Jonah 3:3

So Jonah arose, and went unto Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord,.... He was no longer disobedient to the heavenly vision; being taught by the rod, he acts according to the word; he is now

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.

So, Heb. And; as God commands and directs, so Jonah with ready, resolved, and obedient mind sets about the work. Jonah arose, and went unto Nineveh; though it was a long journey, yet three weeks’ or three months’ travel by land is more eligible than three days in the belly of hell. According to the word of the Lord; every way complying with the command of God, speeding thither resolved to preach whatsoever sermon God should put into his head, encouraged with assurance that God who did send would be with him whithersoever he was sent. An exceeding great city; the greatest city of the known world at that day; it was then in its flourishing state greater than Babylon, whose compass was three hundred and sixty-five or three hundred and eighty-five furlongs, but Nineveh was in compass four hundred and eighty, her walls a hundred feet in height, and broad enough for three coaches to meet and safely pass by each other; it had fifteen hundred towers on its walls, and these towers two hundred feet high; and one million and four hundred thousand men employed continually for eight years to build it, if our author be not mistaken. There is some difference in accounting how this city was three days’ journey: if we account the length of it at one hundred and fifty furlongs, this will amount to eighteen miles and three quarters; this seems too little to be three days’ journey, unless it be supposed the prophet accounts his leisurely progress, and takes in the many stops that would necessarily and unavoidably retard him in his walking and preaching such strange news; if we consider this, it is not unlikely six miles would be as far as he could go in a day, preaching to all and discoursing with many. Others will account it three days’ journey to go through the streets and lanes of this city; but on the supposition it was eighteen miles in length, and eleven miles in breadth, it will be more than three days’ journey, or a week’ s journey; for supposing in a mile’ s breadth but eight streets, from end to end, through eighteen miles’ length, it will amount to four hundred and sixty-four miles. Others account by the compass of the walls sixty miles, and allow twenty miles to each day’ s journey, too far for any one to walk, preach, dispute or reason, and account for himself: the first account seems most probable.

Jonah 3:3 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.Ver. 3. So Jonah arose and went unto Nineveh] He went not home first to bid them farewell, as Luke 9:61, neither went he another way, as once; it was enough of that once, and he had learned obedience by the things that he had suffered. To Nineveh he goes, though a mere and a lowly stranger, unknown, unregarded, and with a harsh message; such as he might fear would cost him his life from that fierce and furious people. But Jonah feared nothing now but disobedience; and seems to say, as afterwards Luther did, Inveniar sane superbus, excors et mode impii silentii non arguar, Let me be called and counted proud, mad, anything, everything that naught is, so that I be not found guilty of sinful silence, and of betraying the trust committed unto me, by a dastardly deserting the cause of God. Jonah was now of another spirit, and fulfilled after God ( implevit post me), as Caleb, Numbers 14:24; for what reason? he had now received not a "spirit of fear," and of bondage (δειλειας, δουλειας, Romans 8:15), "but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind," 2 Timothy 1:7; his Spirit of grace had sanctified to him his afflictions, which else would have been but as hammers to cold iron; as they were to Pharaoh, Ahaz, the railing thief. Aben Ezra saith that as soon as ever the whale had vomited up Jonah he got up and took the direct way to Nineveh; that if God should command him thither again he might be ready, and show his forwardness. It is a very good sign when men are the better for what they suffer; when thereby the iniquity of Jacob is purged, and this is all the fruit, the taking away of their sin, Isaiah 27:9. According to the word of the Lord] His call and command, which Jonah had formerly cast behind him, Sed Piscator ictus sapit, There shall be only fear to make you understand the hearing, Isaiah 28:19. Isaiah stood off till frightened; but then he offers his service; "Here I am, send me." Now Nineveh was an exceeding great city] Heb. a great city of God, or, to God; which some interpreted dear to God, and such as he would not destroy, Deo chara et cura. Others, a city not idolatrous, though otherwise vicious. Others, a city which God himself accounted great, and looked upon as such. But if to a great mind nothing is great, as Seneca saith ( animo magno nihil magnum), what can be great to him who is great, Psalms 77:13, greater, Job 33:12, greatest, Psalms 95:3, greatness itself, Psalms 145:3, and to whom all "nations are but as the drop of a bucket, or dust of the balance? behold, he taketh up the isles as a very little thing," Isaiah 40:15.

(3) Now Nineveh was . . .—The past tense here certainly seems to imply that at the time in which the author wrote the city was no longer in existence, but the force of a Hebrew tense is not to 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 that 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 shows itself, 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 allowed to represent ancient Nineveh, is about sixty miles. This agrees sufficiently with the obviously vague and general statement of the text.

Verse 3. Nineveh was an exceeding great city, of three days' journey.] See on Jonah 1:2. Strabo says, lib. xvi., πολυμειζωνηντηςΒαβυλωνος, "it was much larger than Babylon:" and Ninus, the builder, not only proposed to make it the largest city of the world, but the largest that could be built by man. See Diodor. Sic. Bib. l. ii. And as we find, from the lowest computation, that it was at least fifty-four or sixty English miles in circumference, it would take the prophet three days to walk round upon the walls, and announce from them the terrible message, "Yet forty days, and Nineveh will be destroyed!"

3. arose, and went] Before, he arose and fled. He is still the same man. There is still the same energy and decision of character. But he is now “as ready to obey as before to disobey.” was] It has been asserted that the use of the past tense here, “according to all sound rules of interpretation, must be understood to imply that, in the author’s time, Nineveh existed no longer,” (Kalisch). Nothing, however, can safely be determined from the use of a tense in such cases. The clause “Now Nineveh was an exceeding great city,” &c., is evidently a part of the narrative, and prepares the way for Jonah 3:4. It simply states what Nineveh was, and what Jonah found and saw it to be, when he visited it. It is not a historical note, like that which is introduced with reference to the building of Hebron, Numbers 13:22. St John writes (John 5:2) “Now there is at Jerusalem by the sheep-gate a pool.” It might be argued (as it has been) that because he uses the present tense, Jerusalem must have still been standing when he wrote his Gospel. Yet it might with equal force be concluded (and it is a proof of the unsatisfactory nature of this sort of criticism) that because he says that Bethany was nigh unto Jerusalem (John 9:18), that “Jesus went forth with His disciples over the brook Kedron, where was a garden” (John 18:1), and that “in the place where He was crucified there was a garden” (John 19:41), the city and its environs were already laid waste when he wrote. exceeding great] Lit., great to God. The expressions of this kind which occur in the Bible may be divided into two classes. They all alike spring out of the devout habit of the Hebrew mind, which recognises God in everything, and sees Him specially in whatever is best and greatest upon earth. But this habit of mind finds expression in two somewhat different ways. Sometimes, at the contemplation of what is more than ordinarily grand or beautiful, the pious mind rises at once to God, and recognises Him in His works. A thing so great, so fair, must be the work of His hands. “By the greatness and beauty of the creatures proportionably the Maker of them is seen.” “Who made you glorious as the gates of Heaven Beneath the keen full moon?… God! let the torrents, like a shout of nations, Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, God!” Hence such expressions as “mountains of God,” Psalms 36:6; “cedars of God,” Psalms 80:10; “trees of Jehovah,” Psalms 104:16; the explanation being added in the last of these instances (comp. Numbers 24:6), “which He hath planted.” The other class of expressions are those in which the excellence of the object contemplated appears to suggest to the mind that it will bear the scrutiny of God’s judgment, that even before Him, or as referred to Him, it is what the writer asserts it to be. To this class the expression here belongs.

And Jonah arose and went unto Nineveh - , ready to obey, as before to disobey.

1-4. The preaching of Jonah. Jonah 3:1, is almost identical with Jonah 1:1, the only difference being the addition of “the second time” and the omission of “the son of Amittai”; Jonah 3:2 a, is