Jonah 3:6

Near the end of March, I started going through Jonah in the archives of the Daily Dose of Hebrew.  A couple weeks ago, I went over Jonah 3:6:  "The word reached the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes."  I think there's some significant word choice in the Hebrew here.  "Word" (דָּבָר) and "arose" (from the verb קוּם) also appear at the beginning of the book, in Jonah 1:1-3a:  "1 Now the word of the LORD came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, 2 'Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.'  3 But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the LORD."

Using the same words in these two sections highlights the contrast between Jonah in chapter 1 and the king of Nineveh in chapter 3.  When the word of the LORD comes to Jonah, he rises to try to avoid it, but when the word reaches the king of Nineveh, he rises to take action.

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."