A Commentary in Simple English on Jonah |
Chapter 3 Verses 1-5: Jonah preaches in Nineveh In verse.1, God speaks to Jonah again. God is good to Jonah. Jonah obeys God and goes to Nineveh. Yet Jonah still has no kind feelings for the people in Nineveh. Jonah feels no pity or love for them. In verse.2, God tells Jonah to speak to Nineveh. In 1:1, God told Jonah to speak against Nineveh, which perhaps was harder. So Jonah at last gets up (verse.3). He sets out on the journey to Nineveh. This took him about 3 months. The journey was 800km. long. He had to cross mountains and deserts. The first part of the journey through Syria was through a land that was empty. The Assyrians had taken the people away. They had burnt the cities. Now the Assyrians fought each other. So there was danger for Jonah in the last part of the journey because of this civil war. Nineveh was not just one city. There were three or four cities, and great walls joined them together. It was nearly 100km. all round. So Jonah may have needed a three day visit to preach all through Nineveh .Verse 3 may not just mean that Nineveh was important. It may well mean that the city was important to God. The people had false ‘gods’ and they were cruel, but still God cared for them. [3.1] So (verse.4) Jonah goes into the city. He starts to go one day’s journey and he preaches. I do not think that Jonah was lazy because he only went one day’s journey. The people who heard Jonah believed what he said. The message went quickly all through the city. No doubt Jonah told the people about the strange and wonderful things that had happened to him. The main part of his message was quite simple. In forty days time, God would turn Nineveh upside down. God would destroy the city. Now we do not know whether this was all that Jonah said. We do not even know that this was the whole of the message that God had given to him. Jonah ought to have prayed about it. ‘Lord, I will preach that message, but I want more. I want to give the people a message of hope as well’. Instead of this (verse 5), the people of Nineveh do not just believe what Jonah says. They believe that what he says is God’s word to them. (See Ezekiel 3:6). They want to show their sorrow. So all over the city, people go without food (or ‘fast’) and they wear rough, poor clothes. ‘Sackcloth’ was what people wore when they were very sad because someone they loved had died. The name for God here is ‘Elohim’. [3.2]
Verses 6-10: The King of Nineveh Verse 6 speaks about the ‘King of Nineveh’. We would expect him to be the ‘King of Assyria’. Perhaps he only ruled the part of Assyria that was around Nineveh. This would be because the civil war had divided Assyria. In verse.3, Jonah ‘got up’. Now in v.6, the king too ‘gets up’ from his royal seat or ‘throne’. He takes off his rich clothes. He puts on sackcloth. Then as a mark of sorrow and shame, he sits down on the ground in the dust. Then he sends out a message (verse.7) to the people in Nineveh. These are the parts of it:- a) The king tells people to fast. The people had already started to fast (verse.5): so this was not new. b) It is rather unusual (verse 8) to make the animals join in the fast. They would have been very hot in sackcloth! It seems a little cruel to make them take part in the ‘fast’. c) Then the king tells his people to pray. Unlike the sailors on the ship (1:5), they are not to pray to their own ‘gods’. They are to pray to God - ‘Elohim.’ d) The king tells the people who live in Nineveh to change the way that they live. It is very bad: their ways are evil. They are violent. This agrees with what we know about the Assyrians. The ways their feet went were bad. In their hands there were things that they had stolen. In verse 9, the king adds a message of hope. As far as we know, Jonah had not given a message of hope when he spoke to the people. There is more good news in what the heathen king says than in what Jonah had said! The king only speaks about ‘that God’. Yet the king says: ‘If we pray and turn away from our sins, that God may not destroy the city. He may feel sorry for us!’ This is not the same as the prayer of Jonah. (2:2) Jonah was certain that his God would hear and answer his prayer. The king here is not so sure. Yet in verse 10, we read four things about God:- a) God saw what the people in Nineveh did. God knows everything, of course, but He took special note of the prayers the people made to Him. b) God noted too their change of life. c) God felt sorry for the people. Jonah did not! We are sinners. Yet God is better and kinder than we are to one another. d) So God did not have the city destroyed at this time. Later, in 612BC, the enemies of Nineveh did destroy the city. (You can read about this in the Book of Nahum, the next book but one in the Bible). |
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