CHAPTER 3
ETERNAL GENERATION AND THE OLD TESTAMENT:
Micah 5:2 as a Test Case
MARK S. GIGNILLIAT
INTRODUCTION
“The church’s struggle with the Trinity was not a battle against the Old Testament, but rather a battle for the Old Testament.”1 This is certainly one of Brevard Childs’s more memorable quotes and presses on a subject matter of continued importance. What is the material relationship between the givenness of Scripture in human language ante Christum natum and Christian dogmatic claims about God’s triune character? In what way does biblical language refer and to whom? As I often remind my students and myself, early church struggles to come to terms with the unity of God in a shared divine essence, conjoined with the distinctions within this same God—distinctions of person or hypostasis, not essence—took place on the battlefield of biblical exegesis. And in this exegetical war, the Old Testament is Gettysburg.
Increasingly, I am impressed by the efforts made by the early church fathers to come to terms with Scripture’s total witness, giving the Scripture’s straightforward claims an ordered account to avoid crashing on Arian or Sabellian rocks. Micah 5:2 (5:1 in the Masoretic Text) remains an important text in the larger mosaic of Trinitarian reflection, particularly as this text relates to the eternal generation of the son. In other words, theological and exegetical instincts of the patristic kind are in order when coming to terms with this text. “But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you be least among the tribes, from you to me a ruler shall go forth, whose goings forth are from of old, even from eternity.”2
So as not to bury my lede, I will make a few hermeneutical comments on the front end of this chapter. These hermeneutical reflections will take the form of a modest interaction with two important interlocutors, namely, Thomas Aquinas and John Owen. I do so because these two figures from the tradition bear materially on the theological subject matter at hand and the place of Micah 5:2(1) on it. From these hermeneutical comments, I will then turn toward a brief account of Micah 5:2(1) in the history of interpretation and current scholarship. I’ll conclude with reflections on a theological account of grammar and sense-making in light of Micah 5.2(1)’s verbal character.
A Word about Aquinas and the Hermeneutical Role of Speculative Theology
Gilles Emery’s impressive account of Thomas’s Trinitarian theology makes much of the shared goal between Thomas’s biblical commentary and speculative theology: the elucidation of God’s truth. Similar comments may be made about many of the best theological voices from the tradition, Catholic and Protestant: Calvin and Barth come to mind as more well-known figures, but lesser figures do so as well. Emery makes a significant point about Aquinas and the hermeneutical role speculative theology made in his engagement with the biblical text.
Aquinas’s John commentary provides Emery with the tools necessary to make the following claim: Thomas resists too brittle a distinction between Trinitarian theology of the biblical and speculative types. “It is the same theology,” writes Emery.3 The synthetic character of speculative theology and the close reading of the biblical text in commentary both have the same purpose: “the reflective explanation of Scripture.”4 Emery’s conclusion is worth repeating in full: “In every case, speculative theology is not superimposed on or juxtaposed with the biblical text, but is part and parcel of the biblical reading.”5
I wish to highlight the terms “part and parcel” here because the substantive point of this collocation is straightforward. The literal sense of Scripture is not devoid of theological sense-making, nor can the literal sense of the text in its Christian, canonical form be established when verbal signs are disjointed from their theological subject matter. This hermeneutical instinct can be traced in practice to apostolic figures such as Paul, and in time it was given a formal character in works such as Augustine’s De Doctrina. Aquinas’s Augustinian hermeneutic is in full gear at this point, with the necessary dialectic between sign and thing signified remaining intact.6 I wish to return to this matter at the end of the chapter in conversation with the modern literary and intellectual historian George Steiner.
MICAH 5:2 IN THE TRADITION: JOHN OWEN AS EXEMPLAR
Our attention turns to John Owen’s reading of Micah 5:2(1) as an example of this Augustinian hermeneutic brought to bear on the Socinian crisis in England in the early seventeenth century.
Socinianism made its tyrannical march from Italy in the late sixteenth century into Poland during the early seventeenth century, where its roots settled deeply. The Racovian Catechism emerged from Poland’s Socinian movement, and in time, Socinian doctrine made its way into England via an Oxford don by the name of Mr. John Biddle—a Dickensian name if there ever was one. Mr. Biddle translated the Racovian Catechism into English, and the publication of this non-Trinitarian form of Christianity prompted Owen the polemicist into action. Owen produced a counter attack to this catechism, line by line, in his Vindiciae Evangeliae (Defense of the Gospel). Some 589 pages of English prose later, Owen completed his task. The denial of Trinitarian faith was of massive moral consequence for Owen. Nothing less than our salvation hangs in the balance.
As one might anticipate, Owen’s counter to Mr. Biddle’s Socinian views focuses much on the relation of the Second Person, the Logos, to the Father in an attempt to provide biblical and theological support for Nicene orthodoxy. Central to the concerns are the full divinity of the Son with attention given to the notion of the Son’s eternal generation by means of the Father’s eternal act of generating, language familiar to fourth-century Trinitarian debates.
Mr. Biddle’s catechism denies the eternal generation of the Son because, in his terms, “If Christ were begotten of the essence of his Father, either he took his whole essence or but part. Part of his essence he could not take, for the divine essence is impartible; nor the whole, for it being one in number is incommunicable.”7 Owen’s immediate comment after quoting Biddle cuts straight: “And this is the fruit of measuring spiritual things by carnal, infinite by finite, God by ourselves, the object of faith by corrupted rules of corrupted reason.”8
What fascinates about this section in Owen, and for that matter Mr. Biddle’s catechism too, relates to the location of the exegetical debate: the Old Testament. Mr. Biddle raises the question, where do they argue for the eternal generation of the Son? Answer: “From these chiefly, Mic v. 2; Ps. ii. 7; cx. 3; Prov. viii. 23.” From the identification of these texts, Mr. Biddle argues against their validity concerning the eternal generation of the Son by various and sundry means. For example, Micah 5:2, our text of study, does not refer to the eternal generation of the Son. This is a misunderstanding of the lexical data, according to Mr. Biddle. The language refers quite simply to days of antiquity, and the use of the term “day” removes us from the sphere of eternity. The reference to days of antiquity conjoined with the identification of Bethlehem as the place of nativity refers simply to David and his progeny, the line from which Christ would come—a reading conspicuously like most current approaches to the same text. Owen counters with his theological/exegetical armor strapped on for battle. The whole of chapter 9 in Owen’s Defense of the Gospel is an exegetical debate regarding the eternal generation of the son and the Old Testament. Micah 5:2 registers as the first text under critical scrutiny.
The exchange between Owen and Biddle remains instructive, especially in the realm of evangelical hermeneutics, because Owen and Biddle formally agree when it comes to their doctrine of Scripture. In fact, Owen says little against Biddle’s catechetical statements concerning Scripture—a point of some interest. As Carl Trueman’s work on John Owen explains,
When Owen tackles Biddle’s text proper, he starts with a surprisingly brief comment on the Twofold Catechism’s doctrine of scripture, with which he has little disagreement. The very brevity of the chapter, along with its somewhat petulant ad hominem nature, indicates the problem: the Socinians appear to hold to a basic scripture principle in a formally similar manner to the orthodox. The differences, in fact, are significant, and go straight to the heart of why Owen can see scripture as teaching the doctrine of the Trinity and the Socinians reject such a conclusion: the point at issue is not simply whether scripture is the authoritative noetic foundation for theology, but how that scripture is to be interpreted, a point which draws in matters of logic, of metaphysics, and of how individual passages of scripture are mutually related in the act of interpretation.9
Biddle’s claim strikes at the heart of our evangelical sensibility. “I’m only interested in what the Bible claims and nothing more.” And while this kind of appeal has a pedestrian cache, with interpretive instincts heading in the right direction—we seek to order our thoughts and prayers in accord with Scripture’s norming voice—the surreptitious character of the statement remains. For Biddle is not devoid of a metaphysic in his sole interest in the Bible and what it claims, namely, it is logically impossible to hold to a sharing in the divine essence between a plurality of personae in the Godhead. The divine essence is indivisible, and the eternal generation of the Son from the Father’s divine essence does not follow this indivisibility. This a priori notion of the divine essence functions as a hermeneutical cipher for Biddle. Owen identifies this Socinian metaphysic as “rationalistic reductionism.”10
As an aside, Spinoza’s interpretive outline in his Tractatus makes similar claims. “I’m only interested in coming to terms with what Scripture claims and nothing more,” to paraphrase Spinoza. Starting afresh with Cartesian modes of inquiry fully deployed, Spinoza sets himself to the task. But the indubitable foundation of Spinoza’s hermeneutic was the natural light of reason, a claim he repeats enough to register it as a central leitmotif in the Tractatus. This “neutral” hermeneutic led to the necessary sequestering of metaphysical truth claims from Scripture into the specialized world of philosophy. Owen’s response to Spinoza would be similar to Biddle’s, I imagine: “rationalistic reductionism.”
Why? Because Owen is steeped enough in the church’s exegetical tradition to recognize the necessary two-way street between the engagement with the biblical texts themselves and the confession regarding the identity of the one God witnessed to therein. In David Yeago’s formulation, Trinitarian language, while extrabiblical, is deployed as an act of hermeneia for the sake of coming to terms with Scripture’s total witness regarding its naming of the persons of the Trinity: naming related to the divine essence at times and to eternal relations or processions at others. Owen certainly strives to give a rational and ordered account of Christian orthodoxy (an understatement if there ever was one), but he does so in an effort to come to terms with Scripture’s total witness. For Mr. Biddle, the distinction between essence and person is patently false. For Owen, on the other hand, this distinction maintains Scripture’s unity while at the same time comes to terms with its diverse modes of expression concerning divine unity and plurality. Again, the Bible’s own self-witness demands such an account.
As far as Micah 5:2 is concerned, Owen finds Biddle’s philological analysis lacking. For Owen, the 
refers unquestionably to the Son’s eternal generation. He complains Biddle takes no account of 
, which for Owen refers to eternity. And despite the temporal nomen regens (construct noun), given the subject matter, Owen understands 
as a reference to pretemporal eternity as well, much in the same way as the Aramaic Ancient of Days in Daniel 7:9 makes use of “days” in reference to eternity.
Owen perhaps overreaches in his downplaying of the Davidic context. He finds Hugo Grotius’s identification of Zerubbabel as the immediate fulfillment of this text problematic. Owen appeals to the Targum’s paraphrastic rendering of the text as a reference to the coming Messiah, undercutting Grotius’s reading—not to mention Zerubbabel is born in Babylon, not Bethlehem. Of interest, Theodore of Mopsuestia understands this text as having an immediate reference to Zerubbabel, though not at the expense of its ultimate christological referent: a double-literal fulfillment, one might say, or perhaps a figural reading that takes into account multiple referents?
What are we to make of all of this? One, Biddle’s (and Grotius’s) reading of this text shares much in common with current scholarship on Micah 5:2, a point I will turn to next. Two, Owen’s reading of the text is not a close philological analysis of the words themselves but the words in light of the subject matter of Christian Scripture. As his snarky response to Grotius intimates, “That it [Mic 5:2] properly belongs to Christ we have a better interpreter to be sure than Grotius or any of his rabbis, Matt. ii. 4–6.”11 For Owen, the exegetical deck is stacked because Scripture itself speaks clearly about this text’s final referent. Because this is so, the literal sense of the text can only be made sense of in a close reading of the verbal/grammatical character of the text in shared relation with its Triune subject matter. Owen’s reading is standard fare in the tradition.
Excurses: Snapshots from the Tradition
• Cyril of Alexandria understands the “going forth” of Micah 5:2 as either (1) eternal generation or (2) the emergence in time of the Logos’s incarnation (logos incarnatus).12
• Theodoret of Cyrus understands Micah 5:2 as relating substantially to the prologue of John’s Gospel and cannot be reduced to immediate fulfillment in Zerubbabel.13
• Aquinas states the objection: “Further, nothing that has come out from another is within it. But the sone from eternity came out from the Father, according to Micheas v. 2. . . . Therefore the Son is not in the Father” (ST 1.42.5, arg. 2). To which Aquinas replies, “The Son’s going forth from the Father is by mode of the interior procession whereby the word emerges from the heart and remains therein. Hence this going forth in God is only by the distinction of the relations, not by any kind of essential separation” (ST 1.42.5, co. 2). Again, Aquinas is drawing on the metaphysical tradition of the church fathers in distinguishing between essence and persons. As Gilles Emery claims, “The sole distinction in the Godhead is between the persons, but there is no distinction between the persons and the divine nature.”14
• Luther too sees the correspondence between Micah 5:2 and John’s prologue regarding the eternal generation of the Son from the father.15
• Philip Melanchthon states, “Although this testimony is brief, yet it asserts that the Messiah existed before the creation of the world. Therefore He is eternal and God.”16
• Calvin’s exegetical instincts are similar, but he goes in a pastoral direction, encouraging hearers in their suffering to recognize the eternal character of Christ’s kingdom in his sermons on Micah.17 His commentary makes the strange statement that though he is willing to grant this text refers to the eternal generation of the Son, he prefers reading the text more simply as a reference to the long-before determination of God to bring Christ into the world. Why the simple reading? “This will never be allowed by the Jews.”18
While the chord may be struck with different cadence and emphasis in the tradition, by and large the Trinitarian referent of Micah 5:2 is assumed. The phrase “whose origin is from of old, from ancient days” refers not simply to the eternal plan of God to perpetuate David’s throne, though it should be added the text does not say less than this. Rather, the text, whose theological referent is God’s triune revelation of himself in the redemption of humankind, refers to the coming Davidic ruler who does indeed perpetuate David’s throne but does so as one whose eternal identity is in procession from the Father in a shared divine essence.
MICAH 5:2 IN CURRENT SCHOLARSHIP
The dominance of historicist approaches to textual and philological analysis in the modern period comes as no surprise. And the fruits of modern textual analysis in historical guise remain a towering contribution to our understanding of the biblical text. The challenge, however, relates to fitting historical referentiality within an ontological frame regarding the one God of the two Testaments. Micah 5:2(1) is a case in point.
While not wanting to weary readers with an exhaustive taxonomy of current readings on Micah 5:2(1), a few matters are worth highlighting. One, the syntactical notion of “from you to me [
]” remains a challenge simply because the first-person referent comes from nowhere. The form is odd. Nevertheless, despite efforts to correct the text in various ways, there is no textual variant (except perhaps the Micah fragment at Qumran which has a 
after the 
). The LXX and Vulgate read the text as “to me,” moi or mihi. The figure who will emerge as a ruler in Zion is from you to me, with the referent implicitly understood as Adonai.19
Micah 5:2(1) begins as a contrastive to the moment of judgment Judah is currently experiencing (4:14): “But you.” A ruler will come forth to lead God’s people into peace. In fact, he is peace (a likely intertextual referent to Isa 9:6). From Judah’s midst will emerge a ruler who will be the means of overturning wrath with peace—contextually, this figure is the means by which Micah 4:1–4 is actualized.
The next line of the prophetic utterance receives the spotlight of our attention and the focus of this text’s history of interpretation. “And his going forth is from of old, even from days of eternity or days long ago.” The term “going forths” or “origins” 
is in effect a hapax legomenon. The only other use is 2 Kings 10:27, and there it means “latrine.” So we are safe to assume that is not the sense here. Hans Walter Wolff understands the plural use—interesting to note “going forths” or “origins”—as giving the expression a heightened sense of feeling.20 A great deal depends on settling the meaning of “going forth.” Mays describes this term in the following suggestive way: “Origin echoes the verb ‘come forth’ and thinks of children originating in the loins of their father.”21 This phraseology is unique in the Old Testament, and as such, our philological instincts should be on guard about making immodest claims about what the rest of the text can or can’t mean.
Can miqedem refer to a distant time in the past, thus limiting its potential? Yes it can (cf. Amos 9:11). Can a similar claim regarding ‘olam be made, especially given the fact that it is preceded by a temporal absolute noun, “days”? Yes it can. And many, if not most, modern commentators go this route. But must it? Are we forced lexically to nod in the affirmative with NIDOTTE’s conclusion regarding Micah 5:2? “While it is tempting to see here a reference to the eternal preexistence of the Messiah, no such an idea is found in biblical or postbiblical Jewish literature before the Similitudes of Enoch (1 En 48:2–6).” Does such a philological instinct make good on a historical referent or potentially even the intention of the author (however such is conceived) while at the same time divorcing the linguistic character of Scripture from its divine referent in a two-testament frame?
Linguistically speaking, the terms qedem and ‘olam can individually and collectively refer to the eternal character of God (Deut 33:27, “The eternal God [
] is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms [‘olam],” and Ps 90:2, “from everlasting to everlasting”). Even Hillers in the Hermeneia commentary suggests that qedem has a mythical quality to it, “primeval, from the beginning, as an order of creation.”22 Jörg Jeremias believes the connotative force of qedem refers to “mythische Urzeit,” a time properly referred to as “Gottes Zeit.” Why is this God’s time? Because in it, claims Jeremias, the primeval saving will of God (Heilswille) originates there.23 The highlighting of Bethlehem and not Jerusalem is itself significant because God makes clear his future purposes have to do with something new regarding the Davidic line rather than the current Davidic line in place in Jerusalem. A new David is anticipated. Moreover, the use of “days” does not necessarily limit ‘olam (cf. Dan 7:9—the ancient of Days, or the long of days). In other words, a strictly governed historical account of this text’s philological sense may attenuate its canonical intentionality.
The question here is a modest one. Given the unique character of this text, should its referent be limited to its undeniable Davidic context? The text is certainly not less than this, but is it more? Even Anderson and Freedman in their Anchor Bible commentary claim, “At the least the language suggests that the birth of the Messiah has been determined, or predicted in the divine council, in primal days. . . . Even if mosa’ot means no more than an oracle expressing the divine determination, it does not require a great shift in conceptuality to move to the Son of Man figure of the later apocalypses—the Urmensch. . . . So Christians did not abuse the text when they found Jesus in it.”24
I would like to press the matter further and suggest that not only have Christians not abused this text when allowing it a substantive role in the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son, but they in fact are reading the text well in light of the Trinitarian subject of Scripture, a matter itself that not only provides a hermeneutic for all of Scripture but is in fact the retina (to borrow Gerhard Sauter’s memorable phrase) that allow us to see the text’s ontological relation to its subject matter.
A THEOLOGICAL ACCOUNT OF GRAMMAR
For Augustine the signa of the text mediate divine instruction. As such, the words of Scripture are laden with metaphysical weight when the subject matter, as properly identified in the various and sundry voices of Scripture, is God’s own self and expressed will to redeem. Words mean something given the formal character of language in its phonetic and syntactical arrangement. But as George Steiner says, “A sentence always means more.”25 As Steiner, with his own Augustinian hermeneutical instincts engaged, warns, “The absolute decisive failing occurs when such approaches seek to formalize meaning, when they proceed upward from the phonetic, the lexical and the grammatic to the semantic and aesthetic.”26 Why, we might ask Steiner, is this a problem? He answers, “There is always, as Blake taught, ‘excess’ of the signified beyond the signifier.”27
How much more so when the signified is God in his triune processions and missions? Such a confession releases the philological clutch, allowing words in their given morphological and syntactic form a fuller frame of reference when the associated field-mapping brought to bear in textual analysis is the God Christians confess as triune. He is before all things, Paul reminds.
Such a theological account of biblical language seeks to do justice to Scripture’s literal sense and its ability to swell into the subject matter of Scripture’s referent, namely, the triune God’s procession and mission—the theological field-map for the terrain of Scripture. It also resists an anemic linguistic approach to biblical language by minimizing the potential referent to the hermetic moment of original utterance or writing (the distinction between the two is itself an interesting thought experiment regarding the canonical intentionality of language once embedded in particular books and quarters of the canon). Such a move cuts the Gordian knot that separates sign and reality, or scriptural language and its divine subject matter.
A Trinitarian hermeneutic resists a sclerotic tendency to leave language in the past, unencumbered by the metaphysical underpinnings of language in general and biblical language in particular. Can Micah 5:2(1) be read in different ways than the traditional reading that links it to the eternal generation of the son? Certainly. But given the subject matter of Scripture and its canonical function as a continued means by which the Father reveals himself in the Son by the Spirit, must it be read in an overly historicist fashion? Not if the text of Micah 5:2(1) and the New Testament canon share in the same triune subject matter. For his processions are indeed from eternity.
1. Brevard S. Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflections on the Christian Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 376.
2. My translation.
3. Gilles Emery, The Trinitarian Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas (Oxford University Press, 2010), 19.
4. Ibid., 19. Emery comments on the means by which Aquinas brought the speculative work to bear on textual commentary, to wit, a deployment of Hugh of St. Victor’s three levels of literal exposition: littera (textual analysis with reference to grammar and linguistics, an overview of the words’ meaning in their immediate context), the sensus (the analysis of the signification of each member), and the sententia (a genuine understanding of the text, which draws out its theological and philosophical meaning) (ibid., 20). The sententia allows speculative theology its hermeneutical role in establishing the text’s letter.
5. Ibid., 20 (emphasis mine).
6. The use of analogical language, like ousia and hypostasis, by no means diminishes the mystery of the divine Godhead. This abstract language provides a rational account of God’s triune identity (Emery refers to this as the “far-reaching goal”), and more modestly, “the theologian carries out a contemplative exercise in order to grasp a droplet of the divine knowledge communicated by revelation, without losing sights of the limits of our knowledge” (Emery, The Trinitarian Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, 35). George Hunsinger distinguishes Barth’s use of analogical reasoning from Aquinas’s precisely at this point. For Aquinas, our analogical language breaks down regarding the knowledge of God in se with God’s identity in himself remaining a mystery. Whereas for Barth, in line with the Reformed tradition, God’s revelation of himself truly corresponds with God’s actual identity and provides the epistemic possibility for real knowledge of God, accommodated as this revelation is. While at the same time, comprehensive knowledge of God’s eternal identity remains beyond the purview of human knowledge, thus the linguistic appeal to analogy in opposition to univocal and equivocal: apprehensive knowledge vs. comprehensive knowledge. George Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 220–21 n12.
7. Also from the Racovian Catechism, as cited in John Owen, The Gospel Defended, in The Works of John Owen (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1966), 12:237.
8. Ibid., 237.
9. Carl R. Trueman, John Owen: Reformed Catholic, Renaissance Man (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 48.
10. Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725, vol. 4, The Triunity of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 283.
11. Owen, The Works of John Owen, 12:240.
12. St. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on the Twelve Prophets, vol. 2, trans. Robert C. Hill, The Fathers of the Church 116 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 235.
13. Theodoret of Cyrus, Commentaries on the Prophets, vol. 3, Commentary on the Twelve Prophets, trans. Robert C. Hill (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox, 2006), 164.
14. Gilles Emery, Trinity, Church and the Human Person: Thomistic Essays (Naples: Sapientia, 2007), 106. See Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 236. McCormack’s interaction with Levering and Emery emphasizes the overlap between Barth and Aquinas on this matter. Emery prefers the categories of procession and mission as proceeding from the one pretemporal eternal act rather than economic and immanent because the latter language runs the risk of speaking of two trinities. McCormack sees that the only difference between Barth and Aquinas is the latter’s willingness to allow metaphysical speculation a more substantive role. But in the Trinitarian reflections proper, there is much overlap.
15. Martin Luther, Minor Prophets I: Hosea-Malachi, Luthers Works American Edition, trans. R.J. Dinda, ed. H.C. Oswald (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1975), 248.
16. Melanchthon, Loci Communes 1543, trans. J. A. O Preus (St. Louis: Concordia, 1992), 26.
17. John Calvin, Sermons on the Book of Micah, trans. and ed. B. W. Farley (Phillipsburg: P&R, 2003), 275-76.
18. John Calvin, Commentary on Jonah, Micah, and Nahum, trans. John Owen (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005), 299.
19. Wolf understands the strange syntax as stemming for the use of a Davidic tradition and its preference for the verbal phrase 
; cf. Isa 11:1 and 2 Sam 7:13.
20. Hans Walter Wolff, Micah: A Commentary, trans. G. Stansell (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1990), 140.
21. James Luther Mays, Micah: A Commentary (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976), 115.
22. Delbert R. Hillers, Micah (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), 66.
23. Jörg Jeremias, Die Propheten Joel, Obadja, Jona, Micha (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), 185. This reading shares much in common with Calvin, who places going forth in the divine will. Again, speculative theology helps here because the divine will is one with the various personae of the Trinity sharing in it.
24. Francis I. Andersen and David Noel Freedman, Micah: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 468.
25. George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 82.
26. Ibid, 81. Similarly, Michael Polanyi claims, “Much less can we control in advance the myriads of arrangements in which nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs can be meaningfully combined to form new affirmations or questions, thus developing, as we shall see, the meaning of the words themselves ever further in these new contexts. Verbal speculation may therefore reveal an inexhaustible fund of true knowledge and new substantial problems, just as it may also produce pieces of mere sophistry” (Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015], 94–95).
27. Steiner, Real Presences, 84. Steiner’s metaphysical understanding of the semantic potential of words relates to Origen’s understanding of figures in the Old Testament and the two-fold potential of words. Word have their basic referent (the literal) but are also symbolic of some other referent—literal and allegorical interpretation. See Peter Martens, Origen and Scripture: The Contours of the Exegetical Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 66. See Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach: Time, History, and Literature, ed. J. I. Porter, trans. J. O. Newman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014): “Even if Augustine decisively rejects abstract allegorical spiritualism and develops his entire interpretation of the Old Testament out of its concrete reality in worldly historical time, he nevertheless continues to endorse a kind of idealism that removes the concrete event from time as figura—even though it also remains entirely real—and places it into the perspective of timeless eternity. Such ideas were implicit in the very fact of the incarnation” (p. 88).