Yunus 3:3
Konteks3:3 So Jonah went immediately to Nineveh, as the Lord had said. (Now Nineveh was an enormous city 1 – it required three days to walk through it!) 2
Yunus 3:10
Konteks3:10 When God saw their actions – they turned 3 from their evil way of living! 4 – God relented concerning the judgment 5 he had threatened them with 6 and he did not destroy them. 7
[3:3] 1 tn Heb “was a great city to God/gods.” The greatness of Nineveh has been mentioned already in 1:2 and 3:2. What is being added now? Does the term לֵאלֹהִים (le’lohim, “to God/gods”) (1) refer to the
[3:3] 2 tn Heb “a three-day walk.” The term “required” is supplied in the translation for the sake of smoothness and clarity.
[3:3] sn Required three days to walk through it. Although this phrase is one of the several indications in the book of Jonah of Nineveh’s impressive size, interpreters are not precisely sure what “a three-day walk” means. In light of the existing archaeological remains, the phrase does not describe the length of time it would have taken a person to walk around the walls of the city or to walk from one end of the walled city to the other. Other suggestions are that it may indicate the time required to walk from one edge of Nineveh’s environs to the other (in other words, including outlying regions) or that it indicates the time required to arrive, do business, and leave. More information might also show that the phrase involved an idiomatic description (consider Gen 30:36; Exod 3:18; a three-day-journey would be different for families than for soldiers, for example), rather than a precise measurement of distance, for which terms were available (Ezek 45:1-6; 48:8-35). With twenty miles as quite a full day’s walk, it seems possible and simplest, however, to take the phrase as including an outlying region associated with Nineveh, about sixty miles in length.
[3:10] 3 tn This clause is introduced by כִּי (ki, “that”) and functions as an epexegetical, explanatory clause.
[3:10] 4 tn Heb “from their evil way” (so KJV, ASV, NAB); NASB “wicked way.”
[3:10] 5 tn Heb “calamity” or “disaster.” The noun רָעָה (ra’ah, “calamity, disaster”) functions as a metonymy of result – the cause being the threatened judgment (e.g., Exod 32:12, 14; 2 Sam 24:16; Jer 18:8; 26:13, 19; 42:10; Joel 2:13; Jonah 4:2; HALOT 1263 s.v. רָעָה 6). The root רָעָה is repeated three times in vv. 8 and 10. Twice it refers to the Ninevites’ moral “evil” (vv. 8 and 10a) and here it refers to the “calamity” or “disaster” that the
[3:10] 6 tn Heb “the disaster that he had spoken to do to them.”