is thus achieved, for “he does not want any to perish, but wants all to come to repentance” (2 Pet. 3:9). The story of the sparing of Nineveh is ch. 1 all over again: just as the praying sailors were delivered from the fatal effect of the storm, so now is Nineveh from the realization of Yahweh’s prophecy of doom.34 It is even more a repetition of Jonah’s experience. Jonah had been the object of divine anger, symbolized in the fury of the storm (1:15). He too had been under sentence of death and conscious
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