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| Jan van Eyck, Micah, from the Ghent altarpiece, 1432. |
It has been not quite two years since the last entry in this enterprise, which was begun 15 years ago this month. I guess it’s reasonable to stand back from myself and say “Lo, here is a guy who has had trouble staying excited about reading the Bible.”
At the very least, I have trouble staying excited about reading the prophets. Most of what they have to say is reiteration of the formula that God will punish the people because he’s angry about their bad behavior, and occasionally reward the people for their good behavior. Since “the people” means a whole bunch of people, of whom most are surely behaving well part of the time and behaving poorly part of the other time – we’re talking about humans, here – this is much like saying “God is random.” Well, it’s not, because the prophets also define what good behavior is, which is to say doing what the prophets want. This makes their message more like “God is an incredibly powerful bully who will beat you up if you don’t do what I say.”
That’s my memory of it, anyway. But Micah seems to jump right back into this groove. The first section heading of Chapter 1 is “Judgement Against Samaria and Jerusalem,” the big cities of Israel and Judah respectively. The second section heading is “Weeping and Mourning.” I actually don’t know where the section headings come from – they’re just traditional editorial markings, I think, more or less consistent among translations. But they definitely summarize Micah 1 well enough.
In Micah 2, we start with “Man’s Plans and God.” The first two verses warn of woe to thieves, especially those who seize fields and houses. Then, in the third to fifth verses, God says that he is going to crush “this people,” humiliate and cast them off the land. As written, it’s one of any number of examples of the “because some people are dodgy, everybody’s going to get it” mechanism.
Micah 2:6 to 11 is labelled “False Prophets,” but that’s not actually what it’s about. It’s about people complaining about the gloom and doom of prophets like Micah. He mocks them for wanting more joyful prophecies. Then, we end the chapter with “Deliverance Promised,” in which God promises to gather up the “remnant of Israel” like a happy, prosperous herd of sheep. So I guess Micah is capable of busting out a little optimism after all.
Micah 3 is a fiery if vague condemnation of Israel’s civil and religious elite – they “despise justice and distort all that is right” – whereas Micah 4 is back in the joyful mode, predicting a happy future of Jerusalem in which “every man will sit under his own vine and under his own fig tree” and the Jews will live happy in the protection of God:
All the nations may walk in the
name of their gods;
We will walk in the name of the
Lord our God for ever and ever. (5)
Also in Chapter 4, Micah makes reference to the Jews being taken into captivity in Babylon and then being rescued and returned to their homeland (10). Without any better sense of the context than what I’ve learned in this project, I am pretty sure that that’s what all of Micah, or at least all that we're looking at so far, is about.
To recap: after a long line of kings, Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians and many of the elites were hauled off to that city. There, they forged a strong religious identity, to the point which when they were allowed to return to their homeland many years later, the relatively scruffy folks who had been living their lives in the meantime seemed like so many heathens. Obviously they needed to be put back in their place, and fairly obviously, I think, the Book of Micah was part of this campaign.
Now, Chapter 1 begins by saying that it was written “during the reigns of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah,” so the ruin he predicts for Samaria and Jerusalem was a spot-on prediction! Chapter 2’s language about punishing those who steal fields and houses, and gathering up the remnant of Israel, sounds like invective against people who took possession of the property left vacant by the exiles. The happy ending in Chapter 4 is about the wonderful new era of prosperity and serious religion that will return to Jerusalem, once the exiles have reimposed their will over the riff-raff.
I will make the lame a remnant,
those driven away a strong nation.
The Lord will rule over them in
Mount Zion from that day and forever.
As for you, O watchtower of the
flock, O stronghold of the Daughter of Zion,
The former dominion will be
restored to you; Kingship will come to the Daughter of Jerusalem. (7-8)
Micah is a seven-chapter book, so we’ll be back sometime within the next two years with coverage of Chapters 5, 6, and 7!
