“The great city of Nineveh”
Get up! Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before Me. (Jonah 1:2 BSB)
What it sounds like today
A routine mission to go preach in some big foreign city.
The cultural key
The command lands like a bombshell once you know what Nineveh was. It was the capital of Assyria, the cruelest superpower of the era, an empire notorious for mass deportations, flaying prisoners alive, and impaling the conquered, and the deadly enemy that would soon annihilate the northern kingdom of Israel. Asking a Hebrew prophet to march into the enemy's capital and call it to repentance, with the risk that God might actually spare it, is asking Jonah to help save the very people he most fears and hates. That is why Jonah does not merely disobey but flees in the opposite direction: he would rather run to the far end of the world than watch Nineveh shown mercy. And the book's scandal, spelled out in Jonah's angry prayer at the end, is precisely that God is 'gracious and compassionate' even to Assyria. Read without knowing Nineveh, the story is a quaint fish-tale; read with it, it is about God's mercy reaching a reader's worst enemy.
Recovered meaning
Nineveh was the capital of Assyria, the brutal empire that was Israel's mortal enemy; that is why Jonah flees rather than preach there, and why God's willingness to spare it is the book's central scandal. The whole story turns on hating the city God loves.