Jonah 2:6

“I went down to the bottoms of the mountains,

The earth with its bars closed on me for ever,

Yet have you brought up my life from the pit,

O YHWH my God.”

He had felt himself sinking lower and lower, into the very depths. ‘The bottom of the mountains' indicates the sea floor, for as men stood on the shore they saw the slope of the mountains going down into the seas and realised that at the bottom of the slope was a valley, the sea floor. As the boat was clearly not far from shore, the bottom of the sea would not have been at any great depth. And he had felt as though he was excluded from the earth by bars which prevented his returning, and which would hold him for ever. But then he had found himself remarkably delivered and he had been lifted out of the pit, and he had thus recognised that it was the action of YHWH His God.