part0109

The Myth : And there was a man of mount Ephraim, whose name was Micah. And he said unto his mother, The eleven hundred shekels of silver that were taken from thee, about which thou cursedst, and spakest of also in mine ears, behold, the silver is with me; I took it. And his mother said, Blessed be thou of the LORD, my son.

And when he had restored the eleven hundred shekels of silver to his mother, his mother said, I had wholly dedicated the silver unto the LORD from my hand for my son, to make a graven image and a molten image: now therefore I will restore it unto thee. Yet he restored the money unto his mother; and his mother took two hundred shekels of silver, and gave them to the founder, who made thereof a graven image and a molten image: and they were in the house of Micah. And the man Micah had an house of gods, and made an ephod, and teraphim, and consecrated one of his sons, who became his priest. (Judg. 17:3-5)

The Reality : Although placed in the pre-monarchical period, this story is a parable about the feud between King Jeroboam of Israel and the northern Shiloh priesthood.

The story of Micah’s theft of silver from his mother provides an example of how a biblical passage originally presented as a parable (i.e. , a fictional moral lesson) came to be misunderstood by later biblical editors and treated by subsequent interpreters as an isolated tale completely divorced from its original meaning.

According to the story, a man named Micah from the territory of Ephraim stole eleven hundred pieces of silver from his mother. The silver had been dedicated to the god of Israel for the purpose of making a graven image. Micah confessed to the theft and returned the silver to his mother. His mother praised him and took two hundred pieces of silver and had them converted into a graven image and a molten image. With these images Micah established a religious sanctuary with an ephod and teraphim (i.e., religious idols and icons) .

At this point, the story introduces an unemployed Levite priest from Bethlehemjudah seeking work in Ephraim. Micah hired him to administer his sanctuary, the pay to include various perks plus a salary of ten shekels a year. The priest treated Micah like a son, and Micah declared that now that he had a Levite priest God would be good to him.

Immediately thereafter, the story takes a strange twist. The tribe of Dan, unable to hold its territory on the Canaanite shore area, sought out a new homeland. The spies sent out passed by the house of Micah and recognized the voice of the Levite priest.

Continuing their search, they decided upon the territory of Laish, way up in the north. Before setting out to conquer the territory, however, the Danites asked the Levite priest to help them steal the idols and icons from Micah’s sanctuary.

And they said unto him, Hold thy peace, lay thine hand upon thy mouth, and go with us, and be to us a father and a priest: is it better for thee to be a priest unto the house of one man, or that thou be a priest unto a tribe and a family in Israel? ( Judg. 18:19)

The priest agreed to help. The Danites forcibly removed the religious items from Micah’s sanctuary, conquered Laish (which they renamed Dan), and established a new sanctuary under the guidance of the Levite. At the end of the story, we learn the identity of the Levite,“Jonathan, the son of Gershom, the son of Manasseh,” and that he and his sons remained in charge of the shrine “until the day of the [Assyrian or Babylonian] captivity of the land.”

During the narrative, the text proclaims,“In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes” ( Judg. 17:6).

That refrain, repeated throughout the rest of Judges, suggests to some that the story of Micah shows how Israel needed a king to prevent religious corruption. In fact, the opposite is the case. The Micah narrative is rich in symbolism that indicates that it originated as a polemic against kingship after the split between Israel and Judah. The story is about the feud between King Jeroboam and the priesthood of Shiloh after the former undermined the authority of the latter.

According to 1 Kings, which chronicles the breakup of Israel and Judah, Jeroboam, an Ephramite, led the opposition against King Solomon. One day, it says, a prophet named Ahijah, from Shiloh, tore his coat into twelve pieces and gave ten strips to Jeroboam. This, he told the recipient, was a sign that God would take ten tribes away from the house of Solomon and give them to Jeroboam, and that Solomon’s heirs would be left with one tribe.

We noted in Myth #63 the confusion over the tribal division here. The implicit idea was that Judah had one tribe and Israel had the rest. But Jerusalem, the capitol of Judah, was located in the territory of Benjamin. So there was confusion over whether the split should have been 10-2 or 11-1, a confusion that we will see repeated.

When Solomon died, Jeroboam led the Israelites out of the confederation with Judah and established two religious centers, one at each end of the country, in Ephraim and in Dan, and placed images of a golden calf in each.

Jeroboam’s revolt had the encouragement of the priesthood in Shiloh, a cult center where the Ark of the Covenant had resided in the pre-monarchical period. David transferred the Ark to Jerusalem and political and religious rivalry broke out among various priestly factions. The northern priesthood, as indicated by Samuel’s diatribes against kingship before he anointed Saul, had a strong antipathy to the institution of kingship. It believed in priestly guidance as the basis of moral authority.

The break with Judah gave Shiloh the opportunity to reassert its religious authority over Israel and resume its position of primacy within Israelite affairs. Jeroboam, however, was not an especially religious figure. He only concerned himself with the religious issues to the extent it affected his ability to keep Israel divided from Judah. Eventually, Jeroboam declared that anyone who wanted to be a priest could become one.

After this thing Jeroboam returned not from his evil way, but made again of the lowest of the people priests of the high places: whosoever would, he consecrated him, and he became one of the priests of the high places. (1 Kings 13:33)

This did not sit well with the Shilohites. It undercut their authority and diminished the importance of their cult center. Jeroboam had become the enemy.

This is the historical background for the story of Micah. Micah stole eleven hundred pieces of silver. When he returned the silver, two hundred pieces were converted into graven images and sanctuaries were set up first in Ephraim and then in Dan. The key metaphors concern the silver .

The eleven hundred pieces of silver are metaphors for the eleven tribes that split from Judah after Solomon died. The two hundred pieces of silver converted into idols are metaphors for the two tribes that housed Jeroboam’s sanctuaries, Ephraim in the south and Dan in the north. Micah established an idol in the sanctuary in Ephraim and later the Levite, in a break from Micah, transferred the idol to a sanctuary in Dan.

The mother in this story is a metaphor for the nation of Israel before the split between Judah and Israel. Micah corresponds to Jeroboam, the king who feuded with the northern Levite priests. The Levite comes from Bethlehemjudah, meaning Bethlehem in Judah, where King David came from. The Levites were the priestly class, but this one left Judah because he had no work. Under Judah’s control, the Jerusalem priesthood diminished the authority of the Levites in the outlying districts. The journey to Ephraim signified the alliance between Jeroboam and the Shiloh priesthood against Solomon. The priest received a salary of ten shekels per year, one for each of the ten non-Levite tribes in the northern kingdom.

The theft of the icons by the Levite and the tribe of Dan shows the split between the Shilohite priesthood and Jeroboam. The removal of the sanctuary to Dan shows the division of religious authority in Israel after the split.

The Bible identifies the Levite as “Jonathan, the son of Gershom, the son of Manasseh.” This is the only place where this particular Jonathan and this particular Ger-shom are mentioned. And the claim that the Levite is descended from Manasseh rather than Levi is bizarre on its face, since Levi and Manasseh have separate lines of tribal descent. However, the Levite’s full name is based on territorial connections rather than genealogical affiliations.

1 Chronicles 6:62-71 describes the allotment of land to the sons of Gershom during the conquest of Canaan:

And to the sons of Gershom [the son of Levi] throughout their families out of the tribe of Issachar, and out of the tribe of Asher, and out of the tribe of Naphtali, and out of the tribe of Manasseh in Bashan, thirteen cities…. Unto the sons of Gershom were given out of the family of the half tribe of Manasseh, Golan in Bashan with her suburbs, and Ashtaroth with her suburbs .

These passages show a traditional belief that the Gershom branch of Levi had a close relation to Manasseh and to the northern tribes. The passage identifying the ancestry of the priests at the Danite cult center must have been written after Israel and the Danite cult center had ceased to exist, because the text refers to Israel’s captivity, either by Assyria or Babylon.

The names Jonathan and Micah both have connections to Saul, the first king. Jonathan was his son and also a good friend of David. The betrayal of Ephraim by Jonathan the priest mirrors the betrayal of Saul by Jonathan his son, who befriended David and helped him escape from Saul. Saul’s Jonathan had a grandson named Micah, but we know nothing about him. The father of that Micah was Meribbaal.

The Saulite Micah, the Ephramite Micah, and Jeroboam all appear to be the same person. The name Jeroboam means something like “the people increase.” This is a variation on the name of Rehoboam, Solomon’s successor and Jeroboam’s rival, which has approximately the same meaning as Jeroboam. This suggests that Jeroboam’s name was a throne name chosen after he came to power.

In the story of Jeroboam, his father’s name is Nebat and he comes from Ephraim, but as we have seen from the naming of the Levite, names and genealogies easily can be changed to fit the needs. Jeroboam may have been descended from Saul and his original name may have been Micah.

In its original form, the story of Micah was a parable, a fictional tale presenting a moral or religious lesson in which the characters would have been readily recognizable by the intended audience. The message of the parable was that kingship is evil and that the Shilohite priesthood was Israel’s chief means of prosperity. Written originally in the time of Jeroboam as an attack on his leadership, the storyteller disguised the central characters by placing them in the pre-monarchical period.

The tale survived, almost certainly in a written form, and centuries later the biblical scribes incorporated it into a history of Israel. Unfortunately, by that time they no longer knew the original meaning and treated it as a simple narrative about problems in pre-monarchical history.