Jonah 3: A city turns, and the threatened destruction does not come

The second commission in Jonah 3 does not offer a new assignment. It sends Jonah back to the city he tried to avoid, and this time he goes "according to the word of the LORD." The account records obedience without yet claiming that his attitude has changed. Against Nineveh's great scale, Jonah's preserved warning is strikingly short: forty days and an overthrow. The response is anything but small. The people believe God before the king enters the scene, and the king then lays aside his robe, sits in ashes, and extends the fast throughout the city. Yet sackcloth is not the chapter's final measure of repentance. The decree names evil and violence, and verse 10 says God saw their works, specifically that they turned from their evil way. Mercy is sought without being presumed, and the threatened calamity is withheld. Nineveh's resistance is no longer the problem. The next chapter will expose Jonah's resistance to its preservation.