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Once Micah had warned the people of the coming punishment, he launched into more detail about who exactly was to blame for the disaster. The second chapter is comprised of two speeches of doom, primarily focused on greedy landholders. The elite of Judah had been ignoring God’s sacred system of land distribution, and they had abused their power to gobble up the property of the less fortunate. In the third chapter, our prophet widened his gaze, calling out the entire cast of Judah’s leadership: priests, judges, and prophets. The obligation of leaders was to serve the people. Instead, the civil and religious systems had become corrupt, money-grabbing schemes in which judges, prophets, and priests denied justice to the people and fattened their own wallets. Exile was the consequence for those who hated good and loved evil.
We need to go deeply into the text to unpack the substance of Micah’s accusations and discover the response of Micah’s peers to his message.
Property rights
Micah first painted an image of Judah’s elite landowners, lying in their beds, plotting their next evil deed, eager for the morning so they could renew their wicked acts. Micah charged, “they covet fields, and seize them; houses, and take them away” (2:2). The idea of wrongdoers scheming at night, keen on starting each day, was striking for its industriousness. Micah clarified that the robbing of the disadvantaged in Judah was intentional, not the accidental result of tough economic times or poor agricultural yields. The hardship of the lower classes in Judah was the product of design, not circumstance. The landowners were refusing to obey God’s laws of land inheritance and debt forgiveness. Micah’s contemporary, the prophet Isaiah, spoke of a pervasive spirit of greed: “Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field till no space is left” (Isa. 5:8).
Before the Israelites had conquered the land of Canaan, God had mapped out how the people should distribute the land among the tribes (Num. 26). The intention was to ensure fairness for every tribe and their descendants. On the plains of Moab, Moses took a census of the entire Israelite community and by the casting of lots, land was assigned to each clan, with larger clans receiving larger lots and smaller clans getting smaller lots. After Joshua and his armies conquered the “hill country, the western foothills, the Arabah, the mountain slopes, the wilderness and the Negev” (Josh. 12:8), the elders had distributed the territory according to what they had already decided before the conquest. The land of Israel was a sacred gift from God to his people, hence only God could divide and distribute it. It was not the prerogative of earthly systems to redistribute it.
The laws of Moses also laid out a legal system to manage disputes over ancestral lands. They took care to ensure that daughters could inherit family land when fathers had no sons. If a man had no children, his land passed down to his brothers (Num. 27). God foresaw a day when the people would try to game his system of debt forgiveness and land returns, but he appealed to what should be a common sense of justice: “Do not take advantage of each other but fear your God” (Lev. 25:17).
The story of Naboth’s vineyards shows just how seriously the righteous people took the laws of land inheritance, while the ungodly disregarded the laws. The unrighteous King Ahab of Israel coveted his neighbor Naboth’s vineyard. When Ahab asked to purchase the vineyard, Naboth replied, “The Lord forbid that I should give you the inheritance of my ancestors” (1 Kings 21:3). As a righteous man, Naboth understood that according to God’s laws, if he sold his ancestral property, he would deprive his descendants of a future home and vineyard. He also knew that the land was God’s and not his to give. Ahab and his wife Jezebel, offended by the rejection, killed Naboth and took possession of the vineyard. Upon hearing the news, the prophet Elijah became enraged. He understood that an evil king’s greed had pushed aside God’s laws, which resulted in the killing of an innocent man. When greed overwhelmed justice, and the upper classes put themselves above God’s laws, the weak suffered.
A century later, when Micah was preaching against land-grabbing elites, he wore the mantle of Elijah. The King of Israel was not above God’s laws in Elijah’s day, nor were the upper classes of Judah in Micah’s days.
Robbing and defrauding the middle and lower classes became the norm in Micah’s lifetime. Given that Micah was from a rural town in Judah, he likely was an eyewitness to the mistreatment of family and neighbors. Micah often placed himself in his oracles. He accused the land barons of taking homes from “the women of my people” (2:9). When a family lost their land, they lost their life-source and easily slipped into poverty and destitution.
God understood that inherited land rules would not prevent hardship. So, his law provided safety nets which prevented people from slipping into debt and servitude. Every seven years, the lending system prescribed by the Torah cancelled all debts. The law of Moses also demanded that every fiftieth year, the year of Jubilee, all family property should return to the rightful owners (Lev. 25:8-13). However, lenders neglected the seven-year law, and landowners disregarded the Jubilee.
God warned against the temptation to deny loans to the poor: “If anyone is poor among your fellow Israelites in any of the towns of the land the Lord your God is giving you, do not be hardhearted or tightfisted toward them” (Deut. 15:7). By the eighth century BCE, God had had enough. Punishment awaited the hardhearted and tightfisted. God commissioned Micah to give the elite one last warning.
Micah’s oracles often have an eye-for-an-eye or reap-what-you-sow element. For Judah’s landowners, Micah had one simple message. Because they had proven greedy and untrustworthy with the land God gifted them, the gift was going to be taken away and overrun by an invading army. Judah would be overthrown, and it would be up to her captors to parcel out the fields (2:4). Exile was the greatest of humiliations for ancient peoples because it represented not only a military and political loss, but also the disfavor of their deity. Indeed, Micah did not name the Assyrians or Babylonians as the instruments of God’s punishment. Yahweh was the only one sitting in the judge’s seat.
Prophetic office
Micah’s oracles of disaster were difficult for his listeners. Other prophets contemporary with Micah begged him to stop his pronouncements saying, “one should not preach of such things; disgrace will not overtake us” (2:6). Micah denounced those prophets. They were determined to deliver good news, but they were overconfident in their immunity from punishment as God’s chosen people. They prophesied what the audience wanted to hear, not the truth. Micah said the people wanted to silence the truth-telling prophets while the false prophets preached “wine and strong drink” (2:11). The false prophets appealed to the community’s wealth and appetite, as opposed to petitioning their conscience. They assured the people of material blessings, or what Isaiah called “smooth things” (Isa. 30:10).
This placating message was deadly for Israel and Judah, and the same deadly message carries on in the church today. The equivalent of false prophets in our day are the health and wealth churches who guarantee that strong faith leads to material gain. This message is a lie, a distortion of the gospel. It is also a pitiful commission compared to our actual call to take part with our creator in building the kingdom of God.
Since ancient peoples often paid prophets for their services, there was a temptation to give the “customers” what they wanted. Micah accused the prophets of proclaiming peace when they received payment for their prophetic message (3:5) and declaring war when they did not receive any payment. The wealthier the recipient of a prophecy, the more pleasing the oracle. False prophets tickled the ears of the people.
The people believed Yahweh to be a “compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness” (Ex. 34:6), as he had described himself to their patriarchs. The people were relying on the eternal guarantees of their covenant with God. However, God designed the covenant as a partnership with moral and ethical expectations. God warned his people that if they kept the covenant, they would experience blessings, and if they walked away from the covenant, they would experience curses (Deut. 11). God did not revoke their position as His elect, but their sins and disregard for His laws brought his curses upon them, and part of the stated punishment for breaking the covenant was banishment from the promised land (Deut. 11:17).
Micah contrasted his own faithfulness to Yahweh’s message with that of the false prophets. He never denied the authenticity of their prophetic gift, he only expressed that they were misappropriating it. He was a prophet carried by Yahweh’s spirit, which set him apart (3:8). The punishment for false prophets was the removal of their prophetic ability. Just as Samson lost his strength with the cutting of his long hair, Micah warned that the prophets’ visions and revelations would go dark, and their prayers and intercession would go unanswered (3:6).
Conspiracy of the powerful
God had sent Moses to Israel when she needed a leader to deliver her from bondage in Egypt. He had sent Joshua when Israel needed a military commander to conquer the promised land. God had sent King David when Israel needed a united political capital and then Solomon when the people wanted a house for Yahweh to be exalted. The physical Kingdom of Israel and Judah were complete, even if divided, but their spiritual condition was rotten. The prophets, priests, judges, and landowners shared responsibility for poisoning the well.
Micah widened the scope to look at the whole corrupt power structure responsible for Judah’s undoing. Because Micah was a prophet with access to the king (Jer. 26:18), it is likely he delivered his oracles in the Jerusalem courtyards within earshot of all the Judean elite. Micah accused them of a conspiracy to exploit the people and deny them justice. Land barons stole property while the judges in court refused to protect them. The priests took bribes and looked the other way. Moral order was not their priority. Micah explained the widespread corruption in a phrase common to the other true prophets: The people “hate the good and love the evil” (3:2).
Micah described Judah’s elite as cannibals. Each of Micah’s oracles increased in severity, but in the third chapter his denunciations reach a climax. He charged that they eat the poor, take off their skin, break their bones and cook them in pots (3:3). The prophet desired to use brutal language to express precisely the horror that God experienced while observing their mistreatment of each other.
Micah gives us plenty to think about as we look around our world and question our own measure of selfishness. When we spread our hands in prayer to our creator, does his face shine down upon us? Or as the prophet Isaiah has said, does he hide his face because our hands are also full of blood (Isa. 1:15)? The prophets’ messages endure and are relevant today.