"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."
Jonah 3:5 · King James Bible
Where it was
Nineveh stood on the east bank of the Tigris river, opposite the modern city of Mosul in northern Iraq. It was for a time the greatest city in the world — the capital of the Assyrian empire, ringed with a wall said to be so wide that three chariots could ride abreast on top of it. In Jonah's day the book calls it "an exceeding great city of three days' journey" (Jonah 3:3). At its height in the seventh century BC, under Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal, Nineveh may have held 120,000 people or more (Jonah 4:11).
Why it matters in the Bible
Nineveh appears in Scripture as both the great enemy of Israel and, briefly, the great example of a whole city that repented. Assyria — with Nineveh as its throne-city — was the empire that conquered the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 BC and carried the ten tribes into exile. The Jewish memory of Nineveh was fear and grief.
Which is why Jonah did not want to go. The Lord tells him: "Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it" (Jonah 1:2). Jonah runs the other way, is swallowed by a great fish, is spit out on land, and this time obeys. He walks a day's journey into the city crying, "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown." And the Bible records one of the great turnings in Scripture: the king rises from his throne, lays aside his robe, sits in ashes, and decrees a city-wide fast — beasts as well as men. "And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not" (Jonah 3:10).
A century later the prophets Nahum and Zephaniah announce Nineveh's fall. The Medes and Babylonians destroy it in 612 BC — so thoroughly that when Xenophon marched past two hundred years later he did not know he was walking on the ruins of a capital.
Jesus himself invokes Nineveh: "The men of Nineveh shall rise in judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: because they repented at the preaching of Jonas; and, behold, a greater than Jonas is here" (Matthew 12:41).
For the household
Nineveh is the Bible's proof that no city and no person is too far gone for God to reach. And Jonah is the Bible's warning that even those who know God best can resent his mercy toward the very people they have judged past hope.