1:6a
The captain approached him: The captain of the ship, that is, the man who was in charge of the ship, found Jonah asleep and was surprised. Although it is possible that the captain had gone looking for Jonah, most commentators consider it more likely that he just noticed Jonah asleep when he went down into the ship for some other reason, perhaps to get some more cargo to throw into the sea.
1:6b
How can you sleep?: His question to Jonah was not a real question, but a rhetorical one. He was scolding Jonah for being asleep when he should have been praying to his god for help. If rhetorical questions cannot be used in your language for scolding, you may need to use a statement here instead of a question.
1:6c
Get up and call upon your God: The captain ordered Jonah to pray fervently to his god for help. Notice Berean Standard Bible uses God with a capital “G” because it refers to the true God even though the captain did not yet know that Jonah’s god was the true God. However, since the captain did not know this he probably talked about him as if he were just one of many gods. Other versions do not capitalize “god” here (New International Version, NET Bible, New Revised Standard Version, English Standard Version, etc).
Notice that qum here has its normal meaning of “get up” although the construction is similar to 1:2a. Jonah was lying down, so it is natural that the captain should tell him to Get up. So it should be translated as a separate verb.
1:6d
Perhaps this God will consider us, so that we may not perish: The people from the nations near Israel believed that storms were caused and controlled by various gods and that they had the power to stop or even start storms. Therefore, the captain felt that it was very important that everyone on the ship ought to be praying to their gods so the people on board the ship would be spared and not die.
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