to the fish, and it vomited out Jonah on the dry land.

Chapter 3

1The LORD’s word came to Jonah the second time, saying,

2“Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and preach to it the message that I give you.”

3So Jonah arose, and went to Nineveh, according to the LORD’s word. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, three days’ journey across.

Try it — this verse

Your Bible already chose a meaning here. Which one do you read?

Every one is defensible. None says a choice was made. KJV and NASB are the only two that decline to decide.

4Jonah began to enter into the city a day’s journey, and he cried out, and said, “In forty days, Nineveh will be overthrown!”

5The people of Nineveh believed God; and they proclaimed a fast and put on sackcloth, from their greatest even to their least.

6The news reached the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, took off his royal robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes.

7He made a proclamation and published through Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles, saying, “Let neither man nor animal, herd nor flock, taste anything; let them not feed, nor drink water;

8but let them be covered with sackcloth, both man and animal, and let them cry mightily to God. Yes, let them turn everyone from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands.

9Who knows whether God will not turn and relent, and turn away from his fierce anger, so that we might not perish?”

10God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way. God relented of the disaster which he said he would do to them, and he didn’t do it.

Chapter 4

1But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry.

2He prayed to the LORD, and said, “Please, LORD, wasn’t this what I said when I was still in my own country? Therefore I hurried to flee to Tarshish, for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness, and you relent of doing harm.

3Therefore now, LORD, take, I beg you, my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.”

4The LORD said, “Is it right for you to be angry?”

5Then Jonah went out of the city and sat on the east side of the city, and there made himself a booth and sat under it in the shade, until he might see what would become of the city.

6The LORD God prepared a vine and made it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shade over his head to deliver him from his discomfort. So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the vine.

7But God prepared a worm at dawn the next day, and it chewed on the vine so that it withered.

8When the sun arose, God prepared a sultry east wind; and the sun beat on Jonah’s head, so that he was faint and requested for himself that he might die. He said, “It is better for me to die than to live.”

9God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the vine?” He said, “I am right to be angry, even to death.”

10The LORD said, “You have been concerned for the vine, for which you have not labored, neither made it grow; which came up in a night and perished in a night.

11Shouldn’t I be concerned for Nineveh, that great city, in which are more than one hundred twenty thousand persons who can’t discern between their right hand and their left hand, and also many animals?”

Method

Three zones, and no discount for our side

Every reader has a position. Concealing it is the dishonesty, not holding it.

Zone I — Commitment

Declared as the lens we read through, never dressed as a neutral finding. The graph does not claim to have settled it.

Zone II — Divided

Where the tradition genuinely disagrees. Both sides carry evidence and the claim is not resolved on the reader’s behalf.

Zone III — Empirical

Ordinary evidentiary standards, with no discount for our own side. Claims favourable to us fail here, and stay in the record when they do.

What this graph refuses to say

Each of these would have been published had nobody checked. They are stored as refusals rather than corrected quietly.

Jonah 3:5-10 — Do not assert that Nineveh is irrelevant to the book, or that the book is 'not about evangelism' — the claim concerns rhetorical target, not subject matter. AND: the Pulpit row was removed from consensus_profile. It recorded an EXPECTATION about what contemporary preaching does with this book. Layer 03 does not exist, so that row was a guess wearing the costume of data.
Jonah 3:4 — the popular explanation that a scribe confused Greek numeral mu (40) with gamma (3) is a CONJECTURE repeated in devotional sources and is not established. Also: a variant in the interval establishes nothing about the book's historicity or date of composition.
Jonah 1:9 — Do not assert that the LXX translator 'changed' the text — deliberate rendering and different Vorlage are both live and scholars are divided. Separately: it could NOT be confirmed whether the word is physically extant or reconstructed in 4Q76/4Q82 at 1:9, only that no variant is recorded. Do not state the scrolls positively 'read Hebrew' there.
Jonah 1:1-4:11 — (1) Mur88 and 8HevXIIgr are NOT Qumran finds — say 'Judaean Desert', never 'Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran'. (2) The much-cited claim that 4Q76 places Jonah directly after Malachi rests on a 5mm physical join with NO LETTERS CROSSING IT and a colour difference in the leather; Guillaume calls it 'highly hypothetical' and Pajunen & von Weissenberg (JBL 2015) argue the text following Malachi was probably not Jonah. DO NOT record the Malachi-Jonah sequence as fact.
Jonah 2:3-10 — 'scholars agree it is a later addition.' They do not — it is contested, and the recent turn runs the other way. Keep separate two questions that get fused: whether the psalm is by the book's author, and whether it fits its narrative setting.
Jonah 1:17 — (1) Do not omit Matthew 16:4. It is the strongest internal datum and popular treatments on BOTH sides leave it out. (2) Do not present the Matthean form as tidy: 'three days and three nights' sits in a long-noted tension with 'on the third day', which appears in eleven New Testament texts. The entry must not imply the chronology is settled.
Jonah 1:1-4:11 — (1) DO NOT cite a 1956 Pontifical Biblical Commission ruling on Jonah's genre — it is unverified and may not exist. (2) 'Nobody read it non-literally before the Enlightenment' is FALSE: Ibn Ezra read the fish episode as a prophetic vision in the 12th century. (3) Do not present satire as the settled critical view; Sasson, Bolin, Berlin and Simon dispute it from within criticism.
Jonah 3:3 — Do not present the size gap as settling the book's genre or historicity — five explanations are live and the disagreement is about which, not whether. The archaeological numbers are not in dispute; the reading of 'three days' journey' is.
Jonah 3:3 — (1) The distribution of opinion above is a CHARACTERISATION built on one scholar's framing and a list of named adherents, not a measured survey. It must never be rendered as a percentage or as 'most scholars'. (2) The walk-around-the-walls reading was ABANDONED by Wiseman, its most-cited proponent — do not cite him for it.
Jonah 3:3 — Do not impute bad faith to translators, and do not extend this to a general claim that translations are unreliable. The claim is narrow and demonstrable: at THIS verse, versions resolve an open question differently and do not tell the reader they have done so.
Jonah 4:11 — (1) The apologetic multiplication — 120,000 children times five implying a city of 600,000 — EXCEEDS EVERY PUBLISHED ESTIMATE. Refuse it. (2) No population figure here is measured. All are density estimates over excavated area, and a recent study concedes they rest largely on guesswork. No figure may be quoted with more precision than that.
Jonah 1:1-4:11 — (1) Micah 7:18-20 is NOT part of the ancient reading. Congregational and popular sources routinely present those verses as original; they are roughly a thousand years younger than the Jonah prescription. (2) Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer is GEONIC, c. 8th century, and pseudepigraphic. The name must not be allowed to date it to the tannaitic period.
Jonah 4:6 — (1) tumultus is 'uproar', NOT 'riot' — do not escalate the Latin. (2) Augustine does not name the disputed word here; any statement of WHICH word requires Jerome Ep. 112.22 as a second citation. Never compress the two letters into one sentence. Note also that Augustine's letter reached Jerome only after years of misdelivery.
Jonah 4:6 — Requires BOTH citations. Do not attribute the identification of the word to Augustine; he never gives it.
Jonah 4:6 — Superseded. Kept as version history: this is what an unverified recollection looks like after checking.
Jonah 1:1-4:11 — This is a ZONE 1 entry. It is declared as a confessional commitment and the lens this project reads through. It must never be presented as a neutral finding of the engine, and the engine must not claim to have adjudicated it. ADDITIONALLY: do not defend this commitment with the false claim that non-literal readings are a modern or Enlightenment invention. Ibn Ezra read the fish episode as a prophetic vision in the 12th century. A Zone 1 entry is declared, not argued from bad history.