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Jonah 4 - Jonah's Wrath at the Lord's Evensorrow

  1. But this most misquemed Jonah, and he was highly wroth.
  2. And he bade to the Lord, and said, ‘I bid thee, O Lord, was not this my saying, when I was yet in my homeland? Therefore I fled before to Tarshish: for I knew that thou art an eesty God, and mildheart, slow to wrothen, and of great kindness, and who beruses from sending evil.
  3. ‘Therefore now, O Lord, nim, I beseech thee, my life from me; for it is better for me to queal than to live.’
  4. Then said the Lord, ‘Doest thou well to be wroth?’
  5. So Jonah went out of the borough, and sat on the east side of the borough, and there he made a shamble, and sat under it in the shadow, until he might see what would become of the borough.
  6. And the Lord God yat a thove wort1 ready, and made it come over Jonah, so that it might be a shadow over his head, to aleese him from his heartsickness. So Jonah was most glad of the wort.
  7. But God made a worm ready when the morning rose the next day, and it smote the wort so that it withered.
  8. And it came to ago, when the sun did arise, that God made an aver east wind ready; and the sun beat upon the head of Jonah, so that he blacked out, and wished in himself to queal, and said, ‘It is better for me to queal than to live.’
  9. And God said to Jonah, ‘Doest thou well to be wroth for the wort?’ And he said, ‘I do well to be wroth, even until death.’
  10. Then said the Lord, ‘Thou hast had sorrow for the wort, for that which thou hast not worked, neither hast thou made it grow; that which came up in a night, and quole in a night:
  11. And should not I spare Nineveh, that great borough, wherein there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand folks that cannot make out her right hand from her left; and also much livestock?

  1. The Hebrew word is קִיקָיוֹן (qîqāyôn). According to Wiktionary, under the English word kikayon, this is “a plant mentioned in the Book of Jonah, where it provides shade; possibly a gourd or a castor oil plant.” Many translations of the bible say "gourd" or "leafy plant" (here translated as thove wort), and the NIV Exhaustive Concordance Dictionary lists the word as meaning "caster-oil vine" or "cucumber plant". ↩