to vomit: to bring back up and throw out what has been swallowed
This is the plain, unpleasant word for throwing up. Its sounds imitate gagging, and the writers never soften it: what went in comes back out, and nobody picks the moment.
What makes the word worth study is the range of things the Bible puts in the position of the one doing the vomiting:
- a guest brings up the meal a grudging host served him
- someone who eats too much honey brings it up again
- a great fish brings up the prophet Jonah onto dry land
- God makes a greedy man give back up the wealth he swallowed
- the land itself brings up the people living on it
The warnings in Leviticus are why the word carries so much weight. Israel's food rules taught that a body must refuse to take in what is unfit, and the same picture is then stretched over the whole country. When the people living there do what those chapters forbid, the land is described as unable to keep them down, and up they come. That is a much stronger image than being driven out by a conquering army (גָּרַשׁ): the expulsion is a reflex rather than a policy, and the land, not an enemy, is the one doing it.
The Wisdom books turn the same reflex into a teacher. Too much of a good thing, or a meal from a host who resents giving it, ends the same way, and the body reaches its verdict before the mind does.
Nuances
Whether the fish vomiting Jonah out signals the prophet's humiliation or is only the manner of his deliverance.
- contestedThe narrator deliberately chooses a crude verb, the same one used of the land in Leviticus, so that the rescue doubles as a shaming of a prophet even a fish will not keep down.; Jack M. Sasson, Jonah (Anchor Bible 24B; New York: Doubleday, 1990); Brent A. Strawn, On Vomiting: Leviticus, Jonah, Ea(a)rth, Catholic Biblical Quarterly 74/3 (2012): 445-64; Kevin J. Youngblood, Jonah (ZECOT; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2013)
- contestedThe point is the deliverance itself, Jonah set down on dry land in an echo of creation and the exodus, with the manner of it secondary.; James Limburg, Jonah (OTL; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1993); Uriel Simon, Jonah (JPS Bible Commentary; Philadelphia: JPS, 1999)
- contestedBoth hold at once: Jonah is genuinely delivered and genuinely humiliated, and the undignified mode keeps teaching him what he refuses to learn.; Douglas Stuart, Hosea-Jonah (WBC 31; Waco: Word, 1987)
How the picture of the land vomiting out its inhabitants is meant to work.
- majorityThe defilement is an objective condition produced by grave voluntary sins, chiefly illicit sex, idolatry, and bloodshed, and the land expels its inhabitants because it genuinely cannot hold that pollution.; Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 17-22 (Anchor Bible 3A; New York: Doubleday, 2000), 1572-85; Jonathan Klawans, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 21-42
- minorityThe language is genuinely poetic and mythic: the land is an actor in the covenant, of a piece with prophetic pictures of the land mourning.; Baruch A. Levine, Leviticus (JPS Torah Commentary; Philadelphia: JPS, 1989), 122-23; Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Pollution, Purification, and Purgation in Biblical Israel, in The Word of the Lord Shall Go Forth (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1983), 399-410
- minorityIt is covenant warning language: a figure of speech inside a list of sanctions, teaching Israel what its own larger body will refuse to hold, just as the food rules taught what its stomach must refuse.; Gordon J. Wenham, The Book of Leviticus (NICOT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979), 250-53; John E. Hartley, Leviticus (WBC 4; Dallas: Word, 1992), 297-301
- minorityThe vomit language is late community-forming rhetoric that looks back on the exile and explains it after the fact.; Erhard S. Gerstenberger, Leviticus: A Commentary (OTL; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996)