The second commission is the first one minus a reason. In 1:2 YHWH said “Arise, go to Nineveh, the great city, and call out against it (עָלֶיהָ), for their evil has come up before my face.” Here the first half is repeated word for word, but three things change:

1. עָלֶיהָ (“against it”) becomes אֵלֶיהָ (“to it”). A single consonant. The commission shifts from indictment toward address — though the preposition is not by itself as decisive as that summary makes it sound (see the syntax note).
2. The charge is dropped. No “their evil has come up before my face.” Nineveh’s guilt is not restated; the commission is now bare command.
3. The content is withheld. Instead of a stated message, Jonah is sent with “the proclamation that I am speaking to you” — a hapax noun (הַקְּרִיאָה) and a participle that leaves the timing open. He goes holding an assignment, not a script.

That withholding is the verse’s real weight. Chapter 1 had given Jonah a reason to object; chapter 3 gives him nothing to argue with. He receives an order and a promise of words, and the reader will not hear the words until 3:4 — five Hebrew words, the shortest prophetic oracle in the Bible.

The Masoretic pointing of וִּקְרָא is irregular, and OSHB, BHS and BHQ all agree in printing it; it is treated in its own section.

Built onbhs · bhq · halot

Two asyndetic imperatives, exactly as at 1:2 and with no conjunction between them. קוּם here is not a command to stand up from a seated position but the standard ingressive auxiliary: it marks the beginning of an action carried by the following verb of motion (Waltke–O’Connor on the “hendiadys” of coordinated verbs). The literal line keeps “Arise” so the repetition across 1:2, 1:3 (וַיָּקָם), 3:2 and 3:3 (וַיָּקָם) stays visible; the modern line gives “Get up.”

The book builds its plot out of this verb. 1:2 commands קוּם; 1:3 reports וַיָּקָם יוֹנָה — he got up, and went the wrong way. 3:2 commands it again; 3:3 reports וַיָּקָם יוֹנָה a second time, now followed by אֶל־נִינְוֵה. The English must use the same word at all four points or the inversion and its correction vanish.

לֵךְ is the apocopated qal imperative of הלך, the regular form for this verb.

Identical to 1:2 and to 3:3 (there without the article, עִיר־גְּדוֹלָה). גָּדוֹל is the leitwort of Jonah — great city, great wind, great storm, great fear, great fish, great evil, great gladness — and the glossary fixes it as “great” at every occurrence. Nothing here warrants departure.

The phrase functions almost as a title rather than a description: Nineveh is not “a big city” but “the great city,” the designation repeated at 1:2, 3:2, 3:3 and 4:11. The qualifier that will matter later is added in 3:3 (לֵאלֹהִים, “to God” / “before God”), not here.

Built onhalot · bdb

This is the “unexpected reading” OSHB flags, and it is a matter of vocalization, not consonants.

The expected pointing of the conjunction before a qal imperative of קרא would be û-qrāʾ (וּקְרָא) — šûreq before a consonant with a šewaʾ. The Leningrad Codex instead gives waw with ḥireq and a dageš in the qop: וִּקְרָא. A dageš after a vowelless waw with ḥireq is not a normal Tiberian configuration, and the Masoretic tradition itself preserves notes on the oddity. BHS and BHQ both print the Leningrad reading without emending it, and OSHB records its agreement with both editions.

Built onbhs · bhq · jouon-muraoka

Proposed — pending reviewAnthony Gelston (ed.), Biblia Hebraica Quinta, fascicle 13: The Twelve Minor Prophets, Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2010.

Draft — witness readings here are an AI’s recollection and have not been checked against the apparatus (BHQ, the Göttingen Septuagint, DJD). Verify before relying on them.

At 1:2 the commission read קְרָא עָלֶיהָ — “call out against it.” Here it reads קְרָא אֵלֶיהָ — “call out to it.” One consonant, and much has been built on it: that the second commission is softer, that YHWH has already shifted from judgment to appeal, that the change prefigures the reprieve of 3:10.

The lexical facts are more restrained. With קרא, עַל does normally carry a hostile or declarative-against sense (cf. the prophetic oracles “against” a nation), while אֶל marks the addressee neutrally. But אֶל and עַל are frequently interchanged in Biblical Hebrew — especially in later books and in the orthography of the Second Temple period — and the two letters are graphically and phonetically close. The variation may be semantically loaded or may be no more than free alternation.

The rendering keeps the distinction visible without arguing from it: “against it” at 1:2, “to it” here, and the reader is told why both readings are live.

Built onhalot · bdb · waltke-oconnor

הַקְּרִיאָה is a hapax legomenon — this is its only occurrence in the Hebrew Bible. It is a transparently formed feminine noun from קרא, and stands as the cognate accusative of the imperative that governs it: qərāʾ … ʾet-haqqərîʾâ, “call out … the call-out.” HALOT and BDB agree on the sense “proclamation, message that is called out”; there is no real lexical dispute, only the rarity.

Two things follow for translation.

First, the figure. Hebrew likes the cognate accusative (compare “sacrificed a sacrifice” at 1:16, already fixed in the glossary), and the English should let it be heard: call out … the proclamation. A paraphrase such as “deliver the message” erases the fact that the noun is made from the verb.

Second, the definiteness. הַ־ plus אֲשֶׁר makes this a specific, identified proclamation — not “a message” but “the proclamation, the one I am speaking.” Jonah is not given liberty of content. He is given a defined thing he does not yet hold.

Built onhalot · bdb · dch

Proposed — pending reviewJack M. Sasson, Jonah: A New Translation with Introduction, Commentary, and Interpretation, Anchor Bible 24B, New York: Doubleday, 1990.

A verbless-type clause with a participial predicate: independent pronoun אָנֹכִי + active participle דֹּבֵר + prepositional phrase. The long pronoun אָנֹכִי (rather than אֲנִי) is required as the subject of a participle, so it is not primarily emphatic here, though the full form has weight in divine speech.

The participle carries no tense. It locates the action as ongoing relative to the frame, and the frame is the moment of the commission. Three readings are grammatically open:

• Present progressive — “that I am speaking to you,” i.e. this very utterance is the proclamation.
• Future / imminent — “that I will speak to you,” i.e. the content comes later, in Nineveh. The participle readily carries imminent futurity (Joüon–Muraoka on the predicative participle).
• Durative-iterative — “that I keep speaking to you,” the word given and renewed.

The narrative favors the second or a deliberate blend of the first two: no content is supplied in v. 2, and v. 4’s oracle arrives only when Jonah is inside the city. The rendering “I am speaking to you” is chosen because English present progressive is itself open toward the imminent future and does not close off the other readings. The study line marks the ambiguity rather than resolving it.

One morphological note. דֹּבֵר is a qal participle of דבר. The verb is overwhelmingly piel in Biblical Hebrew; the qal is confined to the participle and a few poetic forms, and functions as the ordinary participle of the piel verb. Nothing semantic follows from the stem here — it is not “a weaker speaking.”

Built onjouon-muraoka · waltke-oconnor · halot

Set side by side with 1:2, the omission is as loud as the repetition.

1:2 — Arise, go to Nineveh, the great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before my face.

3:2 — Arise, go to Nineveh, the great city, and call out to it the proclamation that I am speaking to you.

The כִּי clause with רָעָה — the word that will run through 3:8, 3:10 and 4:1 — is gone. In its place stands a withheld message. The effect is to strip Jonah of grounds for debate: in ch. 1 he was told why, and fled; now he is told only to go.

The pattern of a prophet sent with words still to be given is a recognized one. Compare Balaam, told to speak only the word YHWH puts in his mouth (Num 22:35; 23:5, 12), and Moses, told that YHWH will be with his mouth and teach him what to say (Exod 4:12). In each case the sending precedes the speech. Jonah stands in that line — with the difference that the words, when they come in 3:4, are the barest in the prophetic corpus.

Built onhalot

Proposed — pending reviewHans Walter Wolff, Obadiah and Jonah: A Commentary, trans. Margaret Kohl, Continental Commentaries, Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1986.

LXX Jonah 3:2 reads: ἀνάστηθι καὶ πορεύθητι εἰς Νινευη τὴν πόλιν τὴν μεγάλην καὶ κήρυξον ἐν αὐτῇ κατὰ τὸ κήρυγμα τὸ ἔμπροσθεν ὃ ἐγὼ ἐλάλησα πρὸς σέ.

Three differences bear on meaning.

κατὰ τὸ κήρυγμα (“according to the proclamation”) for the Hebrew direct object אֶת־הַקְּרִיאָה. The Greek turns the cognate accusative into a prepositional phrase of conformity: preach in accordance with the message rather than preach the message. The hapax noun is handled by κήρυγμα, a standard choice beside the verb κηρύσσω, so the translator preserved the Hebrew’s root-figure in Greek even while changing the syntax.

τὸ ἔμπροσθεν (“the former / the earlier one”) has no counterpart in the Hebrew. It makes the second commission a reissue of the first: preach the proclamation I spoke to you before. This looks like the translator’s interpretation — harmonizing 3:2 with 1:2 — rather than a different Hebrew text; no Hebrew word in the MT or, so far as the editions report, in any Hebrew witness corresponds to it.

ἐλάλησα, aorist, for the Hebrew participle דֹּבֵר. The Greek closes the Hebrew’s temporal openness toward the past, fitting ἔμπροσθεν: the word has already been given. The Hebrew participle does not say that, and the English must not be corrected toward it.

ἐν αὐτῇ (“in it”) renders אֵלֶיהָ; the Greek does not reproduce the אֶל/עַל distinction that chapter 1 and chapter 3 set up in Hebrew, so the Septuagint is no witness on that question.

For the critical text of the Greek see the Göttingen edition of the Twelve.

Built ongoettingen-lxx-xii · muraoka-lxx

Draft — witness readings here are an AI’s recollection and have not been checked against the apparatus (BHQ, the Göttingen Septuagint, DJD). Verify before relying on them.

Rabbinic. Jewish tradition read the two commissions as one mission renewed, and the second sending as evidence that repentance remains open — Jonah, who in the aggadic treatments flees because he foresees Nineveh’s repentance and Israel’s contrast, is nonetheless sent back. The Mekhilta’s discussion of prophets and the Targum’s handling of Jonah belong in this orbit; the specific locations should be checked before citation.

New Testament. Jonah’s preaching to Nineveh is invoked by Jesus (Matt 12:41; Luke 11:30, 32) as the standard against which his own generation is measured — the Ninevites repented at Jonah’s קְרִיאָה, and “something greater than Jonah is here.” The commission of 3:2 is the hinge that makes that comparison possible.

Early Church. Jerome, in his commentary on Jonah, treats the second sending as a case of divine patience toward both prophet and city, and reads the withheld content as God reserving the word to the moment of speaking. Cyril of Alexandria’s commentary on the Twelve similarly takes the repeated commission as a figure of the gospel’s going out to the nations, with Nineveh as the Gentile world. In Latin tradition the commission was also read alongside the apostolic sending of Matt 28:19 — reception, not exegesis of the Hebrew.

These later readings are recorded as reception. The Hebrew of 3:2 makes no claim about the nations beyond Nineveh.

Built onhalot

Proposed — pending reviewJerome, Commentarii in Ionam prophetam (Commentary on Jonah), ed. and trans. in Sources Chrétiennes 323; English in Jerome, Commentaries on the Twelve Prophets, ed. Thomas P. Scheck, Downers Grove: IVP Academic. · Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on the Twelve Prophets, trans. Robert C. Hill, Fathers of the Church, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press.

Draft — the later uses cited here (New Testament, rabbinic, patristic) are an AI’s recollection and have not been checked against the sources. Verify before relying on them.

“Call out to it the proclamation” is deliberately slightly unusual English. The cognate accusative is the point: a verb and its own noun, side by side. Smoothing it to “proclaim my message to it” would read better and would lose both the figure and the root-chain of קרא that runs through the chapter.

“It” rather than “her” in the modern line: אֵלֶיהָ is feminine because עִיר is a feminine noun — grammatical gender, not referential, and per §3 only referential gender constrains the rendering. The literal line keeps “her” so the Hebrew form is visible.