Jonah 1:2-4

Amplified Bible, Classic Edition

²Arise, go to ^[a]Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim against it, for their wickedness has come up before Me.^(A)

³But Jonah rose up to flee to Tarshish from being in the presence of the Lord [as His prophet] and went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish [the most remote of the Phoenician trading places then known]. So he paid the appointed fare and went down into the ship to go with them to Tarshish from being in the presence of the Lord [as His servant and minister].^(B)

⁴But the Lord sent out a great wind upon the sea, and there was a violent tempest on the sea so that the ship was about to be broken.^(C)

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Footnotes

Jonah 1:2 In spite of the fact that Nineveh is called a “great city” three times in the Old Testament (Gen. 10:11, 12; Jonah 1:2; 3:3) and once in the Apocrypha (Judith 1:1), skeptical Bible critics long believed the statement to be greatly exaggerated. When the walled city was first excavated, it was found to be less than nine miles in circumference. That sparked cynical claims that the author, Jonah, did not know what he was talking about. But the real author, the Holy Spirit, was being overlooked. Later excavations have revealed that Nineveh had many suburbs, three of which are mentioned along with Nineveh in Gen. 10:11, 12. One first-century writer (Diodorus of Sicily) justifiably says that Nineveh was a quadrangle measuring about sixty miles in circuit—a “great city” indeed.