And Jonah began to enter into the city a day's journey, and he cried, and said, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.
A day's journey - not going straight forward without stopping: for the city was but eighteen miles in length; but stopping in his progress from time to time to announce his message to the crowds gathering about him. Since the circumference was "three days' journey," Jonah occupied a day in his journey in the city, and at the close of his "day's journey" was at the east side of the city (Jonah 4:5), the opposite to that at which he had entered. He walked through it from end to end, repeating the one dirge-like cry, the more impressive by its monotonous simplicity. "Yet forty days, and Nineveh ... overthrown!" The word х nehpaaket (H2015)] for "overthrown" implies a miraculous overthrow, like that of Sodom.
Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown. The commission, given indefinitely at his setting out, assumes now, on his arrival, a definite form, and that severer than before. It is no longer "a cry against" the wickedness of Nineveh, but an announcement of its ruin in 40 days. Compare Jonah 1:2, "Cry against it, for their wickedness is come up before me." This number is in Scripture associated often with humiliation. It was for forty days that Moses, Elijah, and Christ fasted. Forty years elapsed from the beginning of Christ's ministry (the antitype to Jonah's) to the destruction of Jerusalem. The more definite form of the denunciation implies that Nineveh has now almost filled up the measure of her guilt. The change in the form which the Ninevites would hear from Jonah, on anxious inquiry into his history, would alarm them the more, as implying the increasing nearness and certainty of their doom, and would at the same time reprove Jonah for his previous guilt in delaying to warn them.
The very solitariness of the one message, announced by the stranger thus suddenly appearing among them, would impress them with the more awe. Learning that, so far from lightly prophesying evil against them, he had shrunk from announcing a less severe denunciation, and therefore had been cast into the deep and only saved by miracle, they felt how imminent was their peril, threatened as they now were by a prophet whose fortunes were so closely bound up with theirs. In Noah's days 120 years of warning were given to men, yet they repented not until the flood came, and it was too late. But in the case of Nineveh God granted a double mercy: first, that its people should repent immediately after threatening; second, that pardon should immediately follow their repentance. 'The conversion of a whole people so immediately was a miracle of grace, exceeding even the miracle of nature performed in Jonah's entombment in and resurrection from the great fish. Of course, all were not savingly converted; but all for the time sincerely humbled themselves for their sins. The secondary instruments employed by God to produce this blessed change were suitable. The cuneiform inscriptions inform us that Assyria had been for successive generations at war with Syria. Not until the reign of Ivalush or Pul, probably at the time of Jonah's mission, was Syria tributary to Assyria.' The breaking of their power under Jeroboam II, according to Jonah's prophecy, which would probably reach their ears, prepared the way before him. The fact of Jonah's own deliverance (we know from Christ's calling him "a sign unto the Ninevites," Luke 11:30) did reach them. Their deep reverence for their gods, as appears from all their inscriptions, also was a predisposing cause to incline them readily to hear the divine message.