Albert Barnes Commentary Jonah 3

And the word of the Lord came a second time to Jonah - “Jonah, delivered from the whale, doubtless went up to Jerusalem to pay his vows and thank God there. Perhaps he hoped that God would be content with this his punishment and repentance, and that He would not again send him to Nineveh.”

Anyway, he was in some settled home, perhaps again at Gath-hepher. For God bids him, Arise, go. “But one who is on his way is not commanded to arise and go.”

God may have allowed an interval to elapse so that the news of so great a miracle might spread far and wide. But Jonah does not supply any of these incidents. He does not speak of himself, but only of his mission, as God taught him.

Arise, go to Nineveh that great city, and preach (or cry) unto it - God says to Jonah the very same words which He had said before; only perhaps He gives him an intimation of His purpose of mercy, because He says no more, “cry against her,” but “cry unto her.” He might “cry against” one doomed to destruction; to “cry unto her,” seems to imply that she had some interest in, and therefore some hope from, this cry. “The preaching that I bid you.” This is the only notice which Jonah relates that God took of his disobedience, because He charged him to obey exactly what He commanded. “He does not say to him, why did you not do what I commanded?” He had rebuked him in deed; He corrected him and did not upbraid him. “The rebuke of that shipwreck and the swallowing by the fish sufficed, so that he who had not felt the Lord commanding, might understand Him delivering.”

Jonah might have seemed unworthy to be inspired again by God. But “whom the Lord loves, He chastens;” whom He chastens, He loves.

“The hard discipline, the severity and length of the scourge, were the pledges of a great trust and a high destination.” He knew him to be changed into another man, and, by one of His most special favors, He gives him that same trust which he had before deserted.

“As Christ, when risen, commended His sheep to Peter, wiser now and more fervent, so to Jonah risen He commends the conversion of Nineveh. For so did Christ risen bring about the conversion of the pagans, by sending His Apostles, each into large provinces, as Jonah was sent alone to a large city.”

“He bids him declare not only the sentence of God, but in the same words; not to consider his own reputation or the ears of his hearers, nor to mingle soothing with severe words, and convey the message ingeniously, but with all freedom and severity to declare openly what was commanded him. This plainness, though, may be less acceptable to people or princes, is often more useful, always more approved by God. Nothing should be more sacred to the preacher of God’s word, than truth and simplicity and inviolable sanctity in delivering it. Now alas, all this is changed into vain show at the will of the multitude and the breath of popular favor.”

And Jonah arose and went unto Nineveh — ready to obey, as before to disobey. Before, when God said those same words, “he arose and fled;” now, “he arose and went.” True conversion shows the same energy in serving God as the unconverted had previously shown in serving self or error. Saul’s spirit of fire, which persecuted Christ, gleamed in Paul like lightning through the world, to win souls to Him.

Nineveh was an exceeding great city — literally “great to God,” that is, what would not only appear great to people who admire insignificant things, but what, being truly great, is so in the judgment of God, who cannot be deceived. God did account it great, Who says to Jonah, Should not I spare Nineveh that great city, which hath more than six score thousand that cannot discern between their right hand and their left? It is a different idiom from that, when Scripture speaks of “the mountains of God, the cedars of God.” For Scripture speaks of these as having their firmness or their beauty from God as their Author.

Of three days’ journey — that is, 60 miles in circumference. It was a great city. Jonah speaks of its greatness under a name which he would only have used of real greatness. Varied accounts agree in ascribing this size to Nineveh.

An Eastern city often enclosing, as did Babylon, cultivated land, the only marvel is that such a space was enclosed by walls. Yet this is also no marvel, when we know from inscriptions what masses of human strength the great empires of old had at their command, or of the more than threescore pyramids of Egypt.

In population it was far inferior to our metropolis, of which, as of the suburbs of Rome of old, “one would hesitate to say, where the city ended, where it began. The suburban parts are so joined to the city itself and give the spectator the idea of boundless length.”

An Easterner would more naturally think of the circumference of a city because of the broad places, similar to the boulevards of Paris, which encircle it, so that people could walk around it, within it.

“The buildings,” it is related of Babylon, “are not brought close to the walls, but are at about the distance of an acre from them. And not even the whole city did they occupy with houses; 80 furlongs are inhabited, and not even all these continuously, I suppose because it seemed safer to live scattered in several places. The rest they sow and till, so that, if any foreign force should threaten them, the besieged might be supplied with food from the soil of the city itself.”

Not Babylon alone was spoken of in ancient times as “having the circumference of a nation rather than of a city.”

And Jonah began to enter the city a day’s journey - Perhaps the day’s journey enabled him to traverse the city from end to end, with his one brief, deep cry of woe: “Yet forty days and Nineveh overthrown.” He prophesied an utter overthrow, a turning it upside down. He does not speak of it as if it would happen at a time beyond those days. The close of the forty days and the destruction were to be one.

He does not say strictly, “Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown,” but, “Yet forty days and Nineveh overthrown.” The last of those forty days was, before its sun set, to see Nineveh as a “thing overthrown.” Jonah knew from the first God’s purpose of mercy for Nineveh; he had a further hint of it in the altered commission he had received. It is perhaps hinted in the word “Yet.” “If God had meant unconditionally to overthrow them, He would have overthrown them without notice. ‘Yet,’ always denotes some long-suffering of God.” But, taught by that severe discipline, he discharges his office strictly.

He cries what God had commanded him to cry out, without reserve or exception. The sentence, as are all God’s threats until the last, was conditional. But God does not say this. That sentence was now within forty days of its completion; yet even so it was remitted.

Wonderful encouragement, when one Lent sufficed to save some 600,000 souls from perishing! Yet the first visitation of cholera was checked in its progress in England, upon one day’s national fast and humiliation; and we have seen how general prayer has often at once opened or closed the heavens as we needed.

“A few years ago,” relates Augustine, “when Arcadias was Emperor at Constantinople (what I say, some have heard, some of our people were present there), did not God—willing to terrify the city and, by terrifying, to amend, convert, cleanse, and change it—reveal to a faithful servant of His (a soldier, it is said) that the city should perish by fire from heaven, and warn him to tell the Bishop! It was told.

The Bishop did not despise it, but addressed the people. The city turned to the mourning of penitence, like that Nineveh of old. Yet lest people should think that he who said this deceived or was deceived, the day which God had threatened came. When all were intently expecting the outcome with great fear, at the beginning of the night, as the world was darkening, a fiery cloud was seen from the East—small at first, then, as it approached the city, gradually enlarging, until it hung terribly over the whole city.

All fled to the Church; the place could not hold the people. But after that great tribulation, when God had accredited His word, the cloud began to diminish and at last disappeared. The people, freed from fear for a while, again heard that they must migrate, because the whole city would be destroyed on the next Sabbath. The whole populace left the city with the Emperor; no one remained in his house. That multitude, having gone some miles, when gathered in one spot to pour forth prayer to God, suddenly saw a great smoke and raised a loud cry to God.” The city was saved.

“What shall we say?” adds Augustine. “Was this the anger of God, or rather His mercy? Who doubts that the most merciful Father willed by terrifying to convert, not to punish by destroying? As the hand is lifted up to strike, and is recalled in pity when he who was to be struck is terrified, so was it done to that city.”

Will any of God’s warnings now move our great Babylon to repentance, that it not be ruined?

And the people of Nineveh believed God; – strictly, “believed in God.” To “believe in God” expresses more heart-belief than “to believe God” in itself necessarily conveys. To believe God is to believe that what God says is true; “to believe in” or “on God” expresses not belief only, but that belief resting in God, entrusting itself and all its concerns to Him. It combines hope and trust with faith, and love too, since, without love, there cannot be trust. They therefore believed the preaching of Jonah, and that He, in whose name Jonah spoke, had all power in heaven and earth. But they believed further in His unknown mercies; they cast themselves upon the goodness of the previously “unknown God.” Yet they believed in Him as the Supreme God, the object of awe, the God אלהים 'ĕlohı̂ym (Jonah 3:5; Jonah 3:8), האלהים ha'ĕlohı̂ym (Jonah 3:9), although they did not know Him as He is, the Self-Existent One.

Jonah does not say how they were thus persuaded.

God the Holy Spirit relates the wonders of God’s omnipotence as common everyday things. They are no marvels to Him Who performed them. He commanded and they were done. He spoke with power to the hearts that He had made, and they were turned to Him. Any human means are secondary, utterly powerless, except in His hands Who alone does all things through whomever He does them. Our Lord tells us that Jonah himself was a sign unto the Ninevites.

Whether, then, the mariners spread the history, or however the Ninevites knew the personal history of Jonah, he, in his own person and in what befell him, was a sign to them. They believed that God, Who avenged his disobedience, would avenge theirs. They believed perhaps, that God must have some great mercy in store for them, Who not only sent His prophet so far from His own land to them who had never acknowledged Him, never worshiped Him, but had done such mighty wonders to subdue His prophet’s resistance and to make him go to them.

And proclaimed a fast and put on sackcloth – It was not, therefore, a repentance in word only, but in deed. A fast was at that time entire abstinence from all food until evening; the haircloth was a harsh garment, irritating and afflictive to the body. Those who did so were (as we may still see from the Assyrian sculptures) men of pampered and luxurious habits, uniting sensuality and fierceness. Yet this they did at once, and as it seems, for the 40 days.

They proclaimed a fast. They did not wait for the supreme authority. Time was urgent, and they would lose none of it. In this imminent peril of God’s displeasure, they acted as people would in a conflagration. People do not wait for orders to put out a fire, if they can, or to prevent it from spreading. Whoever they were who proclaimed it, whether those in inferior authority, each in his neighborhood, or whether it spread from man to man, as the news spread, it was done at once.

It seems to have been done by acclamation, as it were, one common cry out of the one common terror. For it is said of them, as one succession of acts, the men of Nineveh believed in God, and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth from their great to their little, every age, sex, and condition. “Worthy of admiration is that remarkable speed and diligence in deciding what to do, which, although in the same city with the king, perceived that they must provide for the common and imminent calamity, not waiting to laboriously ascertain the king’s pleasure.” In a city 60 miles in circumference, some time would inevitably be lost before the king could be approached; and we know, in some measure, the forms required in approaching Eastern monarchs of old.