What was Jonah’s message to Nineveh?

Five words

The first time God sent Jonah to Nineveh, he ran the other way. The second time, the order is shorter and stricter: “preach to it the message that I give you” (Jonah 3:2). Jonah walks into the great city of Assyria and delivers it.

Jonah began to enter into the city a day’s journey, and he cried out, and said, “In forty days, Nineveh will be overthrown!”

In Hebrew it is five words: od arba’im yom ve-Nineveh nehpakhet. The book records nothing else he said. Forty is the Bible’s number for a time of testing: forty days of rain in Noah’s flood (Genesis 7:12), forty days for Moses on the mountain (Exodus 24:18), forty days for Elijah’s walk to Horeb (1 Kings 19:8). The old Greek translation, the Septuagint, reads “three days” instead, which makes the warning even more urgent.

What the message leaves out

Read it again for what is missing. There is no “Thus says Yahweh,” the formula prophets use to show whose word they carry. There is no reason: the city never hears the charge God gave Jonah, “their wickedness has come up before me” (1:2). There is no “unless,” no call to turn, no promise of mercy. It sounds less like a sermon than a sentence read out in court.

Yet the people of Nineveh “believed God” (3:5), fasted and put on sackcloth, and the king himself guessed at the way out that the message never mentioned: “Who knows whether God will not turn and relent?” (3:9). How the city answered, and why God spared it, is told in why God spared Nineveh.

A verb with two meanings

The last word, nehpakhet, comes from the verb haphak, to overturn. It is the word for the end of Sodom and Gomorrah: “He overthrew those cities, all the plain” (Genesis 19:25). Anyone who heard Jonah would think of fire from the sky. But haphak also means to turn or to change, as in the psalm: “You have turned my mourning into dancing for me” (Psalm 30:11). The medieval commentator Rashi pointed out the double sense: the city would be overturned, or it would turn from evil. Before the forty days were out, Nineveh had been turned upside down, just not the way Jonah expected.

A prophecy that failed?

The disaster never came, and that is exactly what made Jonah angry (Jonah 4:1–2). The prophet Jeremiah states the rule that Jonah’s message hid.

At the instant I speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up and to break down and to destroy it, if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do to them.

So many readers hear an unspoken condition inside every prophecy of doom. A warning that works is not a failed prediction. It is a warning that did its job.

The sermon Jesus remembered

Centuries later, Jesus held up this street preaching against his own audience.

The men of Nineveh will stand up in the judgment with this generation and will condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah; and behold, someone greater than Jonah is here.

Five words, one day’s walk, and a whole city in sackcloth. Preachers have envied that ratio ever since.