Charles Ellicott Commentary Jonah 3:3

"So Jonah arose, and went unto Nineveh, according to the word of Jehovah. Now Nineveh was an exceeding great city, of three days` journey." — Jonah 3:3 (ASV)

Now Nineveh was...—The past tense here certainly seems to imply that at the time when the author wrote, the city was no longer in existence, but the force of a Hebrew tense should not be estimated by the analogy of modern languages.

An exceeding great city.—Literally, A city great to God; an expression equivalent to a divinely great city, and taken, as Ewald thinks, from the language of the people, like the Arabic “to Allah,” in the saying “to Allah (i.e., divine) is he who composed this.” In the Hebrew poetic and prophetic writings a finer form is found, e.g., “mountains of God,” “cedars of God” (Psalms 36:6; Psalms 80:10), “trees of Jehovah” (Psalms 104:16), but in Genesis 10:9 a precisely similar proverbial use is found, also belonging to the Mesopotamian region, Nimrod, a mighty hunter before the Lord.

Of three days’ journey.—Hitzig takes this as giving the diameter of the city, but most commentators refer it to the circumference. The circuit of the walls was the most obvious measurement to give of an ancient city. Herodotus variously reckons a day’s journey at about eighteen or twenty-three miles (v. 53, iv. 101), and the circuit of the irregular quadrangle composed of the mounds of Koujunjik, Nimrud, Karamless, and Khorsabad, now generally accepted to represent ancient Nineveh, is about sixty miles. This agrees sufficiently with the obviously vague and general statement of the text.