JONAH 3
1 And the word of the LORD came unto
Jonah the second time, saying,
“Okay, let’s
try this again….” As Jonah is given a second chance, the call to go to Nineveh
for a second time.
Some say the
phraseology, “word of the LORD came,” in this verse indicates that God showed
up in human form, the form of the pre-incarnate Yeshua, like He did Abraham,
Jacob and Joshua, to personally give him a message.
2 Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great
city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee.
Imagine face
down in the sand, half dead, feeling and smelling the fresh air like throwing
the blankets off of you after hiding under them from the boogie man. Dazed,
coughing up water perhaps Jonah gathers his strength and gets up.
3 So Jonah arose, and went unto
Nineveh, according to the word of the LORD. Now Nineveh was an exceeding great
city of three days' journey. 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.
Scholar
believe that the city was not a literal three day walk, but this verbiage means
that Nineveh as one of three cities in close proximity to each other, like a
triangle; Nineveh, Khorsabad and Nimrud. Nineveh is mentioned because it was
the greatest of the three. We know it had 120,000 people living in it (4:11),
but perhaps this was the combined population of all three cities, if indeed
Jonah preached in all three cities. Now Radak on the other hand says that
Nineveh was a literal three days walk across it and that Jonah walked a third
of the way and delivered his message.
5 So the people of Nineveh believed
God, and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them
even to the least of them. 6 For word came unto the king of Nineveh, and he
arose from his throne, and he laid his robe from him, and covered him with
sackcloth, and sat in ashes.
Legends of
the Bible tell us that the king’s name was Osnappar.
7 And he caused it to be proclaimed
and published through Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles, saying,
Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste any thing: let them not feed,
nor drink water: 8 But let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and cry
mightily unto God: yea, let them turn every one from his evil way, and from the
violence that is in their hands. 9 Who can tell if God will turn and repent,
and turn away from his fierce anger, that we perish not? 10And God saw their
works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, that
he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not.
To Jonah’s
dismay, though he did not preach repentance but impending doom, the Ninevites
took it upon themselves to repent; apparently they know Israel’s God was a
gracious and compassionate God. They even made their children and animals
participate in this process of repentance! We don’t even make our kids fast on
Yom Kippur unless they are Bar/Bat Mitzvah age.
In Matthew
12:41 Yeshua states that Nineveh would stand to condemn Israel for their
failure to repent and believe in Him.
The Talmud
says that the sackcloth and ashes didn’t prove their repentance, but their
turning from their evil deeds did and this is what God saw moreso that the
outer entrapments of repentance.
Many wonder
why gentiles would heed the words of a Jewish Prophet. Rabbis and Sages of old
say that the Ninevites repented because of seeing and hearing of Jonah’s
miraculous salvation from the belly of a sea monster.
God’s heart
broke seeing their seriousness and sincerity in repenting. But this didn’t set
well with Jonah. Jonah didn’t share God’s II Peter 3:9 heart, that he doesn’t
desire anyone to perish but that all repent.
The phrase,
“repent from the evil” implies that God temporarily removed the calamity.
Nineveh’s repentance here in the Book of Jonah delayed the Judgment upon them
by approximately 100 years.
