Charles Ellicott Commentary Jonah 3:4

"And Jonah began to enter into the city a day`s journey, and he cried, and said, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown." — Jonah 3:4 (ASV)

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 undertake a minute inquiry about whether his course was straight or circuitous seems trivial. The writer has no intention of providing data for determining the exact dimensions of Nineveh, but only to produce 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 is analogous to what we find elsewhere in Holy Scripture. The great preacher of repentance, St. John the Baptist, undoubtedly often repeated that one cry, Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Our Lord graciously chose to begin His own ministry with those very same words.

And probably, among the civilized 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 often-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;”

He went about through all the lanes of the city, repeating, day and night, this one cry. When scourged until his bones were laid bare, he 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 Septuagint read “three.”