Jonah 3:4

"And Jonah began to enter into the city a day's journey, and he cried, and said, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown."

"Began to enter into the city ..." This says nothing about Jonah's going a whole day's journey into Nineveh and then starting to preach, but points out the fact that as he "started" the day's journey into Nineveh, he began to cry the cry that God gave him. This mention of a "day's journey" in this verse "must not be understood as relating either to the diameter or the circumference of the city."[15] It merely means that after Jonah had gone some distance into Nineveh he started to preach.

"Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown ..." The word "overthrown" here, literally means, "Destroyed from the very foundation and is the same word used in speaking of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah."[16]

"And he cried ..." What language did Jonah use? Of course, no one can actually say; but since his message contains only five words in Hebrew, it could hardly have been inconvenient if he had learned it in three or four different languages! Besides that, Aramaic, which according to Griffiths, "was a lingua franca for the educated classes, understood by Jews and Assyrians alike, as the language of diplomacy."[17]

"Yet forty days ..." Why forty? "The number forty is often associated in the scripture with humiliation. It was forty days that Moses, Elijah and Christ fasted."[18] Furthermore, Israel's probation in the wilderness lasted forty years; and forty years elapsed between the end of the ministry of Jesus Christ and the final overthrow and destruction of Jerusalem. When the flood came, it rained, a rain of judgment upon the earth, for a total of forty days and forty nights. Banks added that, "The number forty is considered the number of probation, testing, punishment, chastisement and humiliation."[19] In New Testament times, those who were punished with stripes usually were given "forty lashes, save one." "The more definite form of the denunciation (in this verse) implies that Nineveh has now almost filled up the measure of her guilt."[20]