Micah — themes & analysis

The most quoted single passage in Micah, and one of the most quoted in the entire prophetic tradition, is the answer the prophet gives in chapter 6 to the question the people put. The setting is a courtroom. The LORD has a controversy with his people; the mountains and the foundations of the earth are called as witnesses. The LORD recites his case: O my people, what have I done to you? How have I wearied you? Answer me. I brought you up from the land of Egypt, and redeemed you from the house of slavery; I sent before you Moses, Aaron, and Miriam. The line is gentle, almost wounded, and it is the prosecution.

The people answer with what reads, in the Hebrew rhythm, as liturgical anxiety: With what shall I come before the LORD? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? The escalation is the prophet's point. They are climbing the scale of offering — calves, rams, rivers of oil, firstborn child — looking for the price that will satisfy.

And then, with the abruptness the prophetic literature is capable of, Micah cuts the entire scale off. He has shown you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God? Three verbs. Three objects. The whole of what is required. The Hebrew is precise: asot mishpat — to do justice — is not to admire it but to carry out the actual judgment in the actual case at the actual gate. Ahavat hesed — to love mercy — uses the great covenantal word hesed, steadfast loving-kindness that does not let go. Hatznea lekhet im elohekha — to walk humbly with your God — carries the connotation of carefully, modestly, attentively, with the discretion of a person who knows the company they are in.

The line refuses the religious bargain the people have just been trying to strike. There is no quantity of offering that buys what God wants. What God wants is the practical, daily, attentive carrying-out of the relation — at the gate, in the household, with the neighbour, with the LORD himself. The line has been quoted by Jewish, Christian, and secular ethical traditions for twenty-seven hundred years, and it has lost none of its sharpness. It lands harder when read with the full courtroom around it.

Where to follow it: Micah 6 (the courtroom).

The fifth chapter of Micah contains the most famous single prophecy in the book and one of the most contested in the prophetic literature. But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose coming forth is from of old, from ancient days. The line names a small village six miles south of Jerusalem — where David had been born to Jesse the Ephrathite. The naming is deliberate. The promise is not for a new king from the great city. It is for a ruler from the small village, of the line that came from there originally, returning to the source.

The rest of the chapter develops the figure with care. The ruler will stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the LORD; they shall dwell secure, for now he shall be great to the ends of the earth; he shall be their peace. The image is pastoral and exact — the ruler as shepherd, the flock dwelling secure, the peace as a state of dwelling rather than as the absence of armies. Micah is the prophet of the small towns, and he gives the messianic prophecy a small-town birthplace.

The Christian tradition has read the chapter through Matthew 2, where the chief priests and scribes of Herod's court quote the verse in answer to the Magi's question, and the line has been part of every Christmas service since. What is worth holding alongside that reading is the prophetic context in Micah itself. The ruler from Bethlehem is announced in the same book that has just announced that Zion will be plowed as a field; the small village is given the future the great city is being told to give up. The prophecy is a deep critique of the Davidic establishment as much as it is a hope for a Davidic figure, and the deepness of the critique is part of why the line has had its long afterlife.

Where to follow it: Micah 5 (the Bethlehem prophecy).

Few passages in the prophetic literature name the leadership of a society with the precision that the third chapter of Micah does. Three parallel oracles, each beginning with a vocative addressed to a particular class. Hear, you heads of Jacob, and rulers of the house of Israel — you who hate the good and love the evil, who tear the skin from off my people, and their flesh from off their bones; who eat the flesh of my people, and flay their skin from off them, and break their bones in pieces, and chop them up like meat in a kettle. The figure is a butcher's. The rulers are not described as merely indifferent but as cannibals, eating the very people they are supposed to govern. The image is calculated to give the audience no room to soften the indictment.

The second oracle is against the prophets. Thus says the LORD concerning the prophets who lead my people astray, who cry peace when they have something to eat, but declare war against him who puts nothing into their mouths. The mechanism is exactly stated. The prophet-for-pay does not tell lies in some abstract sense; he proportions his message to the size of the meal. The third oracle joins all three classes — the heads who give judgment for a bribe, the priests who teach for hire, the prophets who divine for money — and lays the destruction of Zion at their feet.

The specificity is one of the book's gifts to the prophetic tradition. Most prophetic indictments name a sin abstractly — idolatry, oppression, faithlessness — and let the audience locate themselves in it. Micah names the role and the mechanism. He says, you, and the you is exactly the person at the gate. The accuracy is part of why the chapter is uncomfortable to read in any age in which the same roles still exist. Micah, who was no prophet by trade — a villager from Moresheth — is exactly the figure who can say what they are.

Where to follow it: Micah 3 (the three oracles).

The fourth chapter opens with the most famous oracle of peace in the Hebrew Bible. It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the LORD shall be established as the highest of the mountains; peoples shall flow to it, and 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 any more. The oracle is almost word for word identical with Isaiah 2:2-4, which has produced a long scholarly argument about which prophet has it first.

What is unmistakable in Micah's version is the verse that follows, which is not in Isaiah and which is the prophet of the lowland's signature: but they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and none shall make them afraid. The vine and the fig tree are the small farmer's idiom of peace — the smallholding owned, the trees mature, the family safe enough to sit in the shade. Micah takes Isaiah's grand vision and adds the village's measure of what peace will actually look like in the courtyard.

The oracle has had an extraordinary afterlife. The verse about beating swords into plowshares is engraved on a wall opposite the United Nations in New York. What is less often noted is the prophet's stipulation about how the peace is to come: not by treaty but by the flowing of the nations to the mountain of the LORD where they are taught the LORD's ways and walk in his paths. The peace is the consequence of an instruction; the swords are converted because the peoples coming to the mountain have already been changed by the teaching. Micah's hope is not for a peace that holds despite the peoples' hatreds. It is for a peace that becomes possible because the peoples have been changed.

Where to follow it: Micah 4 (the peace oracle).

The book closes in chapter 7 on a strange, intimate, and unforgettable note. The prophet looks at the society around him and finds a household that has come apart. The godly has perished from the earth; they all lie in wait for blood; the prince and the judge ask for a bribe; a man's enemies are the men of his own house. The collapse is not at the gate alone — it has reached the supper table.

And then, with the turn the book has been making throughout, the prophet's voice changes register. But as for me, I will look to the LORD; I will wait for the God of my salvation; my God will hear me. Rejoice not over me, O my enemy; when I fall, I shall rise; when I sit in darkness, the LORD will be a light to me. The first-person voice is unusual in the prophetic literature; we are hearing the prophet himself, sitting alone in the dark, wrapping his confidence around something that has not yet arrived.

The last verses are some of the most carefully composed in the Twelve. Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression for the remnant of his inheritance? He does not retain his anger forever, because he delights in steadfast love. He will again have compassion on us; he will tread our iniquities under foot; you will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea. The line mi-el kamokha — who is a God like you — is the punning answer to the prophet's own name, mikhayahu, which means who is like the LORD. Micah closes the book with his name as a question, and the question is answered by the steadfast love that does not let go, the compassion that returns, the iniquities cast into the depths of the sea where they cannot be retrieved. After seven chapters of indictment and lament and the long courtroom of chapter 6, the book ends in a single voice — the prophet's own — saying that the God who has had a controversy with his people is also the God whose mercy is the answer to the prophet's name.

Where to follow it: Micah 7 (the closing doxology).