Jonah 3:4

3:1-4 God employs Jonah again in his service. His making use of us is an evidence of his being at peace with us. Jonah was not disobedient, as he had been. He neither endeavoured to avoid hearing the command, nor declined to obey it. See here the nature of repentance; it is the change of our mind and way, and a return to our work and duty. Also, the benefit of affliction; it brings those back to their place who had deserted it. See the power of Divine grace, for affliction of itself would rather drive men from God, than draw them to him. God's servants must go where he sends them, come when he calls them, and do what he bids them; we must do whatever the word of the Lord commands. Jonah faithfully and boldly delivered his errand. Whether Jonah said more, to show the anger of God against them, or whether he only repeated these words again and again, is not certain, but this was the purport of his message. Forty days is a long time for a righteous God to delay judgments, yet it is but a little time for an unrighteous people to repent and reform in. And should it not awaken us to get ready for death, to consider that we cannot be so sure that we shall live forty days, as Nineveh then was that it should stand forty days? We should be alarmed if we were sure not to live a month, yet we are careless though we are not sure to live a day.

Jonah 3:4. And Jonah began to enter into the city a day’s journey — That is, he proceeded into the city as far as he could go in a day. And he cried, Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown — The threat is express; but there was a reserve with God on condition of repentance. And it must be observed, that in most of the threatenings of God there is a condition expressed or understood. This is the general rule for interpreting all such denunciations, as has been observed in the note on Jeremiah 18:8 , unless where God makes an express declaration that the iniquity of the people against whom he denounces his judgments is full, and that he will not spare them; or, as it is expressed by our Saviour, with regard to Jerusalem, that the things which belong unto their peace are then hid from their eyes.

(4) And Jonah began to enter into the city a day’s journey. —This is apparently equivalent to And Jonah entered the city, and walked for a day through it. To enter on a minute inquiry as to whether his course was straight or circuitous seems trivial. The writer has no thought of furnishing data for ascertaining the exact dimensions of Nineveh, but only of producing a general sense of its vast size. Yet forty days.—The conciseness of the original, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh overthrown,” forcibly expresses “the one deep cry of woe” which the prophet was commissioned to utter. “This simple message of Jonah bears an analogy to what we find elsewhere in Holy Scripture. The great preacher of repentance, St. John the Baptist, repeated doubtless oftentimes that one cry, “Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Our Lord vouchsafed to begin His own office with those self-same words. And probably, among the civilised but savage inhabitants of Nineveh that one cry was more impressive than any other would have been, Simplicity is always impressive. They were four words which God caused to be written on the wall amid Belshazzar’s impious revelry: Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.

We all remember the touching history of Jesus, son of Anan, an unlettered rustic, who, “four years before the war, when Jerusalem was in complete peace and affluence,” burst in on the people at the Feast of Tabernacles with the oft-repeated cry, “A voice from the east, a voice from the west, a voice from the four winds, a voice on Jerusalem and the Temple, a voice on the bridegrooms and the brides, a voice on the whole people;” how he went about through all the lanes of the city, repeating, day and night, this one cry, and when scourged till his bones were laid bare, echoed every lash with “Woe, woe, to Jerusalem!” and continued as his daily dirge and his one response to daily good or ill treatment, “Woe, woe, to Jerusalem!” (Pusey.) Instead of “forty days” the LXX. read “three.”

The former verse gives us intelligence of Jonah’s arrival at Nineveh; now, so soon as come, he preacheth. Jonah began to enter into the city a day’s journey, and he cried, and said; to walk through and to preach the dreadful threats of God against Nineveh, and he proclaimed openly and plainly what God commanded; he feared not to tell all what concerned all; he did it with earnestness, as deeply affected with what he spake from God against this mighty city. Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown; a very short time, some might think, for this great city; but it is more time than God was bound to give, or than they could deserve, or than God gave to Sodom and Gomorrah, the sins of which cities were no doubt found in Nineveh now Jonah preached, and grew ripe by that time Nahum came to foretell their ruin; see Nahum. The threat is express and peremptory in its form and words; though there be a reserve with God on condition of repentance, which operated in due time, and manifestly proved that God intended mercy to repenting Nineveh, though he threatened an overthrow to impenitent Nineveh. How it should be overthrown is not expressed; some conjecture by a foreign enemy, which carrieth unlikelihood with it; others guess by fire from heaven: but since it was not destroyed we need not inquire how it should have been, and had they not repented the event would have informed us fully.

Verse 4. - § 2. Jonah, undeterred by the danger of the enterprise, executes his mission at one, and announces the approaching destruction of the city. Began to enter into the city a day's journey. Jonah commenced his day's journey in the city, and, as he found a suitable place, uttered his warning cry, not necessarily continuing in one straight course, but going to the most frequented spots. At the time of Jonah's preaching the royal residence was probably at Chalah: i.e. Nimrud, the most southern of the cities. Coming from Palestine, he would reach this part first, so that his strange message would soon come to the king's ears (ver. 6). Yet forty days. "Forty" in Scripture is the number of probation (see Genesis 7:4, 12 ; Exodus 24:18 ; 1 Kings 19:8 ; Matthew 4:2 ). The LXX. has, ἔτι τρεῖς ἡμέραι , "yet three days" owing probably to some clerical error, as writing γ instead of μ . St. Augustine ('De Civit.,' 18:44) endeavours to explain the discrepaney mystically as referring to Christ under different circumstances, as being the same who remained forty days on earth after his resurrection, and who rose again on the third day. Shall be overthrown. This is the word used for the destruction of Sodom ( Genesis 19:25, 27 ; Amos 4:11 ). The prophet appears to have gone on through the city, repeating this one awful announcement, as we read of fanatics denouncing woe on Jerusalem before its final destruction (Josephus, 'Bell. Jud.,' 6:05. 3).

The threat was conditional virtually, though expressed in uncompromising terms. In the Hebrew the participle is used, "Yet forty days, and Nineveh overthrown," as though he saw at the end of the specified time the great city lying in ruins. One sees from Isaiah 36:11, 13 , that Jonah could readily be understood by the Assyrians. Jonah 3:4

4. a day's journey—not going straight forward without stopping: for the city was but eighteen miles in length; but stopping in his progress from time to time to announce his message to the crowds gathering about him. Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown—The commission, given indefinitely at his setting out, assumes now on his arrival a definite form, and that severer than before. It is no longer a cry against the sins of Nineveh, but an announcement of its ruin in forty days. This number is in Scripture associated often with humiliation. It was forty days that Moses, Elijah, and Christ fasted. Forty years elapsed from the beginning of Christ's ministry (the antitype of Jonah's) to the destruction of Jerusalem. The more definite form of the denunciation implies that Nineveh has now almost filled up the measure of her guilt. The change in the form which the Ninevites would hear from Jonah on anxious inquiry into his history, would alarm them the more, as implying the increasing nearness and certainty of their doom, and would at the same time reprove Jonah for his previous guilt in delaying to warn them. The very solitariness of the one message announced by the stranger thus suddenly appearing among them, would impress them with the more awe.

Learning from him, that so far from lightly prophesying evil against them, he had shrunk from announcing a less severe denunciation, and therefore had been cast into the deep and only saved by miracle, they felt how imminent was their peril, threatened as they now were by a prophet whose fortunes were so closely bound up with theirs. In Noah's days one hundred twenty years of warning were given to men, yet they repented not till the flood came, and it was too late. But in the case of Nineveh, God granted a double mercy: first, that its people should repent immediately after threatening; second, that pardon should immediately follow their repentance.

4 . And Jonah began to enter into the city ] Calvin well brings out the moral grandeur of the scene which this verse so simply and briefly describes; the promptitude of Jonah’s action, in entering without delay or hesitation or enquiry, immediately, as it would seem, upon his reaching the city, upon his difficult and dangerous task; his boldness, as a helpless and unprotected stranger, in standing in the heart of “the bloody city,” and denouncing destruction upon it. It was, indeed, to “beard the lion in his den” to adventure himself on such an errand into “the dwelling of the lions and the feeding place of the young lions, where the lion, even the old lion, walked, and the lion’s whelp, and none made them afraid.” ( Nahum 2:11 .) a day’s journey ] “He began to perambulate the city, going hither and thither, as far as was possible, in the first day.” (Maurer.) And as he went he cried. In him was personified the description of the wise King of Israel: “Wisdom crieth without; She uttereth her voice in the streets: She crieth in the chief place of concourse, in the openings of the gates: In the city she uttereth her words, Saying, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Turn ye at my reproof.” Proverbs 1:20-23 .

Some have supposed that, as a day’s journey would suffice to traverse from one side to the other a city, of which the dimensions were such as have been assigned ( Jonah 3:3 ) to Nineveh, and as, moreover, Jonah is found afterwards ( Jonah 4:5 ) on the east side of Nineveh (i. e. the opposite side to that on which he would have entered it in coming from Palestine), we are intended here to understand that he walked quite through the city in a single day, uttering continually as he went “his one deep cry of woe.” The other view, however, is more natural, and it enhances the idea of the impressibility of the Ninevites, and their readiness to believe and repent, which it is evidently the design of the inspired writer to convey, if we suppose that while the preacher himself was seen and heard in only a portion of the vast city, his message was taken up and repeated, and sped and bore fruit rapidly in every direction, till tidings of what was happening came to the king himself ( Jonah 3:6 ), and in obedience to the yet distant and unseen prophet, he issued the edict which laid the whole of Nineveh, man and beast, abashed and humbled before the threatened blow. Yet forty days ] “He threatens the overthrow of the city unconditionally. From the event, however, it is clear that the threat was to be understood with this condition, ‘unless ye shall (in the mean time) have amended your life and conduct.’ Comp.