The Lot Fell on Jonah

The praying has not worked, the cargo is gone, and the sea is still trying to kill them, so the sailors try the last thing left to them. They cast lots. It is close to drawing straws: a way of settling a question that argument cannot settle, and the Bible records it being used when people needed an answer they could not reason their way to. Proverbs has a line about the practice, that the lot is cast into the lap but its every decision comes from the LORD. These men are out of ideas, and the lot falls on Jonah, and the questions come at him fast, the way questions come when frightened people want an explanation now.

What is your occupation, and where have you come from? What is your country, and who are your people?

His answer is entirely correct. He tells them he is a Hebrew, and then he names his God, and the naming is not vague.

I worship the LORD, the God of the heavens, who made the sea and the dry land.

Under pressure, to strangers, in weather that could drown all of them, he gives a clear and accurate account of who God is. There is nothing in it to correct. He is also, while he says it, out in the middle of the sea that God made, on a ship he paid for, headed the opposite way from where God sent him. He tells them God made the water. He is using the water to get away from him.

The men are more frightened after his answer than they were before it, which is how you can tell they understood it. They do not ask him for anything more about himself. They ask what he has done. Then the writer adds a quiet line at the end of verse 10 that changes the whole scene.

The men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the LORD, because he had told them.

He had already told them. At some point earlier, Jonah had explained to a boatload of foreign sailors that he was running away from his God. He was not hiding it. He was talking about it.