Jonah 3:1–10

3:1–2 With these two verses, it is as if everything were “back to square one” (cf. 1:1–2). When the story began, Jonah rebelled against the Lord and his call to preach in Nineveh. As a result, Jonah experienced first the Lord’s discipline and then his merciful deliverance. Now, as a further sign of God’s mercy and grace, Jonah is given a second chance to bring God’s message to Nineveh.

3:3–4 “So Jonah arose,” not to flee from the Lord (as in 1:3) but to go “to Nineveh, according to the word of the LORD” (3:3). The story we should have been anticipating from the beginning can finally start.

The narrator pauses briefly to describe Nineveh for us, and the description is best captured by the ESV footnotes for verse 3: “Now Nineveh was a great city to God, [and] a visit was a three days’ journey.” The word translated “journey” (mahalak) is used elsewhere to refer to how long a visit would take (as opposed to how far a person had to go to make the visit).¹ In this context, the sense is that Nineveh was so large and important that to visit it properly required a full three days. In comparison to most little villages and towns in the ancient world, where you could see everything important in an hour or two, Nineveh was huge. This naturally implied it had many people within it, which explains why it was “a great city to God,” that is, important to him; many lives were at stake (cf. comment on 4:10–11).

So “Jonah began to go into the city,” preaching his message of warning on that first day: “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” (v. 4). At several places in the Bible, forty days represents a significant amount of time, whether of judgment (Gen. 7:4, 12), instruction (Ex. 24:18; 34:28), or repentance (Deut. 9:18).² The people of Nineveh are thus given a significant amount of time to heed the message and turn from their evil (cf. Jonah 1:2). Failure to do so would be disastrous—when a city was “overthrown” it was annihilated, as were Sodom and Gomorrah (cf. Gen. 19:21, 25). The Ninevites have been warned: the Lord is about to bring his justice to bear against them.

3:5 And the people of Nineveh believe it! The phrase “believed God” is used elsewhere to describe Israelites who put their faith and trust in the Lord (Gen. 15:6; Ex. 14:31),³ and that is what happens here. The entire city believes Jonah’s God is living and real, and therefore they turn to him with humble repentance.

It may be noted that Jonah’s message did not mention repentance as an option (Jonah 3:4). It did not need to. When a prophet declared that judgment was coming because of evil, it was to be understood that the judgment would take place if repentance did not. The Lord makes this especially clear in Jeremiah: “If at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, and if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I intended to do to it” (Jer. 18:7–8). The prophet’s warning thus becomes an invitation to repent.

The Ninevites take this warning and invitation fully to heart; they “called for a fast and put on sackcloth.” In the context of repentance, fasting was a way to humble yourself before God and devote time to confessing your sins to him (1 Sam. 7:6; Dan. 9:3). Similarly, sackcloth was a sign of mourning (Gen. 37:34; 2 Sam. 3:31), just as black clothing is in many societies today; in contexts of repentance, it was a way of saying, “I am grieving because of the wrong I have done” (1 Kings 21:27).

It is almost impossible not to notice the contrast here between the Ninevites and Jonah. It took Jonah three days to reach the point where he could utter his prayer of thanksgiving to the Lord (Jonah 1:17–2:1). But here—when Jonah is only on day one of a city that takes three days to visit—the people are already turning to the Lord. Once more, the pagans are far more spiritually sensitive and humble than the Hebrew prophet.

3:6 It is not just the general public that repents. News of the people’s repentance—and presumably the preaching of Jonah that was prompting it—“reached the king of Nineveh,”⁴ who immediately repents as well. Instead of remaining on his royal throne, he sits down in the ashes—another sign of deep grief in the ancient world (Jer. 6:26; Dan. 9:3). Instead of wearing his royal robe, he puts on the sackcloth of those mourning their sin. In the span of one verse, he has gone from supreme authority to utter humility.

3:7–9 The king then issues a proclamation for the entire city, calling for the most extreme forms of repentance possible (vv. 7–8). No food or water may be consumed, sackcloth must be worn by all, and the whole city must pray fervently; even the animals are to be included in the outward signs of repentance (v. 7). What is more, the king states that the people’s outward signs of repentance must be matched by their turning from their evil ways and the wrong they have done (“the violence that is in his hands”; v. 8). The king realizes that outward signs of repentance—like fasting or sackcloth or prayer—are useless if not accompanied by a change of life (v. 8; cf. Isa. 58:3–9). He does not know whether his people’s repentance will be accepted (“Who knows?”), but he hopes that Jonah’s God will see it and relent from bringing his justice to bear against them (Jonah 3:9).

3:10 This is exactly what happens. Seeing that they had all “turned from their evil way,” the Lord “relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them.”⁵ As one commentator poetically notes, “When Nineveh repented, God relented.”⁶ Truly, he is “a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger . . . forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin” (Ex. 34:6–7). Jonah himself had already experienced the Lord’s mercy and forgiveness for his own evil behavior—but will he be delighted that the Ninevites have experienced the same?