Jonah 1:9

"And he said unto them, I am a Hebrew; and I fear Jehovah the God of heaven, who hath made the sea and the dry land."

"I am a Hebrew ..." Jonah answered their last question first. "Hebrew is the name by which the Israelites designated themselves in contradistinction to other nations, and by which other nations designated them (Genesis 14:13)."[27]

"I fear Jehovah the God of heaven ..." The Interpreter's Bible calls this, "A common post-exilic title for [~Yahweh], and in wide use in the Book of Ezra, and in the Elephantine papyri of the fifth century B.C.!"[28] Such irresponsible comments as this are designed to support a postexilic dating of Jonah, long after the times when Jonah lived; but such allegations are completely refuted and contradicted by the fact that Abraham himself, the ancestor of all the Hebrews, refers to God in exactly these same words (Genesis 24:7). It is more charitable to charge Smart (in Interpreter's Bible) with ignorance than it is to charge him with a lack of integrity.

"Who hath made the sea and the dry land ..." Such a confession on Jonah's part was calculated, whether by design or not, to arouse the most anxious fear on the part of the sailors. It was precisely "the sea" which was the source of all their troubles at the moment; and the knowledge that Jonah had offended the God who created the sea would have been the cause of the most urgent alarm.

"I fear Jehovah ..." This should not be taken to mean that Jonah, at the moment, was in mortal fear that God would destroy him, or that he was here professing innocence and righteousness in his behavior toward God; but it is a simple statement of his relationship to the God of Israel, having this meaning:

"...Namely, that he adored the living God who created the whole earth, and, as Creator, governed the world. He admits directly afterward that he has sinned against this God."[29]