Did you know the Septuagint says Jonah proclaimed that Nineveh would be destroyed in 3 days, not 40?

LXX: “And Jonas began to enter into the city about a day's journey, and he proclaimed, and said, Yet three days, and Nineve shall be overthrown.”

Hebrew: "And Jonah began to enter into the city a day's journey, and he cried, and said, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown."

Surely something is amiss here because Jonah cannot have said both. So how do we reconcile this?

First we must accept that both the Hebrew and Septuagint are one and divine and that we ought to make use of both, as did the Apostles.

And the Apostles made use of both because they knew the translators of the Septuagint were under divine guidance, and were perfectly able to say something different than the Hebrew text on the same matters for the purpose of conveying a different yet related signification, converging on the same meaning.

Augustine believed this 3 vs 40 discrepancy served the purpose of admonishing the reader to go beyond the strictly historical level and seek out the meanings that the history itself was written to convey.

He says it's as if the Septuagint translators wanted to rouse reader who would otherwise cling to nothing more than the bare history of events from his slumber and prod him to search out prophecy's depth.

So what specifically were the translators of the Septuagint trying to signify?

Augustine believes that Christ Himself is deliberately signified both by the 40 and by the 3 days.

He is signified by the 40 days because He spent 40 days with his disciples after his resurrection and then ascended into heaven, and He is signified by the 3 days because he rose again on the third day.

It is as if the reader were somehow being told, "In the forty days look for the one in whom you are also able to find the three days. You will find the former in his ascension, the latter in his resurrection."

Augustine thus tells us, "Christ could be signified quite aptly by both numbers, the one declared through the prophet Jonah, the other through the prophecy of the seventy translators, and yet both declared by one and the same Spirit."

Explanations like this are always amazing to me and I wanted it to share it in hopes that some of you would find it helpful.