Jonas 3:9

Whoever knows—the sins he has committed, shall repent.

“Who knows, He has our guilt in His hand! He may turn from us and have mercy on it from before the LORD, and turn back from His strong anger that we may not be lost.”

"Who knows"- [the explanation of this is:] perhaps God will return and relent when we repent of our evil actions, or the explanation is: one who knows the ways of repentance should repent and God, Blessed is He, will relent, and [Targum] Yonatan translates: "One he knows that he has sins which obligate him [to be punished] should repent of them and we will be granted mercy from before God."

"And he will relent"- [There is a] patakh because it is an פִּעֵל-form past-tense verb altered to be future-tense because of the letter ו, it is from the נִפעַל form [of verbs].

It is said broadly [in the verse]: "whoever knows should return," meaning to say that one who knows of something swindled or stolen in his hands should return it, or [that] one who knows the ways of repentance should return to God and he will have mercy on him, for with this is the anger of God returned [from upon people] and they will not go to destruction. And from this it can be seen that the people of Nineveh understood the Godly decree according to its [true] intention with regards to the overturning [of the city for good or for bad], for the king therefore commanded that Nineveh overturn its actions, for if it did this "spiritual overturning," then God would be overturned from [executing] his decree and there would be no physical overturning in the city afterward. [But] behold that neither the people of Nineveh nor their king were aroused to serve the honored Name [of God] and [they were] not [aroused] to remove their idols and false gods from the land, for they were continuously holding on to their deficient belief, and this is the [meaning of the verse's] statement: "and God saw their actions," meaning to say in the practical commandments between them and their fellows they had returned from their evil way, but they had not returned from their belief [in false gods] and [even] with all this [it still says in the verse]: "And God relented of all the bad he had said to do" for the decree was [based] on nothing but "the treachery in their hands."