Jonah 1:3

I recently started reading Jonah, and I noticed a small feature in the third verse of the first chapter, specifically in the sentence "But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the LORD" (ESV).  As if to reflect the distance that Jonah wants to put between himself and God, "Jonah" and "the LORD" are at opposite ends of the sentence.

From what I can tell, this feature is also present in the original Hebrew text, although it's not quite as extreme.  The Latin Vulgate has a comparable structure:  "et surrexit Iona ut fugeret in Tharsis a facie Domini."  "וַיָּקָם" in Hebrew and "et surrexit" in Latin ("and/but rose") are all that prevent "Jonah" from being at the beginning of the sentence and "the LORD" at the end.

This sort of structure isn't present in the NIV, however, where this sentence is rendered as "But Jonah ran away from the LORD and headed for Tarshish."

Mark 9:14-29 (Jesus Heals a Boy with an Unclean Spirit)

I've been working through Mark 9 in the archives of the Daily Dose of Greek, and a couple weeks ago, I realized that the account in verses 14-29 (where Jesus heals a boy with an unclean spirit) provides something of a foreshadowing of the resurrection of the dead.

This is clearest in verses 26 and 27:  "26 And after crying out and convulsing him terribly, it [the unclean spirit] came out, and the boy was like a corpse, so that most of them [the people in the crowd] said, 'He is dead.'  27 But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up, and he arose."  After a deathlike state, the boy arises.  The verb here is ἀνίστημι, and this is the same verb that's used to refer to the resurrection of the dead in John 11 (where Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead).