2. Get up, go to Nineveh the great city, and call out to it. God repeats verbatim His initial command to Jonah, rightly anticipating that after Jonah’s terrifying experience of God’s power on the ship and in the belly of the fish, the prophet will now be prepared to carry out the mission. The one small difference from the opening words of chapter 1 is that instead of the proposition ʿal, “against,” God uses ʾel, “to,” perhaps suggesting that Jonah’s message may not have an altogether hostile purpose. If that is so, it is a clue Jonah does not pick up, as we shall see.

3. And Jonah got up and went to Nineveh. All we know about his location is that, after having been spewed out by the big fish, he is somewhere on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. In a move characteristic of biblical narrative, his journey to Nineveh, which would have taken weeks, is compressed into four Hebrew words, with all circumstantial detail suppressed.

a great city of God’s. The Hebrew has been variously understood as “a great city to God,” “a great city before God,” and even as “a super-great city” (with ʾelohim serving merely as an intensifier). But this preposition, l^e, often means “belonging to” in biblical Hebrew (including many inscriptions on pottery, seals, and the like). That meaning makes sense in terms of the theology of the book: Nineveh, like everything else in the world, is God’s possession, and thus God is appropriately concerned about the behavior of its inhabitants and their fate.

a three days’ walk across. “Across” is merely implied in the Hebrew. But the dimensions of the city vividly reflect the fabulous nature of the story: clocking roughly three miles an hour, a walker could cover as much as thirty miles in a day. A city ninety miles across would be considerably larger than contemporary Los Angeles, and, needless to say, no actual city in the ancient Near East could have been anywhere near that big. This three days’ walk also has the consequence that it will take Jonah three days—a formulaic unit in biblical narrative, as we have seen in the instance of the sojourn in the fish’s belly—to proclaim his message throughout the city.

4. Forty days more, and Nineveh is overthrown. The number is formulaic, as in the forty days of the Flood, the forty days Moses spends on the mountain, and the forty years of wandering in the wilderness. Unless we are to construe Jonah’s prophecy as a highly elliptical report, it is unconditional: in forty days, Nineveh is to be utterly devastated (and Jonah uses the participial form, not the future, to heighten the immediacy), with the verb “overthrown” the same one that is applied to Sodom. But, as the next verse makes clear, the people of Nineveh understand this dire prediction as implying a reversal of the disaster if they change their ways.

5. And the people of Nineveh trusted God. That is, they trust God’s word delivered by Jonah that they will be annihilated unless they turn back from their evil ways. This translation avoids the use of “believe” for the Hebrew term because the general meaning of this word in the Bible—as opposed to the postbiblical usage of heʾemin—suggests an act of trust, not belief. One should not imagine that the Ninevites have become monotheists, but rather that they have taken seriously the word of YHWH that He is prepared to destroy the city. The claim of some scholars that this verb when followed by the preposition b^e means “believe” does not stand up under analysis. The few cases where it occurs with this preposition are at best ambiguous, and in Micah 7:5, the usage is unambiguously a statement about trust, not belief: “Do not trust in evil,” and then in the poetic parallelism, “nor place confidence (tivteḥu) in a leader.”

6. And the word reached the king of Nineveh. First, a wave of penitence sweeps through the populace as Jonah continues his three days’ walk through the city, crying out his grim prophecy, then word of it comes to the king in his palace.

his mantle. Elsewhere the noun ʾaderet can be any sort of mantle or cloak, but here it is clearly a royal mantle with the designation perhaps playing on the word ʾadir, “majestic,” that might be discerned in its root.

7. had it proclaimed. Literally, “caused to be shouted.”

By the authority. The term mitaʿam is appropriate for the introduction of a royal decree and also is one of the reflections in our text of Late Biblical Hebrew.

man and beast, cattle and sheep, shall taste nothing. The bracketing, a virtual equation, of man and beast becomes a thematic thrust of the story. It is, of course, bizarre that a fast should be imposed on animals, another reflection of the fabulous character of the story, and that bizarreness will be heightened in the next verse.

graze. Although this word ordinarily apply only to the animals, here it seems, almost comically, to refer to humans as well.

8. And man and beast shall cover themselves with sackcloth. The translation closely follows the wording of the Hebrew, which intimates an image, against all logic, of the beasts voluntarily covering themselves with sackcloth. In the next clause, even though “call out” should refer to the humans only, its syntactical placement comes close to inviting us to imagine the beasts calling out as well. All this amounts to a kind of hyperbolic farcical representation of the penitence of Nineveh: after Jonah’s message, the city is so caught up in a profound impulse of penitence that a fast with sackcloth is imposed on beasts as well as on human beings.

turn back. The verb shuv, repeated three times in two verses, becomes the thematic focus of this episode: the people turn back from evil, and God then turns back from His baleful intentions.

10. God relented from the evil that He had said to do to them. “Evil” here means “harm,” as often elsewhere in biblical usage, but it is a measure-for-measure response to the evil of the Ninevites, and thus the translation follows the repetition of the word in the Hebrew. As in the previous episode, God is seen first as a wrathful God—sending the terrible storm that threatens the sailors’ lives as well as Jonah’s—and then as a merciful God—rescuing Jonah from the belly of the fish to give him a second chance as a prophet, and now canceling the decree to destroy Nineveh.