Jonah 3

The second commission in chapter 3 is a literary repetition with a single difference: this time Jonah obeys. He walks into the city and delivers the shortest prophetic sermon in the Hebrew Bible — in Hebrew, five words; in English, eight: Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown. The word overthrown is ambiguous in Hebrew — the same root, hapak, can mean to overthrow in destruction or to overturn in repentance — and some readers have taken the ambiguity as intentional. The book does not resolve it. What it records is that the city believes God; that the fast is declared before any decree, suggesting the response is organic rather than top-down; and that the king, when he hears it, acts with a thoroughness the narrator records in careful detail. Rise from the throne, remove the robe, sit in ashes. The royal gesture is the civic gesture intensified.

The decree the king issues is among the most theologically striking in the Hebrew Bible. It covers the livestock explicitly: man and beast, herd and flock, shall neither eat nor drink nor carry out their ordinary business, and shall be covered with sackcloth. The cattle in sackcloth have generated interpretive commentary from antiquity — are they symbolically included or literally outfitted? The book gives no indication that the narrator finds the image anything other than natural. It is, in the book's economy, entirely consistent with the cattle's reappearance in the closing question of chapter 4. What the decree adds, beyond the fast and the sackcloth, is a moral condition: let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands. The word violence — hamas — is the specific charge that had triggered the divine commission in chapter 1. The city knows what it is repenting of. God sees the turning and relents. The Hebrew verb for God's change of mind — nicham — is the same verb used for the people's turning. The repentance is mutual.