LEARNING DAILY

Jonah 3:3-4, So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, a three-day journey in extent. And Jonah began to enter the city on the first day’s walk. Then he cried out and said, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”

Jonah finds himself spit up onto dry land. I can imagine his elation at that. But God, came to him a second time and told him to go preach the message of repentance. I would think the experience he had just been through caused him to be obedient even if he was reluctant.

Because I do not always read as carefully as I should, I missed some details of Jonah’s walk to Nineveh and that is why I continue to tell you that you need to study God’s Word as you read it in order to better understand it. In the number of times I have read this book, I missed the detail that Jonah “began to enter the city on the first day’s walk”. All I had read was “Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, a three-day journey”. When I carefully read the passage, I became confused by these conflicting points. In some research I found that the city was so large it would take three days to walk around it (in extent).

One question I have that is not addressed in the Bible is where the dry land was. From what I have read and seen on maps, Nineveh is a great distance (500 miles +) from the coast of Phoenicia. How did Jonah enter the city on the first day of his journey? Here is where we take God at His Word, believing if we needed to know He would have explained it.

Understanding what happened as Jonah entered the city with the message God had sent him with and knowing the people’s beliefs and worship of the fish god (remember the last page of the blog) he was sent to give us a clue to what happened as spoke in God’s message. Again, we are not told if there were witnesses to the great fish vomiting Jonah on to the shore. My study indicates that there were probably witnesses who told others what they had seen and probably became followers of Jonah.

Read what I found on a website called Got Questions. Your Question. Biblical answers. “Some scholars have speculated that Jonah’s appearance, bleached white from the action of the fish’s digestive acids, would have been of great help to his cause. It could be that the Ninevites would have been greeted by a man whose skin, hair, and clothes were bleached ghostly white—a man accompanied by a crowd of frenetic followers, many who had witnessed him being vomited upon the shore by a great fish. Given the piscine nature of Jonah’s arrival, Nineveh’s repentance follows from a logical progression.”

Jonah arrives in the city with a short but direct message, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” The number 40 is used in Scripture for times of testing. Jonah’s “prophetic warning to the Ninevites was conditional and designed to motivate repentance” (David Jeremiah Study Bible). This was not a message of hope nor a promise of forgiveness. It was a message that judgment was coming. If the people did not repent, they would be overthrown. Again, we are not told if this was the entire message Jonah spoke; it certainly was the center or the emphasis of what he spoke to the people of Nineveh.

How did the people of Nineveh respond? That is the subject of the next page of the blog.