Jonah 3:9

Who can tell Comp. Joel 2:14, where the Hebrew is the same. Calvin well explains the doubtful form assumed by the king's decree. "How can it be," he asks, "that the king of Nineveh repented earnestly and unfeignedly, and yet spoke doubtfully of the grace of God?" I answer, that there is a kind of doubt which may be associated with faith; that, namely, which does not directly reject the promise of God, but which has other things as well in view.… No doubt the king of Nineveh conceived the hope of deliverance, but in the mean time he was still perplexed in mind, both on account of the preaching of Jonah, and on account of his consciousness of his own sins … The first obstacle (to his immediate certainty of forgiveness) was that dreadful preaching, Nineveh after forty days shall perish.… Then again, the king, no doubt when he pondered his sins might well waver a little."

God will turn Lit., the God, i. e. the One supreme God. See note on Jonah 1:6, and comp. 1 Kings 18:39. This acknowledgment by the Assyrians of Jehovah, the God of the Jews, as "the God" is all the more remarkable, because, as Kalisch points out (though he unhappily sees in the description of this chapter, not an historical fact, magnifying the grace of God and the efficacy of true repentance, but the "aspiration" of a later writer for "that time when -the Lord shall be One and His name One" "), it is contrary to all else we know of them. "The prophet Nahum declares distinctly, among other menaces pronounced against Nineveh, -Out of the house of thy gods will I cut off the graven image and the molten image" (Jonah 1:14; comp. Jonah 3:4); the Books of Kings state by name the Eastern idols Nibhaz and Tartak, Nergal and Ashima, Adrammelech and Anammelech (2 Kings 17:30-31); in the remarkable account of Sennacherib's war against Hezekiah, the former, through the mouth of one of his chief officers, bitterly taunts the Hebrew king with his futile reliance on his national god, whose nature the Assyrian understands so little that, in his opinion, Hezekiah must have incurred Jahveh's wrath, for having deprived him of all the heights and of all the altars except that solitary one in Jerusalem; and he places, in fact, Jahveh on the same level of power with the gods of Hamath and Arpad, or any Syrian idol (2 Kings 18:22; 2 Kings 18:30; 2 Kings 18:33-34). And, on the other hand, all Assyrian monuments and records, whether of a date earlier or later than Jeroboam II., disclose the same vast pantheon which was the boast of king and people alike Asshur, -the great lord ruling supreme over all the gods," with his twelve greater and four thousand inferior deities presiding over all manifestations of nature and all complications of human life; for the Assyrians at all times saw their strength and their bulwark in the multitudeof their gods, and considered that nation feeble and defenceless indeed, which enjoyed only the protection of a single divinity."