The captain could not understand how anyone could sleep at a time like this. The ship was "like to be broken," the cargo had been thrown overboard, and every sailor was praying (Jonah 1:4-5). Yet one passenger slept. Keil & Delitzsch render the captain's words "How canst thou sleep soundly?" On Jonah 1:5 they trace Jonah's sleep to careless self-security, a false sense that he was safe. The captain also needed every prayer he could get. Gill notes that the captain's own gods "were insufficient to help them," so he wanted this stranger to pray to his God as well. The question presses Jonah to wake up and do what everyone else on board was already doing: call for help.

Jonah never answers, and the text does not say that he prayed. The narrative moves straight to the sailors, who say, "let us cast lots, that we may know for whose cause this evil is upon us," and the lot falls on Jonah (Jonah 1:7). Jonah's first recorded prayer in the book comes later, "out of the fish's belly" (Jonah 2:1). The captain's hope "that we perish not" is met only after Jonah is cast into the sea and "the sea ceased from her raging" (Jonah 1:15).

The men on this ship did not worship the LORD. Keil & Delitzsch say on Jonah 1:5 that the crew were heathen (people who did not know the true God), probably mostly Phoenicians, a seafaring people, who came from different places and had different gods. The captain's title, "shipmaster," is literally rab chobel in Hebrew, the chief of the sailors. Keil & Delitzsch explain that chobel comes from chebel, a ship's cable or rope, so a sailor was one who handled the ropes. That is why Gill renders the title "the master of the ropers."

Two more words stand out. "Sleeper" is nirdam, the same word as "fast asleep" in Jonah 1:5. Its root means to be stunned or stupefied, whether by deep sleep or by death. "Think upon" is ashath, used in this sense only here. Keil & Delitzsch note that God's thinking of a person "involves the idea of active assistance." In other words, the captain hoped God would not only notice them but act to help them.

The storm is not chance: "the LORD sent out a great wind into the sea" (Jonah 1:4). The scene is full of irony. The man who knows the LORD sleeps, while a heathen captain has to tell him to pray. The captain says "God" with the article, the way we might say the God instead of a god, and Keil & Delitzsch take this as "the true God." His "if so be" makes no claim on God. It is only a hope that God will notice them and spare them.

The same hope returns at Nineveh, where the king asks, "Who can tell if God will turn and repent, and turn away from his fierce anger, that we perish not?" (Jonah 3:9). In both places, people outside Israel cast themselves on God's mercy, and in both places God spares them (Jonah 1:15-16; Jonah 3:10). The book shows a God whose mercy reaches sailors and Ninevites, even while His own prophet is running from Him.