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Micah’s style lacks fluidity. His book is like a collection of oracles stitched together by rough transitions. Some oracles point to judgment and some to salvation. Some oracles apply to the near future, and others connect to Israel’s distant future, also known as the Messianic Age. Micah’s text lacks a continuous progression from present judgment to future salvation.
One of the most important things to understand when reading the prophets is that prophecies do not always follow an obvious order. They often switch between first- and third-person points of view within the same passage. Martin Luther complained about the prophets’ strange way of talking, “like people who, instead of proceeding in an orderly manner, ramble off from one thing to the next so you cannot make head or tail of them or see what they are getting at.”[1]
As you approach the prophets, I recommend leaving room for more literary nuance than you would expect from a modern author. The prophets did not intend for their oracles to be read in one sitting but heard in short sermons, like inspired street evangelists. They perhaps did not envision a time when their entire prophetic career would be assembled in a single volume.
The first three chapters of Micah consist mainly of oracles of judgment sprinkled with a message of hope. In Chapters 4 and 5, those proportions are switched. Micah delivers long passages of hope sprinkled with short sections of judgment.
Exalted Jerusalem
Micah 4 begins with a beautiful vision of an exalted Jerusalem in the Messianic Age. Micah was walking among the nations on their way up to Jerusalem, overhearing the exhortation of the Gentile pilgrims, “Come, let us go up!” All the nations were streaming toward Zion for teaching and religious instruction.
In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains and shall be raised up above the hills. Peoples shall stream to it, and many nations shall come and say: ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.’ For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge between many peoples, and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore; but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid; for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken (4:1-5).
Interestingly, this passage in Micah is almost identical to Isaiah 2:2-4. Isaiah and Micah were contemporaries, both ministering in Jerusalem’s halls of power. How should we deal with prophets using the same passage in their books? We know by now, at the halfway point through our Minor Prophet study, that prophets often quoted each other and cross-referenced other biblical writings. These matching portions in Isaiah and Micah are the longest word-for-word quotations in the prophets. It is unclear if Micah quoted Isaiah, or if Isaiah quoted Micah, or if they both drew from a lost source of prophetic wisdom.
In the biblical canon, Micah does not get the same biblical real estate as Isaiah, his oracle being much shorter and less famed. Scholars traditionally consider Isaiah as the older of the two contemporary prophets. Therefore, if either prophet was quoting the other it was probably Micah quoting Isaiah. However, I think the idea of an exalted Jerusalem in the coming age was well-known, well-developed, and routinely preached in the school of prophets as an encouraging vision for a depleted Judah and threatened Jerusalem. Both Isaiah and Micah had the ear of Hezekiah (Jer. 26:18; 2 Kings 19), the only Judean king in that century to seek after Yahweh. The more their visions collaborated, the more effective their prophetic counsel probably was to the king.
After witnessing Assyria’s destruction of the Northern Kingdom and the ravaging of Judean towns, Isaiah and Micah both longed for a day when all wars would stop. Those living in Jerusalem during Micah’s day feared they would be the next victims of Assyrian aggression. A vision for peace on earth, with Jerusalem taking center stage, provided needed consolation to Jerusalem’s inhabitants.
Micah, Isaiah, and Zechariah predicted Jerusalem’s spiritual impact to reach the world. As prophets, they were vague about when this destiny would unfold, only saying “in days to come,” a signal for an age beyond the horizon (4:1).
For the people of Judah, pilgrimages to Jerusalem were already a common occurrence. The Torah commanded Jews to perform sacrifices and to worship in Jerusalem at least three times a year: Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot. The Psalms of Ascent reflect the traditions and atmosphere of holiness that surrounded the ritual pilgrimage (Ps. 120-134). As the pilgrims abandoned the lowlands and climbed the hills toward Jerusalem, they felt they were spiritually ascending, as well.
Micah painted an image of Mount Zion as the “highest of the mountains” and “raised above the hills” (4:1). In terms of its actual height, Mount Zion is not at all impressive, and far inferior to Mount Hermon in northern Israel, or the mountain ranges of neighboring Lebanon. The prophet was describing Zion’s spiritual heights and its centrality to world peace. In the ancient Near East, deities often were associated with mountaintop temples. When Micah described Zion as higher than all the rest, he meant that Yahweh would possess the highest seat of honor, not merely stand on the physical mountain. The global magnetism of Jerusalem in the Messianic Age would be nothing less than the pull of Yahweh. Nations would pursue access to the one true God in his earthly throne room.
The remnant and the Messiah
In Micah 5, the prophet turns the history pages backwards and describes a few key events that would take place before Jerusalem’s exaltation over the nations. First, a remnant of God’s people would one day return to the promised land to restore the broken kingdom. At the time of Micah’s ministry, the glory of the remnant felt extremely far from their current reality (4:6). Second, an appointed Messiah would be born to reign in the legacy of King David.
The remnant doctrine was a consistent touchpoint in all the prophetic literature. A tremendous blow was coming for Judah by means of the Babylonian attack. Micah and Isaiah were the earliest prophets to foresee the rise of Babylon (Micah 4:11-13, Isa. 39:1). Micah had envisioned the remnant as a unified flock of sheep, regathered and protected by God, their shepherd-king (2:12). God conveyed his compassion towards them, acknowledging that it was indeed he who first afflicted them (4:6-8). He allowed Assyria to function as the rod of his anger and the club of his wrath (Isa. 10:5).
Yet it was also Yahweh who would transform his limping flock into a supreme remnant. God hated Assyria for the excessive pride they took in the ruin of his holy city (4:11), and he laid out counterplans for a revenge attack. Micah described the destruction of Assyria with an agricultural metaphor: “he has gathered them as sheaves to the threshing floor” (4:12). God was the author of all human history, and he would destroy the Assyrians just as Micah had prophesied. It was not Israel, but the Babylonian Empire who overthrew the Assyrians by 609 BCE.
The “Daughter of Zion” or “remnant of Jacob” were both names used for the remnant of Israel’s survivors. The Daughter of Zion would persevere through exile, as a sign of both God’s punishment and his protection. Both Micah and Jeremiah described exile as labor pains for the Daughter of Zion (Jer. 4:31). These labor pains would bring forth something new: the Messianic Age (4:10; 5:3). However, if the remnant was to commit to their path of holiness, the Lord would first need to purge and purify them. Judah had to throw all forms of idolatry and pagan cultic practices out of the covenanted land: sorcery, divination, wooden poles to worship Asherah, and stone pillars to worship Baal. Written in first-person, in this section Yahweh committed to do the uprooting himself, cleansing the nation of all her apostasies. Israel would no longer place her faith in her military strength, chariots, and fortifications. Salvation was Yahweh’s alone.
Among Christians, Micah is most known for his direct address to the small town of Bethlehem: “But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah, who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days” (5:2). Micah’s audience knew exactly what the prophet was stating between the lines in this prophecy. King David had been from Bethlehem (1 Sam. 16:1). Setting the birth of the coming Messiah in Bethlehem served to connect the ancient days of Judah’s glory to her future glory.
The people felt nostalgic for the golden age of King David and his united kingdom. The reestablishment of the House of David was a promise for which Israel eagerly awaited fulfillment: “His line shall continue forever, and his throne endure before me like the sun” (Ps. 89:36). The coming messianic king would be an heir to the Davidic covenant, but he would also bring unprecedented blessings to Israel during his reign. What no one could conceive in the eighth century BCE is that someone greater than David was coming, whose origin was even more ancient and whose strength was even more rooted in Yahweh.
Prophecies pointing to Jesus’s birth intermingle with oracles that only could have applied to Judah’s troubled present. If you read Micah 5 as an orderly progression of prophetic events, the reign of the Messiah seems likely to occur right after Assyria’s invasion. Micah sandwiched the Bethlehem birth prophecies between a description of the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem in 701 BCE (5:1) and the forecasting of the eventual collapse of the Assyrian Empire (5:5). Neither event connects to Jesus’s first-century arrival. Seven centuries stand between Assyria’s fall and Jesus’s birth.
Remember that Micah’s oracles flow in and through each other. Within the confines of Chapter 5, Micah contrasted two types of leaders for Judah. The prophet started with a reference to the humiliation of King Hezekiah during the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem. Micah likely was an eyewitness to this event. He described Hezekiah as having been struck on the cheek with a rod (5:1), which was the prophetic symbol for Assyria. King Hezekiah had done everything within his power to pacify the Assyrians, including giving them a tribute so large that he had to empty the temple treasury. When Micah spoke of Hezekiah’s humiliation, he was probably referencing this tribute. However, we also know that an angel of the Lord swept through the Assyrian encampment, which miraculously ended the siege and rescued Jerusalem (2 Kings 19). The second king promised by Micah was not to suffer Hezekiah’s humiliation but would rely on Yahweh alone: “he shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of the Lord” (5:4).
The phenomenon of juxtaposing prophecies about the near and distant future is common to all the Minor Prophets. It is called “prophetic telescoping.” When you view a mountain range through a telescope, the mountains appear to be linked. Only an aerial view or a closeup encounter shows that the mountains are not closely aligned. Each of the mountains in view are separate mountains situated miles apart. The prophets saw the near and distant future as through a telescope in which nearby and far mountains all looked like one mountain range. For this reason, putting every detail on a historical timeline, or matching every prophetic utterance with an actual event in history may not be the best way to read prophetic texts.
The gospels show that at the time of the Roman occupation in first-century Israel, the Jews were still holding onto Micah’s Bethlehem prophecy and considered it yet unfulfilled. They understood the prophetic telescope and hoped for an unmet expectation. A Bethlehem birthplace became part of the messianic profile in Jewish tradition. In Matthew’s retelling of the nativity, the wise men from the east first approached Herod to inquire where they could meet the infant “king of the Jews” (Matt. 2). Herod, alarmed by the potential threat of a new king, called together the chief priests and scribes to ascertain the birthplace of the Messiah. They all answered, “Bethlehem of Judah” and quoted Micah’s birth prophecy. Later, during Jesus’s earthly, miracle-performing ministry, the people doubted his identity as Messiah. They knew Jesus was from Nazareth and assumed he was born there. This eliminated Jesus from being the Bethlehem-born Messiah they were expecting (John 7:42).
The Hebrew scriptures, slowly and over time, built up a robust profile for the coming Messiah. The narratives, law, and prophets provided hints, predictions, and prototypes for the Messiah—leaving a trail of breadcrumbs to the manger.
Taking the prophet at his word
Across the street from the United Nations headquarters is a granite wall with the vison of Isaiah and Micah etched into it: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war anymore” (Isa. 2:4; Micah 4:3).
I understand that the yearning for world peace is manifest in every human heart, and I endorse featuring prophetic writings in public spaces, but I am also interested in how people often take this verse out of context. Until God’s laws are issued from Jerusalem to set humanity aright, the nations will not beat their swords into plowshares. So, while there is an image of beating swords into plowshares in the UN garden, nothing is said in the inscription about how all war will eventually end. Only when the nations follow God’s ways and walk in his paths will conflict cease. For Christians, we add that this day will come with the recognition of the authority of Jesus when “every knee should bend in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord” (Phil. 2:10-11).
[1] Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, vol. 19: Lectures on the Minor Prophets II, ed. Hilton C. Oswald, trans. C. Froelich (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1974).