He said to them, "I am a Hebrew, and I fear Yahweh, the God of heaven, who has made the sea and the dry land."
Jonah’s confession is a central feature in the narrative. It is the center of a literary chiasmus that begins in Jonah 1:4 and extends through Jonah 1:16. [Note: See Ernst R. Wendland, "Text Analysis and the Genre of Jonah (Part 2)," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 39:3 (September 1996):374-75, which also points out many other structural features of Jonah.] 