Books of the Prophets by Micah

First transcribed: c. mid-sixth century b.c.e. (English translation, 1384)

Edition(s) used:The Holy Bible: Containing the Old and New Testaments with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books by the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Nashville, Tenn.: Thomas Nelson, 1990

Genre(s): Holy writings

Subgenre(s): Biography; handbook for living

Core issue(s): The Bible; forgiveness; God; sacrifice; sin and sinners; social action

Overview

The author of the Old Testament book of Isaiah flourished between 760 and 701/680 b.c.e., but many modern scholars think that much in the book by his name originated c. 540 and later. The author of the book of Jeremiah lived from c. 645 to after 587. A collection of his sermons appeared about 605, but the book was not completed before 585 at the earliest. Amos’s career lasted two years or less, but the book bearing his name presupposes the collapse of the Davidic dynasty in 587. Micah was a contemporary of Isaiah, but some of the materials in the book of Micah come from the period of the Exile (586-539) or slightly later.

The book of Isaiah may be divided into three basic parts. It develops chronologically, with chapters 1-39 dealing mostly with people and events between 742 and 697 b.c.e. Chapters 40-55 shift both scene and time, addressing the exiles in Babylon near the end of the enforced captivity of Jews in that land (539). Chapters 56-66 shift the focus back to Jerusalem, but many scholars think the time frame is the last quarter of the sixth century. While the name Isaiah appears fifteen times in chapters 1-39, and the prophet appears in several narratives (chapters 6-7, 36-39), neither Isaiah nor any other person or event from the eighth century is mentioned in chapters 40-66.

Within chapters 1-39, the first twelve contain a number of passages reprimanding Judah and Jerusalem for sinful behavior and for making alliances with other countries. A narrative reporting Isaiah’s call to be a prophet (in 742 b.c.e.) appears in chapter 6, followed by the narrative of Isaiah’s confrontation with King Ahaz over whether to support a rebellion against Assyria initiated by small, neighboring countries (734-732). In that confrontation, Isaiah tells Ahaz that a “young woman” (the Hebrew word used is not the same as the word for “virgin”) will bear a son (7:14), and before that son can distinguish right from wrong, the threat posed by neighboring nations will disappear. Christians often see in that verse a prediction of the birth of Jesus, because Matthew 1:22 says that Jesus’ birth took place to “fulfill” what God had said through Isaiah. Saying that Jesus fulfilled the passage is one thing; saying the passage predicted Jesus is quite different. Other passages in chapters 1-12 alternate between denunciations of Israel for sin and—following repentance—depictions of a restoration, including a righteous king (9:2-7, 11:1-9). These last two texts help form the Old Testament expectation for a future messiah (that is, Israel’s king). Christians often read these passages as predictions of Jesus, though he is never mentioned by name.

Chapters 13-23 consist of a collection of prophetic sayings against foreign nations. Because few foreigners would hear (or read) them, they perhaps served to warn the people of Israel not to form political or other alliances with Judah’s neighbors, no matter how powerful they might appear at times. Chapters 24-27 probably arose during the dark days of the Babylonian exile. They envision widespread destruction of the earth and its inhabitants for sin, but they also hold out hope for Israel’s future deliverance from its enemies. Chapters 28-32 return to messages against Judah and Jerusalem. Repentance (turning from sin to God) will result in God’s forgiveness and blessing; rebellion will result in punishment. Chapters 36-39 narrate the siege of Jerusalem by King Sennacherib of Assyria in 701. It ended in the payment of tribute by Judah’s king Hezekiah (2 Kings 18:16, but not mentioned in Isaiah) and the subsequent destruction of the Assyrian army. Isaiah’s roles were to advise Hezekiah and to intercede with God for the king’s health.

Chapters 40-55 form what many scholars call Second Isaiah because they address the conditions of the Jewish exiles in Babylon. First, they explain the causes for the fall of the Judah—namely, the sinfulness and impure worship of its people. Second, they proclaim that the God of Judah is the only god and that the Babylonian gods are not genuine; these verses constitute the earliest, unequivocal statements of monotheism in the Old Testament. Third, they announce hope for the future. God would use Cyrus the Great, emperor of Persia, to defeat the Babylonians. Fourth, God would use the suffering of a righteous “servant” to effect the rescue of his people. The New Testament also uses some of these passages in its presentation of Jesus as savior, but Isaiah 40-55 cast him as someone living among the exiles.

Chapters 56-66, often called Third Isaiah, are set in Jerusalem, probably in the last decades of the sixth century, around the time of the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem (520-515 b.c.e.). They address the problem of unfulfilled hope. Second Isaiah had predicted a glorious new day after the exile, but conditions in Judah and Jerusalem in the decades after Jews began returning were bleak. The Temple, which the Babylonians had destroyed in 586, was rebuilt, but the monarchy was not restored. Even the wall protecting the city was not rebuilt until the time of Nehemiah (445 b.c.e.). These chapters reflect a struggle over who could worship in the Temple, opting for including all sincere worshipers. They also envision a remaking of the world in peace, where natural enemies (such as wolves and lambs) will live in harmony.

The book of Jeremiah relates the life and message of a prophet who belonged to a disenfranchised priestly family. Much of the book is a third-person narrative, perhaps written by Baruch, Jeremiah’s secretary (36:1-32). The narrative flow of this material begins with Jeremiah’s call to be a prophet (1:4-10). His most famous message was his so-called Temple sermon, in which he predicted the Temple’s destruction if the people of Judah did not obey God’s law. He was arrested and tried for treason but acquitted. He remained such a thorn in the side of King Jehoiakim that the king burned a written copy of the prophet’s sayings. Jeremiah also saw the siege of Jerusalem by the Babylonians as God’s punishment on Judah for infidelity to God and unfairness to the poor. He counseled surrender. Not surprisingly, Jeremiah found himself in prison; he might have died in a pit had not a servant of King Zedekiah pulled Jeremiah from its mud-filled bottom. After the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians, a group of Judeans took Jeremiah with them to Egypt, where he repeated his message that Judah suffered because it had sinned.

The book of Jeremiah also contains poetic prophecies, many (such as 2:1-3:5) of doom. Some of those passages (such as 4:5-31) appear to have been pieced together with interpretive prose. The book also contains prophecies of hope, perhaps including some from one or more later prophets. The contours of that hope begin with a letter from Jeremiah to the exiles, telling them they will soon return from Babylon. These passages promise that God will restore the fortunes of the exiles, bring them back to Judah, and rebuild their cities. They announce that the northern kingdom of Israel (which fell to the Assyrians in 722 b.c.e.) will be included in that new day. God will also restore the Davidic monarchy and the Levitical priesthood. The most important of these texts promises that God will initiate a new covenant with God’s people, one that is unbreakable and one that they will internalize (31:31-34). It is from this passage that Christians drew the term “New Testament” for its scriptures (the terms for “testament” and “covenant” being synonymous).

The namesake of the book of Amos was a shepherd from the town of Tekoa (1:1), located ten miles south of Jerusalem. He flourished in the northern kingdom of Israel in the eighth century b.c.e., particularly in the sanctuary at Bethel. The book opens with a series of prophecies of disaster against the surrounding cities of Damascus, Gaza, and Tyre, and the small kingdoms of Edom, Ammon, and Moab, primarily for acts of aggression. Such prophecies against foreign nations became a feature of many other prophetic collections.

Most of the remainder of the book addresses the kingdom of Israel, with the prophet insisting on social justice. He complains that the indolently wealthy have taken advantage of the poor (6:4-7), even selling debtors into servanthood for a trifling sum owed them (2:6, 8:6). He complains that the people thought they could sacrifice to God and then live as they pleased. Instead, Amos advocates letting justice “roll down like waters” (5:24).

The book concludes with two positive messages. The first (9:7-10) predicts that God will destroy a “sinful” kingdom (Babylon) without harming Israel; the second (9:11-15) predicts that God will restore the “booth of David” (the Davidic monarchy) and the fortunes of God’s people. The verses clearly look back on the destruction of Jerusalem and fall of the Davidic dynasty in 586, and they envision the restoration of both. These two passages reveal themselves, therefore, to have arisen later than 586. They seem to have been added to bring the book to a positive conclusion. The pattern of doom (1:2-9:6) followed by hope (9:7-15) became a pattern widely used in arranging the prophetic books.

The book of Micah illustrates that pattern. It contains a mixture of passages on doom and restoration: doom in 1:2-2:11, hope in 2:12-13, doom in 3:1-12, hope in 4:1-8, doom in 4:9-5:1, hope in 5:2-15, doom in 6:1-7:7, and hope in 7:8-20. This fourfold repetition of the pattern emphasizes that the punishment of sin—necessary as it may be—is not God’s final word. Many scholars think most if not all of the passages of hope derived from someone who lived later than Micah. The prophet himself, a contemporary of Isaiah, lived in Moresheth, a small village located approximately twenty-five miles southwest of Jerusalem. He seems to have distrusted cities, especially Jerusalem.

At least as much as Amos, Micah championed the cause of the poor, but the passages of hope in Micah far exceed the two at the end of Amos. The first (2:12-13) depicts God as a shepherd who will bring Judah home from exile, marching in front of the people like a triumphant king. The second (4:1-8) contains the famous line about men’s beating their swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks and living on the land without fear of one another. The third (5:2-15) dares to hope for a new king from the line of David in Bethlehem who will defeat Israel’s enemies. The fourth (7:8-20) looks beyond the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians to its rebuilding at a time when God forgives Judah for its sins. The promise of the new king from Bethlehem forms a small but essential part of the Old Testament’s expectations for the future. In the New Testament, the author of Matthew says that Herod’s scholars used the verse to answer the query of the Magi about where the king of the Jews would be born.

Christian Themes

The books of the four prophets advocate an unswerving faithfulness to God, and in the event of sin, they advocate repentance. A proper relationship with God was to manifest itself in three ways. First, the people would experience peace within their community (Isaiah 9:7); what the prophets saw instead was the ruthless pursuit of self-interest. Amos and Micah especially condemn those wealthy people who used their power and wealth to oppress the unfortunate. Isaiah and Jeremiah emphasize that the worship of only God, not the gods of the Assyrian and Babylonian conquerors, is necessary for living as God’s people. Although that idea may seem self-evident to modern Westerners, it was novel in ancient biblical times.

Second, living in faithfulness to God would result in justice in the land. Justice was first and foremost the responsibility of the king (Isaiah 9:7; 11:3-5). In Amos (5:21-24), God rejects worship and sacrifices that are not tied to justice for the poor. Micah (6:8) ties justice to kindness toward other human beings and humility before God. Judeans were to act in ways that guaranteed protection to the poor.

Third, living in faithfulness to God was the means to hope for the future. The prophets were sober in their assessment of the power of Assyria and Babylon vis-à-vis Judah. Its only hope was that God would aid Judah for remaining faithful.

These prophets made predictions. Sometimes they seemed to be without qualifications. Jeremiah, for example, became convinced that Babylon would capture Jerusalem and that the only prudent action, therefore, was for Judah to surrender to the conqueror. Other times, however, prophetic predictions seem to have been conditional. In his Temple sermon, Jeremiah (7:1-15; 26:1-6) warned that the Temple would be destroyed if the people of Judah did not repent. Still other predictions may have been fulfilled in the past (such as the restitution of the Levitical priesthood after the Exile) and others in ways the prophets did not anticipate (such as Isaiah 7:14). Still others perhaps have not been fulfilled (Isaiah 65:17-25), at least not yet.

Sources for Further Study

Brueggemann, Walter. A Commentary on Jeremiah: Exile and Homecoming. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1998. An exploration of the historical and social milieu of Jeremiah’s career that presents a theological interpretation of the book.

Childs, Brevard S. Isaiah. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2001. A critical study of the book of Isaiah that nevertheless examines its shape as determined by the rabbis who validated the books of the Hebrew Bible about the end of the first century c.e.

Holladay, William L. Jeremiah 1 and Jeremiah 2. 2 vols. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress, 1986, 1989. A two-volume critical and historical commentary on Jeremiah, based on the Hebrew text with Holladay’s translation.

Jeremias, Jörg. The Book of Amos. Translated by Douglas W. Stott. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster, 1998. Describes how the book came into being with emphasis on its various stages and their meanings and functions.

Mays, James Luther. Micah. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976. Pays particular attention to the meaning of individual sayings based on the author’s own translation.

Sweeney, Marvin A. The Prophetic Literature. Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 2005. A study of the entire prophetic corpus with particular attention to the genres and their interrelatedness.