To overthrow or to turn around?

"And he cried out, ‘Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!’" Jonah 3v4b.

"Overthrown has", writes Alicia Suskin Ostriker in her book "For the Love of God: the Bible as an Open Book" (2007, p.110), "a double meaning. Hafak, overthrow or overturn, is the word  used for what happens to Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19.29, Deuteronomy 30.23, Amos 4.11, Jeremiah 20.16, Lamentations 4.6). However, as with oracles in classical Greece, which can mean the opposite of what they seem (in the most famous instance an oracle tells the Lydian king Croesus that if he attacks Persia a great kingdom will be overthrown, but neglects to tell him it will be his own kingdom),  hafak can also mean to turn over or turn around."