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After the whale had vomited Jonah onto dry land, the Lord commanded the wayward prophet a second time to go to Nineveh and deliver God’s message to the people.
The author wrote Jonah stylistically in four installments. Chapter 1 parallels Chapter 3, and Chapter 2 parallels Chapter 4. The anonymous narrator of Jonah cues this symmetry by using the same wording for God’s commission of Jonah in the first and third episodes which literally translate: “Up! Go to the great city of Nineveh.” After the storm and fish encounter, Jonah no longer tried to flee from God’s presence. Instead, he “obeyed the word of the Lord and went to Nineveh” (3:3). He followed through on the same commission he had previously turned down. Indeed, our God is the author of second chances, although this extension of his grace is not always guaranteed.
The anonymous author described Nineveh hyperbolically as “an exceedingly large city, a three days’ walk across” (3:3). Jonah’s Nineveh was an important city in the Assyrian Empire and a religious center with many temples dedicated to the various Assyrian gods, but it had not yet reached its high point. Nineveh would become the crown jewel of the Assyrian Empire during the reign of Sennacherib (705-681 BCE), 50 years later. Sennacherib doubled the size of the city, putting Nineveh on the map. If the story of Jonah had been chronicled many years after the events transpired, the narrator could have been describing Sennacherib’s Nineveh. Perhaps Sennacherib’s Nineveh had already been destroyed by the time the story of Jonah became widely known. The verb tense in Hebrew implies that Nineveh’s greatness was already in the past. The narrator penned, “Nineveh was an exceedingly great city.”
Short oracle
Jonah’s oracle consisted of five Hebrew words that translate to: “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” (4:4). This is the only prophetic utterance in the book. In his warning of impending doom, Jonah played the same role as the angel of the Lord who warned Lot’s family of the coming sulfur and fire, but in Sodom’s case the grace period was a matter of hours, rather than days (Gen. 19). Forty is the biblical number often associated with periods of testing. Israel had 40 years in the desert to become a nation reliant on God. Jesus took 40 days in the wilderness before launching his earthly ministry.
The text does not describe how Jonah prophesied. We know it took him three days to reach every Ninevite neighborhood with his warning of doom. His five-word prophecy did not even identify Yahweh as the true source of his oracle. He did not chronicle the list of the Ninevites’ offenses in the eyes of God, like the prophets who ministered to Israel and Judah. And yet, as the scripture bluntly states it, “the people of Nineveh believed God” (3:5). They never questioned the source behind the divine message. They gave audience to Jonah, this stranger from a small faraway kingdom, and took his message seriously. Prophets often had a challenging time gaining an audience in the ancient world, even in their own communities. Jonah was a foreigner from an unimportant peripheral town, but the Ninevites believed he was speaking truth.
The people of Nineveh came together as a community to atone for their sins, even without Jonah’s call for repentance. The king of Nineveh called for repentance from every man, woman, and child, despite their age or social ranking. They included animals in the communal mourning ritual. The totality of the call for lament is like that of Joel, who also described the cattle and flocks as crying out to God in prayer (Joel 1:18).
Repentant king
The king did not issue a decree for reform from his ivory tower. He counted himself among those in need of forgiveness. He traded his robe for sackcloth and publicly humbled himself by descending from his throne and sitting in ashes (3:6). The king’s identification with the people shows the totality of this revival. Everyone was to mourn, fast, and dress in sackcloth. Sackcloth was part of the mourning rituals in the Bible among the Israelites, as well (Joel 1:8; 2 Sam 3:31). Sackcloth is mentioned three separate times in this chapter. There is an emphatic element to the Ninevites’ recognition of God’s call that is strikingly commendable.
The king of Nineveh goes unnamed in Jonah, like the unnamed pharaohs of the exodus that have caused so much consternation among biblical chronologists. It is somewhat problematic that the title “king of Nineveh” in the eighth century BCE is anachronistic, because at the time of Jonah, during the reign of King Assur-dan III, Nineveh was not the capital of the Assyrian Empire. As a weak and distracted ruler, Assur-dan III relied on powerful provincial governors to rule the Assyrian cities. Jonah reflected that dynamic when the king introduced his proclamation saying: “By the decree of the king and his nobles” (3:7).
The king’s decree was not a hollow formality, but a call for a moral reckoning. All violence and immorality had to stop. Just as Joel called on the people of his day to “rend their hearts and not their garments,” the king of Nineveh demanded the cessation of wickedness. His proclamation stated, “all shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands” (3:8). As described, the uniformity of the Ninevites’ compliance was a miracle, equal to the supernatural nature of the storm and the fish encounter.
Those who argue against the historicity of Jonah often point to the lack of evidence that Nineveh ever recognized the God of Israel or communally repented of their misdeeds. I do not see weight to the argument against a historical Jonah. I would not expect to find in Assyrian records any documentation of a moment in time in which Ninevites repented and avoided a disaster from a foreign god. Repentance and revival, by nature, do not leave a material record. We know from other prophets, such as Nahum and Zephaniah, that Nineveh’s revival was short-lived. Searching for a generational moment of full repentance would be like searching for a needle in a haystack, for archaeologists and epigraphers. Also, given that this was a period of Assyrian decline, little documentation from the reign of King Assur-dan III has survived.
Superstition
The most striking aspect of Chapter 3 is the immediacy in which the people and the king of Nineveh responded to God’s message. Biblical historians believe the Ninevites were primed for a divine warning, based on a series of ominous events before Jonah’s arrival. We know from Assyrian records that around the time of Jonah the Ninevites observed a total eclipse of the sun in 763 BCE. To these superstitious people, this eclipse was a bad sign, and other disasters—political conflict, civilian rebellion, and economic trouble—followed it. According to the Assyrian annals, the empire also experienced a severe famine around this time, which lasted six years and caused major food shortages. When the prophet, who had survived being swallowed by a fish, arrived in their city, they were eager to hear his message.
Seeing their repentance, God called off Nineveh’s destruction: “When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it” (3:10). Their belief prompted both humility and action, showing an inward and outward renewal. This is the type of spiritual awakening pastors hope for in their congregations. Just as God had heard the cries of the pagan sailors on the boat with Jonah and had quieted the storm, he took notice of the cries of polytheistic Ninevites earnestly seeking to right their wrongs.
Jonah’s author craftily and subtly put theological questions into the mind of his audience: What is the nature and purpose of God’s anger? What does it mean that God changed his mind? Isn’t the fulfillment of a prophet’s oracle the verification of his prophetic station? Is a prophet still a prophet if his oracle does not come true?
God answered these theological questions about his divine hand in the world when he brought the prophet Jeremiah to a potter’s house. He explained to Jeremiah:
If I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down and destroyed, and if that nation I warned repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned. And if at another time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be built up and planted, and if it does evil in my sight and does not obey me, then I will reconsider the good I had intended to do for it (Jer. 18:7-10).
Our actions can cancel God’s judgment or initiate his blessing. It may be an uncomfortable thought that God’s plans are movable and that prophecies are not absolute. We see examples of God’s reversal of intentions all throughout the Bible. The incident most cemented into the mind of an ancient Hebrew was the golden calf at the foot of Mount Sinai. God wanted to destroy the Hebrews, but Moses intervened, begging God for his compassion to overwhelm his wrath.
Jonah is a narrative that places two events under the microscope to examine the nature of God’s wrath and his compassion. The first half of Jonah reveals how God saved the prophet and the pagan sailors from drowning and shipwreck by rescinding his punishment. Jonah’s second half saw God changing his mind about punishing Nineveh. In both cases, the reader is compelled to feel that God’s punishment, on either Jonah or the Assyrians, would be just. Jonah was the most disobedient prophet and Assyria was the most wicked of empires. It is not their punishment that surprises the audience, but their rescue.
By now, you have probably come to see that in the Minor Prophets, appeals for the people to repent usually accompanied God’s warnings of impending punishment. Malachi whispered, “Return to me, and I will return to you” (Mal. 3:7). Amos summed up the prophets: “Seek me and live” (Amos 5:4). In Isaiah, God promised, “For a brief moment I abandoned you, but with deep compassion I will bring you back” (Isa. 54:7). The psalmist assured, “For his anger lasts only a moment, but his favor lasts a lifetime” (Ps. 30:5).