“In forty days, Nineveh will be overthrown”: the announcement God revokes (Jonah 3)

In short

The announcement. In the book of Jonah, the prophet Jonah, whom tradition places around 786–746 BC, cries out in Nineveh, the capital of Assyria: “In forty days, Nineveh will be overthrown!”

What happened. The book itself tells that the inhabitants repent and that God relents from punishing them: the city is not destroyed within the forty days. Nineveh falls much later, in 612 BC, taken by the Babylonians and the Medes. Only the Bible tells of the city's conversion.

What is still debated. believers see in it a threat that could be lifted if the city changed, which the text itself says, while skeptics judge that an announcement that cancels itself when it does not come true proves nothing, in an account that historians date to 450–300 BC.