Jonah 3:1-5
The Word Came a Second Time
1Then the word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time:
2“Get up! Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message that I give you.”
3This time Jonah got up and went to Nineveh, in accordance with the word of the LORD. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, requiring a three-day journey.
4On the first day of his journey, Jonah set out into the city and proclaimed, “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned!”
5And the Ninevites believed God. They proclaimed a fast and dressed in sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least.
Berean Standard Bible
The word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time. Nothing is said here about the ship or the sea or the fish, and nothing is said about the running. God does not begin by going back over any of it, and there is no sentence anywhere in these five verses where Jonah is made to explain himself before he is trusted with the errand again.
Get up! Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message that I give you.
Compare that with the first sending at 1:2, which begins get up, go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it. The city is the same city. The errand is the same errand. What has changed is the wording: the message is now the message that I give you, so the words are no longer Jonah's to choose.
This time he goes. He got up and went to Nineveh, and the narrator adds in accordance with the word of the LORD, which is the phrase the first chapter could not use about him.
Then the narrator stops to say how big the place is. An exceedingly great city, requiring a three-day journey, which is the sort of detail a storyteller supplies when he wants you to picture the size of what one man has walked into. Jonah sets out into the city on the first day of his journey and preaches, and his whole sermon is eight words long.
Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned!
God is not named in it. No sin is named either, nothing is asked of anybody, and no way out is offered. A deadline and a verdict, and the sermon tells you nothing at all about the man delivering it.
What happens next is out of all proportion to what caused it. The Ninevites believed God. Then comes a fast, and sackcloth, and the narrator takes the trouble to say it ran from the greatest of them to the least. That is the whole city, top and bottom, moved by one unwilling sentence delivered by a man who had already tried to sail the other way.
How We Know
Nineveh is a place that has been dug into. Its great mounds lie on the east bank of the Tigris, opposite Mosul in northern Iraq, and they were already generally believed to be its remains before anybody excavated them. Digging began there in the 1840s, in the mound the country calls Kouyunjik, and the first things out of the ground were fragments of brick and alabaster carrying cuneiform writing. The identification came first and the excavation came after it.
Nineveh is also a fixed point in Israel's own prophets rather than only here. Nahum devotes an entire book to its coming ruin.
What the passage does not explain is its own measurement. Verse 3 calls Nineveh a city requiring a three-day journey and gives no indication whether that describes crossing it, circling it, or preaching through its districts.
- Austen Henry Layard, Nineveh and Its Remains, vol. 1, ch. 1, London 1849.
Questions
1 God sends Jonah a second time. What does he say about the first time?
AnswerNothing at all. There is no lecture, no list of what went wrong, and no easier city offered instead. The instruction comes back almost exactly as it was, and Jonah is trusted with it again without being made to account for himself first.
2 One thing in the second sending is different from the first. What is it?
AnswerAt 1:2 the errand was to preach against Nineveh. Here it is to proclaim the message that I give you. The city and the journey are unchanged, and the words Jonah will use are now God's rather than his own.
3 Jonah's whole sermon is one sentence. What is missing from it?
AnswerGod is not named in it. There is no charge, no call to repent, and no promise that anything could be different. It is a deadline and a verdict, and it is about as bare as a warning can be.
4 The Ninevites believed God. Why does that wording matter?
AnswerBecause the verse names God as the one they believed. Jonah brought eight words and no encouragement whatsoever, so whatever moved that city did not come from the quality of the preaching.
What This Means for Us
A city turned on eight bare words from a man who did not want to be there, which says something about who was actually working. The same God who would not let the errand drop is the one who reached Nineveh, and the running did not cost him the city.
Take a moment together and say nothing, then let each person thank him for one place he worked when the people involved were not much help to him, this house included.
Prayer
Father, thank you for coming back a second time to people who ran the first time. Thank you that Nineveh heard you and not merely a man with a deadline. Where we have been unwilling, work anyway, and give us the grace to want what you want. Amen.