The word of God came to Jonah a second time. God told him to arise, go to Nineveh, the great city, and proclaim the message that he would be given. This time Jonah rose and went to Nineveh according to God’s word. Nineveh was a great city, requiring three days to cross.
Jonah entered the city and went a day’s journey into it. He cried out that in forty days Nineveh would be overthrown. Jonah’s message was brief, but it did not remain only where he had spoken it. The people of Nineveh began to believe God.
They proclaimed a fast, and from the greatest of them to the least they put on sackcloth. The news reached the king of Nineveh. He rose from his throne, removed his royal robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes.
The king issued a decree in Nineveh. No person, herd, flock, or animal was to taste anything, eat, or drink water. People and animals were to be covered with sackcloth, and all were to cry mightily to God. Each person was to turn from evil ways and from the violence done by their hands.
The king said that no one knew whether God might turn and relent, turn from fierce anger, and allow them not to perish. The people of Nineveh did not merely wait to see whether disaster would come. They turned away from the course they had been following and changed what they did.
God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways. God relented concerning the disaster he had said he would bring upon them, and he did not do it. The city of Nineveh did not fall immediately after the forty-day message Jonah had proclaimed.
This outcome greatly displeased Jonah, and he became angry. He prayed to God, saying that this was what he had said while he was still in his own country. That was why he had hurried to flee to Tarshish. He knew that God was gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishment.
Jonah asked God to take his life, saying that death was better for him than life. God asked Jonah whether it was right for him to be angry. Jonah did not answer that question. He went out of the city and sat east of Nineveh.
There Jonah made a booth and sat beneath its shade to see what would happen to the city. God appointed a plant to grow over Jonah, making shade over his head and easing his discomfort. Jonah was very happy about the plant.
At dawn the next day, God appointed a worm to attack the plant, and it withered. When the sun rose, God appointed a scorching east wind. The sun beat down on Jonah’s head, and he grew faint. Again he asked to die, saying that death was better than life.
God asked Jonah whether it was right for him to be angry about the plant. Jonah answered that it was right for him to be angry, even to death. God said that Jonah had cared about the plant, though he had not labored for it or made it grow. It came into being in a night and perished in a night.
God then asked whether he should not care about Nineveh, the great city, in which there were more than one hundred and twenty thousand people who did not know their right hand from their left, as well as many animals. The final words Jonah heard beneath the plant were God’s question about the people and animals of Nineveh.