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In Hebrew, Micah is a sentence name, meaning, “who is like Yahweh?” Yah and Yahu are the suffix forms of Yahweh often used in biblical names. The meaning of the prophet’s name closes out his own book. At the end of the book, Micah praised the steadfast love and compassion of the God of Israel and asked, “Who is a God like you?” (7:18).
Dating
The book of Micah opens with: “The word of the Lord that came to Micah of Moresheth in the days of Kings Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah of Judah, which he saw concerning Samaria and Jerusalem” (1:1). Half the Minor Prophets have historical superscriptions in their introductions, but Micah’s is the fullest. Superscriptions are helpful in our reconstruction of the historical, political, and religious environments that shaped the messages of the prophets. We know about the reigns of these kings from the books of Kings and Chronicles, and we know about the Assyrian political scene because of their many records. So, first, let me paint the historical backdrop for Micah’s world.
With Micah’s ministry overlapping King Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, the book can be dated between 740 and 690 BCE. Based on historical clues in his text, his main ministry lasted from 722 to 701 BCE, with the bulk of his prophecies being uttered during the reign of Hezekiah. Around this same time, Hosea and Amos were prophesying in Israel while Isaiah ministered in Jerusalem. Micah seems to be on the back end of these other prophets. Considering all that was coming for Israel and Judah, God was moved to speak loudly. One interesting thing to note is that Micah’s superscription did not identify the contemporary kings of Israel at the time of his ministry, probably because he considered them to be illegitimate.
Micah ministered in Jerusalem, even though he was from Moresheth, a rural town 25 miles outside Jerusalem. He directed his prophecies at both the Northern and Southern Kingdoms. He often referenced both kingdoms as Israel, treating the divided kingdom as if it were still a unified whole.
Israel and Judah were both economically strong, but the political situation was tense. Israel and the Arameans constantly threatened Judah’s borders. Remember in the previous century, Jonah had ministered to a weakened and distracted Assyria. Under the reign of Tiglath-Pileser III, the Assyrian Empire moved past their period of decline and was on the resurgence. The Assyrian mercenary army was hungry for new conquests. They subdued Israel and Judah, making them vassals and demanding heavy tributes.
The Northern Kingdom of Israel wearied of the Assyrian burden. They plotted with the Aramean King Rezin to fight off Assyria, and they invited the Judean King Ahaz to join them in a military alliance. King Ahaz was an unrighteous, cowardly king, and he wanted no part of challenging Assyria. The prophet Isaiah unsuccessfully counseled Ahaz to fear Yahweh alone and trust in his protection. Instead, Ahaz pursued the protection and alliance of Assyria.
To continue currying the good favor of the Assyrian king, Ahaz informed Assyria of Israel’s plans. He sent a delegation to the king, bearing gold and silver gifts taken from the temple treasury. He even had an Assyrian altar placed inside the Jerusalem temple and instructed the temple priests to make sacrifices on it (2 Kings 16:10-18, 2 Chron. 28:1-4). Ahaz’s violations of Judah’s religious integrity provoked God’s wrath.
Northern Israel’s king did not align with Assyria. Rebellions against the Assyrian yoke continued to pop up for the next 20 years, until finally Tiglath-Pileser III’s successor, Sargon II, completely conquered the Northern Kingdom. Judah was all that remained of the land covenanted to their forefathers.
King Hezekiah succeeded his father, Ahaz. Hezekiah was the opposite of Ahaz, godly and righteous. He listened to the prophetic counsel of Isaiah and Micah (Jer. 26:18). Hezekiah enacted sweeping religious reforms that included sanctifying the temple after his father’s desecrations. He destroyed the cultic high places where people worshiped false gods and enforced strict loyalty to Yahweh. Ready to reestablish Judah’s independence, Hezekiah stopped all tribute payments to Assyria.
Judah’s rebellion did not sit well with the new Assyrian king, Sennacherib. In retaliation, his armies wiped out 46 Judean towns and marched all the way to the gates of Jerusalem. Hezekiah prayed, and Isaiah rightly predicted that the Assyrians could not destroy the capital. A mysterious angel of the Lord passed through the Assyrian encampments, forcing them to give up their siege. In Sennacherib’s records of the siege, he boasted about locking Hezekiah up “like a bird in a cage,” but he never claimed that he captured Jerusalem, an important omission. At the end of the eighth century BCE, Israel and most of Judah were destroyed, but Jerusalem remained unharmed for a little while longer.
The main thing to remember when reading Micah is that during his lifetime Assyria threatened Israel and Judah from all sides. Therefore, Micah’s message of doom was not far-fetched or unreasonable to his audience.
Theophany
Micah’s opening oracle is a theophany, an intense manifestation of Yahweh in earthly terms. Theophanies were a frequently used tool in the Hebrew scriptures. Yahweh manifested as a burning bush to Moses (Ex. 3:2-10), a commander of armies to Joshua (Josh. 5:13-15), a wrestling angel to Jacob (Gen. 32:24-30), and a still, small voice to Elijah (1 Kings 19:12). The prophets’ theophanies were often grandiose with a taste for the cosmic. Isaiah saw the hem of God’s robe overwhelming the whole of the temple (Isa. 6:1-8), while Ezekiel saw Yahweh’s chariot, wheeled by supernatural creatures (Ezek. 1).
In Micah’s vision of Yahweh, he was the superb judge descending from his heavenly chamber and marching on earth (1:4). The mountain range that was one of the natural advantages for Israel in her defense against invading nations melted like wax under the hot knife of Yahweh’s step. With Yahweh descending onto the scene, the fertile valleys of Samaria erupted like a cascading waterfall.
Yahweh summoned the nations to the courtroom of justice. As in the other prophets, the language of the courtroom lent itself to the depiction of Israel’s judgment. Samaria and Jerusalem were on the hot seat. Micah asked, “What is the transgression of Jacob? Is it not Samaria? And what is the high place of Judah? Is it not Jerusalem?” (1:5). As the capitals of the Northern and Southern Kingdoms, God held these cities accountable for the corruption and injustices that tainted their nations. As the centers of religious worship, they were to blame for the failure of the priesthood and the contamination of pure worship of Yahweh. Both kingdoms were guilty of ignoring Yahweh’s ideals.
Based on context clues, Micah likely delivered this first oracle when King Ahaz was on the throne. Samaria was still standing, but Assyria was breathing hot on her neck. Micah described Samaria’s future destruction in vivid detail; her ruin would be total (1:2-9). Samaria had once been the beautiful jewel of the Northern Kingdom, a wreath at “the head of a fertile valley” (Isa. 28:4). However, on the day of her punishment, Samaria’s building stones would fall into the valley below and the invading army would beat her idols to pieces (1:7).
We know from Hosea that idol worship was the most blatant of Samaria’s sins. The people used their temples and high places to take part in Canaanite fertility rituals. Micah described those pagan rituals as collecting “prostitute wages” (1:7), and he predicted invaders would steal the money collected in the temple from such debauchery and put it in the Assyrian coffers. The prophet did not consider the theft of pagan treasures from one temple and their relocation to another pagan temple as a significant loss.
The oracle never names Assyria outright as Samaria’s attacker. Instead, it focuses on Yahweh’s powerful hand intervening in history. The judgments were going to be from Yahweh, even if it was a foreign army who executed his punishment.
By 722 BCE, Micah’s oracle materialized, not long after he had first spoken it. Assyrian King Sargon II conquered Samaria and deported the upper classes of Israel. Sargon II, in keeping with Assyrian policy, moved other conquered peoples into Samaria to occupy the city. From that day forward, the Northern Kingdom was lost to history. This section is the only text Micah gave to Israel. For the rest of the book, he prophesied about Judah.
Puns and wordplay
Micah’s second oracle targeted his listening audience. He described the taking of nine Judean cities (1:10-16), which were all in the Shephelah, Judah’s lowlands. They were small, peaceful, agricultural towns, much like Micah’s hometown. The order in which they were listed was seemingly random, not based on geography or representative of the way Sennacherib’s armies later advanced on Judah. The list was a sampling of cities that would face Judah’s coming destruction.
Micah began with the saying, “tell it not in Gath.” This is one of those prophetic hyperlinks to another passage of scripture. “Tell it not in Gath” is alluding to when King David had learned of Saul and Jonathan’s death and had called for ritual mourning among the people (2 Sam. 1:20). Gath was the long-time Philistine enemy of Israel. David had been resentful of the gloating that would surely happen among Israel’s enemies when news arrived that the Saul and Jonathan were dead. Micah intended for the literary callback to connect the fall of Saul’s house to the fall of the Davidic dynasty. In 2 Samuel, it had been Saul who was on the run from David, and now it was the descendants of David running from Sennacherib.
Micah described the destruction of all nine cities with puns, sometimes based on the sound of the place name and sometimes stemming from the meaning of the town name. Micah was a clever and skilled orator, but understanding the original Hebrew is the only way to appreciate his wordplay. Unfortunately, nuances are lost in translation. I will try to explain a few so you get the picture.
Micah turned the name of each town into an omen of its eventual fate. The town Beth-leaphrah meant “house of dust,” and Micah warned them to roll themselves in dust. His own town, Moresheth, sounds like the Hebrew word for betrothed. Micah said Judah must give a dowry to Moresheth (1:14). The punishment was a complex metaphor. Judah would lose the town of Moresheth and still be required to pay tribute to the Assyrian overlord, like a father who gave away his daughter and paid a dowry. The effect of Micah’s specific doom messages, catered to each town, would have been chilling to his audience.
Here is my own weak example of what Micah is constructing with words, using the names of towns in northern Virginia: God would consign Springfield into a perpetual winter. Ashburn would be engulfed in flames by the enemy. Blackstone would tumble down into the valley.
Lachish was the most strategic of Judean towns mentioned by Micah. It was home to one of the military fortresses built to protect the way to Jerusalem. Micah’s irony borders on cruelty when he commands Lachish to prepare its chariots, not to fight the Assyrian army, but to flee. In fact, Assyria conquered Lachish in 701 BCE in the army’s sweep through Judah. Sennacherib was so proud of his success in conquering the prized town that he depicted the protracted siege and gruesome destruction of Lachish on the walls of his palace in Nineveh. Had he vanquished Jerusalem too, his palace relief most likely would have portrayed Jerusalem’s fall. Over-memorializing Lachish took the focus off any perceived failure in Jerusalem.
Prophetic vocation
The oracles directed at Judah struck a personal chord for Micah. His own pronouncement horrified him. Throughout his oracles, he preached the same message as Amos, railing against the injustices and moral failures pervasive in society. Micah also exhibited a wide emotional range, like Hosea, and he truly grieved the failed union of Yahweh and Judah.
His hometown of Moresheth was a rural community outside of Lachish. The other towns in the Shephelah were known to him. When pronouncing the destruction of Jerusalem, his current home and place of ministry, Micah wrote, “it has reached the gate of my people” (1:9). Micah mourned, “For this I will lament and wail; I will go barefoot and naked” (1:8). He cried out like a jackal, asking others to join with him in grieving Judah’s fate. Shaving a part of one’s head was a customary way to show grief in public. Micah gloomily suggested to his compatriots that they take it one step further, in proportion to the coming devastation, and instead shave their heads as bald as an eagle (1:16).
The purpose of the prophetic vocation was to communicate Yahweh’s truth, but prophets were not spared from the effects of the coming destruction. They were not immune to grief and anguish. Jeremiah did not even marry, because he did not want to bring children into such a difficult period.
What stands out to me in Micah is that there is no tone of gloating in his words. Unlike Noah, the prophets had no boat of protection that allowed them to escape the coming storm. The prophetic calling included walking through the trauma alongside the people. Micah loved Jerusalem. He loved the small towns surrounding Jerusalem. He even equated the Kingdom of Israel with the Kingdom of Judah. These were his people and his towns. Micah, a mouthpiece for God, was not separate from his prophecies. A prophet’s life was on earth, but his ear was in heaven. And for that, I appreciate Micah’s anguish. Its authenticity is comforting, even if the message is challenging.