Nevertheless, the men rowed hard to get back to dry land, but they couldn’t because the sea was raging against them more and more.

Then he issued a decree in Nineveh:

By order of the king and his nobles: No man or beast, herd or flock, is to taste anything at all. They must not eat or drink water.

Who knows? God may turn and relent; He may turn from His burning anger so that we will not perish.

Then God saw their actions—that they had turned from their evil ways—so God relented from the disaster He had threatened to do to them. And He did not do it.

So the Lord said, “You cared about the plant, which you did not labor over and did not grow. It appeared in a night and perished in a night.

Should I not care about the great city of Nineveh, which has more than 120,000 people who cannot distinguish between their right and their left, as well as many animals?”