to tunnel through a barrier: to bore a hole in the wall of a house, and so to force a way through whatever blocks passage
This is a burglar's word. Houses in the world of the Hebrew Bible were built of sun dried mud brick, and a thief working at night did not pick a lock or force a door. He scraped and bored a hole straight through the wall until a body could crawl in. Every use of this verb keeps that picture in view.
That is what separates it from the other Hebrew words for digging. Sinking a pit, a well or a grave down into open ground is a different verb, to dig down (כָּרָה) or to dig out (חָפַר). This one always means going through something that was put up to keep a person out, and the noun built from it names the resulting hole, the burglar's breach (מַחְתֶּרֶת).
The prophets and poets take that one concrete picture a long way:
- Ezekiel is told to widen a hole in a temple wall so that hidden idol worship is dragged into the open.
- Ezekiel then bores through the wall of his own house at dusk, acting out a king slipping out of a doomed city like a thief.
- Amos pictures fugitives burrowing down into the world of the dead, only to find God's hand already waiting there.
- Jonah's sailors work their oars against a sea that will not let them through.
What holds those uses together is not the digging but the barrier. In almost every case the effort is forced, and in almost every case it fails or turns back on the one making it.
Nuances
How חתר, which everywhere else in the Hebrew Bible denotes boring through a mud-brick wall, comes to describe the sailors' effort at the oars in Jonah 1:13. Hebrew possessed ordinary nautical vocabulary for rowing (שׁוט, and the noun שַׁיִט at Isaiah 33:21), and the surrounding chapter deploys accurate sailing terms (מַלָּח, סְפִינָה, רַב הַחֹבֵל), which sharpens the question of why this verb was chosen. The ancient versions already register the difficulty: LXX reads παρεβιάζοντο, a general verb of forcing or straining, the Vulgate simply remigabant, and Targum Jonathan substitutes the ordinary rowing verb.
- majorityA figurative extension of the ordinary sense of the verb: the oars bore into the water as a burglar's tools bore through a wall, an image of near impossible effort against a medium that offers no purchase.; L. Koehler and W. Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, English ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1994-2000), 1:365, s.v. חתר; F. Brown, S. R. Driver and C. A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1907), 369, s.v. חתר; J. M. Sasson, Jonah, Anchor Bible 24B (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 128-131; H. W. Wolff, Obadiah and Jonah, Continental Commentaries (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1986), 102; U. Simon, Jonah, JPS Bible Commentary (Philadelphia: JPS, 1999), 88-89
- minorityA homonymic second root, cognate with Akkadian ḫatāru "to move convulsively, twitch, jerk," yielding a native sense of plying or jerking the oars rather than a metaphor drawn from digging.; J. M. Sasson, Jonah, Anchor Bible 24B (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 130-131, canvassing G. R. Driver's proposal; W. von Soden, Akkadisches Handwörterbuch (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1958-1981), I:336, s.v. ḫatāru
- minorityNeither a metaphor nor a separate root but a deliberate literary choice: the writer passed over the ordinary rowing verb to reach the burglary verb of Job 24:16, Ezekiel and Amos 9:2, figuring the sailors' effort as a transgressive breach against the divine will.; C. Meredith, "The Conundrum of ḥtr in Jonah 1:13," Vetus Testamentum 64/1 (2014): 147-152