Online Bible: New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures

1 To Jo´nah, though, it was highly displeasing, and he got to be hot with anger. 2 Hence he prayed to Jehovah and said: “Ah, now, O Jehovah, was not this an affair of mine, while I happened to be on my own ground? That is why I went ahead and ran away to Tar´shish; for I knew that you are a God gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abundant in loving-kindness, and feeling regret over the calamity. 3 And now, O Jehovah, take away, please, my soul from me, for my dying is better than my being alive.”

4 In turn Jehovah said: “Have you rightly become hot with anger?”

5 Then Jo´nah went out of the city and sat down east of the city; and gradually he made for himself there a booth, that he might sit under it in the shade until he would see what would become of the city. 6 Accordingly Jehovah God appointed a bottle-gourd plant, that it should come up over Jo´nah, in order to become a shade over his head, to deliver him from his calamitous state. And Jo´nah began to rejoice greatly over the bottle-gourd plant.

7 But the [true] God appointed a worm at the ascending of the dawn on the next day, that it should strike the bottle-gourd plant; and it gradually dried up. 8 And it came about that, as soon as the sun shone forth, God also went on to appoint a parching east wind, and the sun kept striking upon the head of Jo´nah, so that he was swooning away; and he kept asking that his soul might die, and he repeatedly said: “My dying off is better than my being alive.”

9 And God proceeded to say to Jo´nah: “Have you rightly become hot with anger over the bottle-gourd plant?”

At that he said: “I have rightly become hot with anger, to the point of death.” 10 But Jehovah said: “You, for your part, felt sorry for the bottle-gourd plant, which you did not toil upon or make get big, which proved to be a mere growth of a night and perished as a mere growth of a night. 11 And, for my part, ought I not to feel sorry for Nin´e·veh the great city, in which there exist more than one hundred and twenty thousand men who do not at all know the difference between their right hand and their left, besides many domestic animals?”