Jonah 2:6
I went down to the bottoms of the mountains. The earth barred me in forever: yet have you brought up my life from the pit, Yahweh my God.
WEB
I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars was about me for ever: yet hast thou brought up my life from corruption, O LORD my God.2.6 bottoms: Heb. cuttings off2.6 corruption: or, the pit
KJV
What Jonah 2:6 means
From the very bottom of the sea, sinking past the roots of the mountains with the earth's gates shutting behind him for good, Jonah is suddenly lifted up alive. It is a cry of rescue from a place that looked like the end.
Jonah 2:6 comes from a prayer offered in the strangest of chapels: the belly of the great fish. Having fled God and been thrown overboard, Jonah prays a psalm of thanksgiving while still inside the creature, looking back on how far he had fallen. He describes drowning in vivid detail, water closing over his head, weeds wrapping his face, before he reaches the turn where he is pulled back up.
The language is borrowed straight from the Psalms of the dying. "The bottoms of the mountains" and "the bars of the earth" picture the ancient underworld, Sheol, the pit, whose gates were imagined slamming shut on the dead. Jonah is not merely underwater. He is describing himself as good as buried, past the point of return, locked in "forever."
Two Hebrew words carry the weight. The pit is shachat, a word for the grave and for decay itself. And le'olam, "forever," is the door that seems to close for good. Then comes the hinge, the small word rendered "yet" or "but," and everything reverses: God brings his life up out of that pit.
The verse anchors a stubborn kind of hope. It says that rescue can reach lower than the lowest place a person can go, and that what looks final may not be. Even from the floor of the sea, a way back up exists.