Jonah began to enter into the city a day's journey, and he cried out, and said, "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!"
"Yet forty days ..." Why forty?  "The number forty is often associated in the scripture with humiliation.  It was forty days that Moses, Elijah and Christ fasted."[18]  Furthermore, Israel's probation in the wilderness lasted forty years; and forty years elapsed between the end of the ministry of Jesus Christ and the final overthrow and destruction of Jerusalem.  When the flood came, it rained, a rain of judgment upon the earth, for a total of forty days and forty nights.  Banks added that, "The number forty is considered the number of probation, testing, punishment, chastisement and humiliation."[19]  In New Testament times, those who were punished with stripes usually were given "forty lashes, save one."  "The more definite form of the denunciation (in this verse) implies that Nineveh has now almost filled up the measure of her guilt."[20]