Nineveh
A place in the Bible
The great capital of Assyria, by the Tigris River. The Lord sent the prophet Jonah there.
What happened here
- Jonah: the Lord asked him to preach in Nineveh. Jonah ran away, but in the end he went and announced that in forty days the city would be destroyed.
- The conversion: the people of Nineveh believed God, fasted, and put on sackcloth, great and small. God saw that they turned from evil, and he forgave them.
- God’s compassion: God asked Jonah whether he should not have pity on Nineveh, with more than a hundred and twenty thousand people and so many animals.
- Jesus remembers it: Jesus said that the people of Nineveh repented at the preaching of Jonah, and that something greater than Jonah was here.
Today
Its ruins remain on the bank of the Tigris, across from the city of Mosul, in Iraq.
Where it appears in the Bible
Jonah 1:2-3; Jonah 3:3-4; Jonah 3:5; Jonah 3:10; Jonah 4:11; Matthew 12:41
What the Bible says
Jonah 1:2-3
2Arise, and go to Ninive the great city, and preach in it: for the wickedness thereof is come up before me. 3And Jonas rose up to flee into Tharsis from the face of the Lord, and he went down to Joppe, and found a ship going to Tharsis: and he paid the fare thereof, and went down into it, to go with them to Tharsis from the face of the Lord.
Jonah 3:3-4
3And Jonas arose, and went to Ninive, according to the word of the Lord: now Ninive was a great city of three days’ journey. 4And Jonas began to enter into the city one day’s journey: and he cried, and said: Yet forty days, and Ninive shall be destroyed.
Jonah 3:5
And the men of Ninive believed in God: and they proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth from the greatest to the least.
Douay-Rheims Bible (Challoner revision), public domain.
Source: Easton’s Bible Dictionary (1897), “Nineveh”