It's always enlightening reading the Bible in different languages.
Last night at a German-language Bible study group we were going through Acts 18, and I read something I'd never noticed in English or Greek, which is that God says to Paul (who'd been having an awful time in Corinth), "ich habe ein großes Volk in dieser Stadt." - "I have a large people in this city."
English translations go with "many" because it works better, but the word groß (big) fits πολὺς (many) just fine, AND it made me think of Jonah and Jonah 4 in particular.
Throughout Jonah the word גדול "big" comes up more than a dozen times, although the Greek word is μέγας (mega!).
But in the last line of Jonah we do get the word "many", speaking of the many animals who would have been destroyed, not to mention the 120k+, had Yhwh not had mercy on them. The "more than" is the adjectival form of πολὺς: πλείους. So we have "many" in the conclusion of Jonah, as in Acts 18:10.
All this makes clear what God is saying to Paul in Acts. Just as God had mercy on Nineveh through the unwilling Jonah, so too will he have mercy on the people of Corinth through the willing (if slightly battered) Paul.
It is a great city, with a great many people in peril with out God's salvation.
