The book of the vision of Nahum the Elkoshite. The Ninevites were part of the Assyrian Empire, who were a nasty lot. Now Nineveh was a very large city; it took three days to go through it. Nineveh is not mentioned again in Scripture till the days of Jonah, when it is described as a great and populous city, the flourishing capital of the Assyrian empire (2 Kings 19:36; Isaiah 37:37).. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, a three-day journey in extent. He calls him to go to Nineveh. Jonah 3:5 - So the people of Nineveh believed God, and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them even to the least of them. Ancient historians say that Nineveh was the largest city in the world at that time. Go to Nineveh: Medieval Jewish Commentaries on the Book of Jonah, Translated and Explained - eBook (9781621897675) by Steven Bob Similarly, God sends Jonah to Nineveh, “the great city,” telling him that its evil “has come up” before him . Aramaic nuna, "fish"). God told Jonah to go to Nineveh and call them to repent. The problem was, Jonah couldn’t stand the Ninevites. He returned to Nineveh and was later killed in the temple of the Assyrian god Nisrok (2 Kings 19:35–37). The English placename Nineveh comes from Latin Ninive and Septuagint Greek Nineuḗ (Νινευή) under influence of the Biblical Hebrew Nīnewēh (נִינְוֶה), from the Akkadian Ninua (var. The original meaning of the name is unclear but may have referred to a patron goddess. Interestingly, although it is not certain what the original meaning of the name of the city means, in ancient Aramaic, ‘Nuna’ from where we get the word‘Nineveh’ means ‘the place of the fish’, thought to refer to a goddess associated with fish. Ninâ) or Old Babylonian Ninuwā. i. On the human level, the dramatic story speaks to us of the possibility of second chances in our lives. Go to Nineveh: The city of Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian Empire and was a large and prominent city in its day. So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Jonah is the central character in the Book of Jonah, in which God commands him to go to the city of Nineveh to prophesy against it "for their great wickedness is come up before me," but Jonah instead attempts to flee from "the presence of the Lord" by going to Jaffa (sometimes transliterated as Joppa or Joppe), and sets sail for Tarshish. God calls Jonah outside of his comfort zone. The book of Jonah remains an engaging part of the religious lives of Jews and Christians. —Jonah 3:3 NKJV It was not a city of Israel at all; God called Jonah to go to a pagan, Gentile city and call them to repentance. Nineveh is well-known as the place where the prophet Jonah was sent by God to preach (Jonah 1:2). On the spiritual level, it describes the paths an individual and a people can take leading them back to God. Nahum 1:1 - The burden of Nineveh. Jonah was reluctant to go, probably because of the Assyrians’ great wickedness, and he tried to run from the Lord’s command. Jonah 3:2 - Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee. God tells Abraham that the outcry against Sodom is such that he “must go down” to investigate . Jonah’s Nineveh is thematically connected to Sodom, another biblical city of evil . The cuneiform for Ninâ is a fish within a house (cf. Jonah Goes to Nineveh. 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