JUST AS NO one has any idea of what ultimately became of Amos, so there is no indication on which to base even a speculation about what, if anything other than death, befell Hosea when he ceased prophesying. Was Gomer still around, and did he live happily ever after with her as a symbolic statement of the reconciliation between God and Israel in the last chapter of the book? This is more or less how the rabbis of the Talmud would see it in one of those charming fables (midrashim) they liked to spin about events in the Bible:
When God spoke to the prophet about the sins of Israel, expecting him to excuse or defend his people, Hosea countered by telling God to choose another people. It was then that Hosea was commanded to take Gomer to wife. When, after a time, God asked him to follow the example of Moses, who parted from his wife as soon as he was called to prophecy, Hosea replied that he could not send his wife away since she had borne him children, whereupon God said to him: “If thou, whose wife is a harlot and whose children are the children of harlotry and thou knowest not whether they are thine or not, canst not separate from her, how then can I separate Myself from Israel, from My children, the children of My elected ones, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob?” As soon as he realized his sin, Hosea entreated God to pardon him, whereupon he was told: “Instead of asking mercy for thyself, ask mercy for Israel against whom I have decreed three decrees because of you.” Thereupon Hosea prayed as he was bidden and the impending threefold doom was averted.
Less fanciful is the theory that Hosea survived until the brutal Assyrian conquest of the Northern Kingdom in 722 B.C.E., suffered deportation, and became a member of the Ten Lost Tribes. But we simply have no idea.
This much, however, we do know: shortly after Amos disappeared from the North, and probably a little before Hosea did, down in the South two other prophets became active. While mainly concerned with Judah, they also had something to say about Israel (which was still in existence during the earlier phase of their prophetic careers). The name of one was Micah (for whom no patronymic but only a hometown—the small rural village of Moresheth—is supplied) and the name of the other was Isaiah the son of Amoz of Jerusalem.
These two were themselves such close contemporaries—both prophesying more or less between 740 and 700 B.C.E.—that no consensus has been forged on which one came first. Of the authorities whose work I have consulted, a majority give chronological priority to Isaiah, but only hesitantly. Others are even less sure. Hence there is no definitive guidance from the experts about whether our story of the four prophets of the eighth century B.C.E. should continue with Isaiah and then conclude with Micah, or the other way around. Left free to make a choice, I have decided to take up Micah first. Because (as everyone agrees) Isaiah is the greatest of the four, it seems fitting that he should be placed in a position where his words can most clearly be seen as the grand climax of this first phase of classical prophecy.
LIKE MUCH OF the classical prophetic literature, the Book of Micah is not only difficult in itself but bedeviled by textual corruption. The Andersen-Freedman team, in the edition of Micah they added to the ones they did of Amos and Hosea, ranked the latter with the Book of Job in the number of unintelligible passages it contains. Now they put Micah into the running for the same dubious distinction. Wrestling with one particularly recalcitrant verse, they make a comment that might well be extended to the book as a whole:
The general content . . . is clear. When it comes to specific details, the passage is as obscure as any in the Hebrew Bible, perhaps the most obscure . . . . The text is incoherent to the point of unintelligibility. Yet all the individual words are familiar and their meanings are plain. It is on the level of composition that the arrangements are meaningless; or, rather, the meaning eludes us.
Yet there is one verse in Micah whose meaning eludes no one. It has become so celebrated that rare is the person unfamiliar with it—and this includes people who know nothing else about Micah or any other book in the Hebrew Bible, and may not even have the faintest notion of where the saying comes from. It is, of course, this: “He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.”I
Why has Micah’s injunction acquired such enormous fame and popularity? At first glance, the answer seems so obvious as to make the question sound silly. If we look at it in its historical context, the injunction expresses the essence of the turning point that the classical prophets of the eighth century B.C.E. are assumed by almost everyone to represent: the elevation—to say it yet again, as I unavoidably must do—of morality over ritual and sacrifice.
And the answer seems equally obvious—though somewhat more complicated—if we look at Micah’s statement from a modern perspective. When the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed in 1882 that God was “dead,” he was saying out loud what many in their heart of hearts felt had finally been wrought by the astounding progress of modern science. But at the same time, they could not bring themselves to face the prospect of a world in which, as the great Russian novelist of the same period, Feodor Dostoevsky, warned (prophetically sensing the rise of totalitarianism in the next century, as surely as Amos and Hosea experienced intimations of the rise of Assyria in their own day), “everything” would become possible. Nor could even many who agreed with Nietzsche accompany him to his more optimistic conclusion that, liberated from the shackles of religion, mankind could now move to a stage “beyond good and evil.”
Like those ex-believers for whom the evolutionist approach of the Higher Criticism provided a middle ground on which to take temporary refuge from a wholesale repudiation of the Bible, the people of a more philosophical bent who joined their ranks were unable or unwilling to let go of the influence of their religious upbringing. (Writers like George Eliot and Matthew Arnold in England and Ernest Renan in France, along with the Jewish founders of the Society for Ethical Culture in America, immediately spring to mind, but there were scores of others.) They, too, went on a mission to rescue whatever could be salvaged from the traditional biblical faith. And so there arose a host of efforts to extract and preserve the moral core that to the “modern mind” remained valid even if no God existed to command and enforce it.
No wonder, then, that in culling through the Bible they should have pounced upon Micah’s summation of “what is good.” No wonder that one leading English biblical scholar of the nineteenth century, G. A. Smith, should have called it “the greatest saying of the Old Testament,” and another, Robertson Smith, should have given it the place of honor in an influential lecture he delivered on “The Prophets of Israel.” And no wonder that in the twentieth century the formidable Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye should have praised it “as one of the great moral breakthroughs in history.”
Andersen and Freedman put their finger on the main point: “The ‘good life,’ as defined here [by Micah], is not ‘religious’ at all, not if religion is thought of in terms of institutions (temple, synagogue, church) and ceremonies.” No better definition could be framed of what vast numbers of people raised as pious Christians and Jews—now turned skeptics and basically secularized but still very far from being cut off from their biblical moorings—were searching for.
But it would be misleading to suggest that Micah’s saying appealed in the nineteenth century, or continued appealing in the years ahead, only to people mining the Hebrew Bible for a “humanist” conception of the “good life,” stripped of everything but the most generalized moral precepts and addressed not exclusively to the people of Israel but to “man” in general. Even in the Talmud, Micah’s saying is characterized as a summation of all 613 commandments that the rabbis extrapolated from the Bible. (At first sight, this is baffling, since Micah seems to omit the ritual commandments affecting the relations “between man and God” to which equal standing is generally accorded by the rabbis of the Talmud. But on reflection one realizes that the rabbis correctly understood Micah’s idea of walking with God to involve obeying all His commandments.)
Yet if it appears almost self-evident at first glance why Micah’s statement should have attained such widespread importance, interesting questions begin to arise when we consider it more carefully, both in connection with the prophetic literature of the eighth century B.C.E. as a whole, and within the narrower confines of the Book of Micah itself. To those questions, the answers are anything but self-evident.
Thus, before Micah, both Amos and Hosea made similar statements. Amos: “Seek good, and not evil, that ye may live: and so the LORD, the God of hosts, shall be with you . . . . Hate the evil, and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate . . . .” And Hosea:
Hear the word of the LORD, ye children of Israel: for the LORD hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land. By swearing, and lying, and killing, and stealing, and committing adultery, they break out, and blood toucheth blood.
Indeed, Micah himself would seem to be referring to these very statements by Amos and Hosea when he prefaces his own with “He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good . . . .” As most of the modern translations recognize, the Hebrew says “told,” not “showed” you, which strengthens the suspicion that Micah was alluding specifically to the prophecies of his older contemporaries.
Considering the similarity among the three oracles, why has Micah’s been singled out for special glory? A possible reason is the very simple one that its greater pithiness makes it more memorable. Less simple is another possibility: that tendentious interpretations of Micah have created the impression that he provides an even more unambiguous warrant than Amos and Hosea are thought to do for dismissing any need for the “cult.” Even Yehezkel Kaufmann contributes to this impression: “The doctrine of the primacy of morality is asserted with particular force in Micah, first because of the absence . . . of an attack on idolatry.” And, Kaufmann continues, what gives the famous verse its force “is the unparalleled idea,” going beyond Amos, “that these are God’s sole demand of man.”
Yet after revisiting Micah with a fresh eye, I am convinced that this impression is as false to Micah’s prophetic message as it is to the Book of Amos. As with Amos—and Hosea—what emerges from a reading that takes the whole of Micah into consideration, and not just the passages that are most palatable to modern moral tastes, has much, or even everything, to do with idolatry.
Therefore, as against the standard view, I will try to demonstrate that, in common with his two somewhat older contemporaries who have recently been preaching in the North, Micah, taking his stand in Judah, is engaged with all his might in the war against idolatry, especially (though not so exclusively as Amos and Hosea) from within. Like Amos and Hosea, too (more forthrightly than the former, but not quite so clearly as the latter), he establishes two relationships: a negative one between the particular evils he denounces and idolatry; and a positive one between the good and fidelity to God (which, again contrary to the stereotyped interpretation of this book, embraces both ritual and morality).
IT DOES NOT require fancy exegetical or homiletical maneuvers to show that Micah was as much a general in the war against idolatry as Amos and Hosea. Nor is it necessary to go searching in the heavens above or beyond the sea to uncover the necessary evidence. Proof stares us in the face in the very passage from which the famous saying is always conveniently ripped.
That passage describes a contention between God and Israel, which is at first presented in the form of a legal dispute, with the whole of nature serving as a kind of jury:
Hear ye now what the LORD saith; Arise, contend thou before the mountains, and let the hills hear thy voice. Hear ye, O mountains, the LORD’s controversy, and ye strong foundations of the earth: for the LORD hath a controversy with his people, and he will plead with Israel.II
God then indicts the children of Israel for ingratitude. They have forgotten everything He has done for them since bringing them out of slavery in Egypt, and are acting instead as though He were a tiresome burden: “O my people, what have I done unto thee? and wherein have I wearied thee?” He then invites them to “testify against me.”III
But it would make no sense for God to bring a case against Israel if the offense were only ingratitude. What the lawsuit implies is a breach of contract: the children of Israel have broken the covenant they have made with God. As He reminds them in detail, He has honored His part of the bargain, but they have violated theirs. One might expect that He would then spell out the ways in which they have done so, and that they would then eagerly accept His invitation to defend themselves or even accuse Him of violating the covenant.
But no: neither of these things happens. No bill of particulars is recited by God, and the people do not defend themselves. In effect they simply enter a plea of nolo contendere and, having thus admitted their guilt, ask what they can do to be forgiven. Or rather—carrying through with the lawsuit imagery as it applies to that period—they ask what they can do to recompense the injured or defrauded party. “Wherewith shall I come before the LORD, and bow myself before the high God? . . .”
The switch here from the plural to the singular is one of the details in Micah that has bred much scholarly debate (just as with many passages in Hosea, where both the syntax and the grammar of the Hebrew are at least as peculiar). But the meaning remains the same whether the “I” is a spokesman for the entire people; or the prophet himself asking rhetorical questions; or (as I think) the literary artist in Micah further personalizing a dispute that has already been made intimate by God’s use of the term “My people” and the tenderly imploring tone He adopts when an accusatory or angry note might have seemed more suitable.
Responding, then, in one voice, the people agree to pay damages. Yet—again confounding normal expectations—they do not negotiate for a plea bargain that would get them off with as little as possible. Instead, they themselves keep upping the value of the settlement they are prepared to reach. “. . . Shall I come before him [God] with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old?” And if this precious gift is not enough, “Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams . . .?” And if even this extravagant price is too low, how about “. . .ten thousands of rivers of oil . . .”? Will that suffice?
Perhaps because of God’s silence in response to these deals, they think not, since without pausing for an answer, and still speaking in a single voice, they escalate to the ultimate sacrifice, the greatest one of all: “. . . shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”
It is this—not the lawful sacrifices proposed before—that provokes God into uttering the famous injunction. Having pronounced it, but without (for the moment) specifically expressing His disgust at the abominable proposal the people have made, God launches a string of denunciations enumerating the sins of which the people are guilty and the punishments that will be meted out to them.
The sins with which He begins have already been denounced by Micah in two earlier chapters of the book, and they are similar to those emphasized by Amos. The first time around, Micah excoriates the rich for expropriating the property of small landholders, for bribing the judges (presumably in order to give their thievery legal cover), and in general for committing crimes against the poor:
Woe unto them that devise iniquity, and work evil upon their beds! when the morning is light, they practice it, because it is in the power of their hand. And they covet fields, and take them by violence; and houses, and take them away: so they oppress a man and his house, even a man and his heritage.
And this is not all:
. . .ye pull off the robe with the garment from them that pass by securely as men averse from war. The women of my people have ye cast out from their pleasant houses; from their children have ye taken away my glory for ever.IV
But there is even worse, when Micah, turning to the rulers, employs gruesome imagery, complete with one of the more repulsive suggestions of cannibalism in the Hebrew Bible, to evoke the injustices these leaders both commit and tolerate:
And I said, Hear, I pray you, O heads of Jacob, and ye princes of the house of Israel; Is it not for you to know judgment? Who hate the good, and love the evil; who pluck off their skin from off them, and their flesh off their bones;Who also eat the flesh of my people, and flay their skin from off them; and they break their bones, and chop them in pieces, as for the pot, and as flesh within the cauldron.
It is to such sins as these (from Chapter 3) that God returns (in Chapter 6) when he rejects the people’s amazing offer to atone for them by sacrificing their own firstborn. But in this second round, He passes over the social realm quickly, and speaks in relatively milder terms mainly of how the rich cheat the poor:
Are there yet the treasures of wickedness in the house of the wicked, and the scant measure that is abominable? Shall I count them pure with the wicked balances, and with the bag of deceitful weights? For the rich men thereof are full of violence, and the inhabitants thereof have spoken lies, and their tongue is deceitful in their mouth.
BUT WHERE, it may reasonably be asked, is the connection with idolatry in all this? Where is there even an open expression of astonishment at the fantastic idea broached by the people to God Himself that they might atone for their sins against their covenant with Him through the grossest possible violation of that very covenant—that is, by resorting to the worst of all the abominations associated with the idolatry the covenant itself requires them to renounce?
According to Andersen and Freedman, when Micah speaks of the introduction of the “sins of the house of [the Kingdom of] Israel” into Jerusalem, he is pointing to his own contemporary, King Ahaz of Judah, who (as we have learned from the Second Book of Kings) is not only an idolator but practices human sacrifice: “But he [Ahaz] walked in the way of the kings of Israel, yea, and made his son pass through the fire, according to the abominations of the heathen, whom the LORD cast out from before the children of Israel.”
But Micah provides us with an even more powerful piece of evidence than this that he is fusing social sin with idolatry. It comes in a verse containing the bill of indictment that God finally issues after He has spurned the offer of human sacrifice by telling the people what they should have known already about justice and mercy—having, as He says, been told before. In this highly significant verse, it is a Northern dynasty that is brought in as an epitome of everything wicked that is being imitated by the Southern Kingdom: “For the statutes of Omri are kept, and all the works of the house of Ahab, and ye walk in their counsels . . . .”
Because this verse is preceded by a list of social injustices, a number of commentators (both Jewish and Christian) have interpreted it as referring not to the royal patronage of Baal worship during the reigns of Omri and his son Ahab, husband of Jezebel, but rather to “oppression and injustice” or “to the luxury of the upper classes, and social injustice.”
Yet these commentators miss a crucial element, which is that the house of Ahab embodied a perfect synthesis of idolatry and social oppression. It was during this king’s reign that, we recall, Elijah treated the two classes of sin as equally serious, first by slaughtering 450 prophets of Baal after his contest with them on Mount Carmel, and then by cursing Ahab and Jezebel with a bloody end for the murder of Naboth and the theft of his vineyard.
The underlying premise of Elijah’s twin actions, I would contend again, was that the theft and the murder flowed from the idolatry, or, conversely, that they were the fruits of faithlessness to the commandments of the God of Israel. In harking back to “the house of Ahab,” which necessarily includes Jezebel, even though she is not named here, Micah the literary artist returns to the bloody crossroads where sins against God meet and marry crimes against man, and the two classes of violation become indistinguishable from each other.
So intent are many people on reading Micah solely as a tract against social injustice, and seeing him as building on the non-religious or “humanist” foundation they imagine has already been laid by Amos, that they almost literally blind themselves to the even more outspoken and unambiguous denunciations of idolatry scattered through this book. Yet the very first chapter begins with several such denunciations (in at least one of which—involving the image of harlotry— we have a resonant echo of Hosea):
. . . What is the transgression of Jacob? is it not Samaria? and what are the high places of Judah? are they not Jerusalem? Therefore . . . all the graven images thereof shall be beaten to pieces, and all the hires thereof shall be burned with the fire, and all the idols thereof will I lay desolate: for she gathered it of the hire of an harlot, and they shall return to the hire of an harlot.
Later, in a vision of the future purification of the “. . . cities of thy land, . . .” there is more. But it is embedded in and surrounded with complexities that have to be unraveled before we can grasp that Micah is saying something very different from what appears on the surface, and from what a host of commentators have taken it to be.
TO BEGIN WITH, in the superscription we are informed that “The words of the LORD that came to Micah the Morasthite . . .” concern both Samaria (the then capital of the Northern Kingdom, which has not yet fallen) and Jerusalem (the capital of Judah), and while he concentrates on his native Judah, he so often embraces the North in his prophecies that we can safely take the “cities” in the purification vision as the two capitals and therefore standing for the entire Land of Israel.
The purification that Micah foresees begins with an apparent act of demilitarization: “And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the LORD, that I will cut off thy horses out of the midst of thee, and I will destroy thy chariots.” But if we read this verse as a “pacifist” statement, we are puzzled by how completely it contradicts the visions immediately preceding it. There, far from employing the language of what we might today regard as an advocate of disarmament, Micah envisages a fiercely warlike Israel achieving victories over its more powerful enemies:
Now also many nations are gathered against thee, that say, Let her be defiled, and let our eye look upon Zion. But they know not the thoughts of the LORD, neither understand they his counsel: for he shall gather them as the sheaves into the floor. Arise and thresh, O daughter of Zion: for I will make thine horn iron, and I will make thy hoofs brass: and thou shalt beat in pieces many people; and I will consecrate their gain unto the LORD, and their substance unto the LORD of the whole earth.
Despite this assurance of ultimate victory, Micah prophesies a prior succession of battles in which Israel will be defeated by unnamed foreign forces. But then a remnant of Judah, apparently swollen by returning exiles, will rally under a new king of the house of David, and under him they will (also apparently) reconquer all that has been lost:
And he shall stand and feed in the strength of the LORD, in the majesty of the name of the LORD his God; and they shall abide: for now he shall be great unto the ends of the earth. And this man shall be the peace, when the Assyrian shall come into our land: and when he shall tread in our palaces, then shall we . . . waste the land of Assyria with the sword, and the land of Nimrod in the entrances thereof: thus shall he deliver us from the Assyrian, when he cometh into our land, and when he treadeth within our borders. And the remnant of Jacob shall be in the midst of many people as a dew from the LORD, as the showers upon the grass, that tarrieth not for man, nor waiteth for the sons of men. And the remnant of Jacob shall be among the Gentiles in the midst of many people as a lion among the beasts of the forest, as a young lion among the flocks of sheep: who, if he go through, both treadeth down, and teareth in pieces, and none can deliver. Thine hand shall be lifted upon thine adversaries, and all thine enemies shall be cut off.V
Traditionalist commentators interpret all this as a messianic or eschatological vision for the distant future (when the scion of David will be born) and—somehow managing to overlook the nationalistic and warlike triumphalism of this passage—they concentrate all their attention on the verse about dew and rain as metaphors for the teachings of God. This reading is a great aid to resolving the apparent contradiction that arises in the next verse, when God declares that He will rid Israel of its military equipment (chariots and horses): for, as is axiomatic to the traditionalists, in the messianic age there will be no further need for reliance on weaponry.
But in an interpretation of this verse that is more plausible, since it looks forward to the attack on idolatry that follows, and to which it works as an introduction, Andersen and Freedman propose that the horses and chariots may have been connected with elements of an idolatrous practice. In support of this interpretation, they cite the fact (reported in the Second Book of Kings) that King Josiah, in later conducting his purge of anything smacking of idolatry, “took away the horses that the kings of Judah had given to the sun, at the entrance to the house of Yahweh, . . . and he burned the chariots of the sun with fire.”
But even without this illuminating bit of information, one has no trouble refuting the notion that Micah (supposedly like Amos before him) is on the whole indifferent to the war against idolatry. After all, Micah continues in the name of God to promise in the most unambiguous terms that an end will be made in Jerusalem (and Samaria?) to all manner of idols, to the sacred groves in which they are worshiped, and to the forbidden arts of divination. For the “extraordinary tenacity” of divination among the people of Israel, Andersen and Freedman write, “seems to have been an integral part of persistent paganizing trends, with the making of idols . . . as its most overt expression.” Thus Micah:
And I will cut off witchcrafts out of thine hand; and thou shalt have no more soothsayers: Thy graven images also will I cut off, and thy standing images out of the midst of thee;and thou shalt no more worship the work of thine hands. And I will pluck up thy groves out of the midst of thee . . . .
BUT THERE IS another messianic or eschatological vision in Micah, which creates problems both for the widely accepted “universalist” picture of this prophet and for the more “particularist” (and less pacifist) idea of him that I have been trying to demonstrate is truer to the book as we have it. The same vision creates even thornier problems for the scholars, because it duplicates almost word for word one of the most frequently quoted passages in the Book of Isaiah. Here is how it appears in Micah:
But in the last days it shall come to pass, that the mountain of the house of the LORD shall be established in the top of the mountains, and it shall be exalted above the hills; and people shall flow into it. And many nations shall come, and say, Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, and to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for the law shall go forth of Zion, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. And he shall judge among many people, and rebuke strong nations afar off; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the LORD of hosts hath spoken it. For all people will walk every one in the name of his god, and we will walk in the name of the LORD our God for ever and ever.VI
Except for what comes after, there are only thirteen minor differences between this passage and the one in the second chapter of the Book of Isaiah. In the useful list constructed by Andersen and Freedman, seven possible explanations have been put forward:
1. Isaiah and Micah each composed an identical prophecy independently.
2. An earlier prophecy was taken over and used by each prophet independently.
3. Micah composed it; Isaiah borrowed it.
4. Isaiah composed it; Micah borrowed it.
5. An oracle originally part of the Micah tradition but not necessarily original with the prophet was put into his book and later introduced into the book of Isaiah in one of its many revisions.
6. An oracle originally part of the Isaiah tradition but not necessarily original with that prophet was put into his book and later borrowed into the book of Micah.
7. An independent oracle, not originally associated with either prophet, and written later than either book, perhaps much later on, found its way independently into both books.
While recognizing that this “mystery” is not yet solved, and may never be, and while also acknowledging that theirs is very much a minority view among their fellow scholars, Andersen and Freedman incline toward Micah as the author and the First Isaiah as the borrower.
Yet most other scholars, along with the rest of the world, attribute the passage to the First Isaiah (and I suspect that, except for readers steeped in the Bible, hardly anyone is even aware that these hallowed words occur anywhere but in the Book of Isaiah). And there is indeed a good reason for regarding the passage as having originated with the First Isaiah and inserted into the Book of Micah by Micah himself or someone else. When, shortly, we come to the First Isaiah, I will have a bit to say about why it fits very well with him. For now, however, let me indicate why I think it does not fit smoothly into Micah.
For this purpose, a good way to begin is by quoting the veritably rhapsodic characterization of the passage by Andersen and Freedman:
This apocalypse is perhaps the most famous of all the visions to come from the imagination of the prophets of Israel, or revealed by the God of Israel . . . . It is global in scope, tranquil in mood, an impossible dream for all humankind, as hard to believe now as it must have been then . . . it is remarkable that it comes from an age of wars and tumults, of cruelty and chaos. It comes from a time of imperialist devastation, demolition, and domination of smaller nations by powers advanced in the technology of war, ruthless in conquest and control.
Now let me set this eloquent description beside Kaufmann, turning to him this time in agreement rather than dissent. Kaufmann generally accedes to the standard conception of Micah as a pacifist and a universalist that I am at pains to complicate or even throw out. But he also contradicts himself (or comes close to doing so) in explaining why he believes the duplicated passage in question is more likely to have issued from the mouth (or pen, as he would maintain) of the First Isaiah than from Micah.
As a prelude to his discussion of the duplicated passage, Kaufmann looks back at the purification vision I analyzed above:
Micah’s prophecies of salvation are inspired by the popular idea of the “day of YHVH.”VII They are purely national, and are pervaded by the theme of national revenge . . . . The Davidic monarchy will return to its former glory, and the enemies of Israel will be crushed and despoiled by the new king, who is described as a ravaging bull or a lion . . . . In this setting the Isaianic vision of the temple mount is particularly out of place . . . it is a foreign body in Micah.
It is on just such a note of national vindication as Kaufmann describes that the Book of Micah will end. But not before, like all the other classical prophets, Micah repeatedly warns of impending catastrophes whose details rival or sometimes even surpass their counterparts in the Hebrew Bible in frightfulness and horror. To the people of his own time, the most frightful of these must be his prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem. No one before him has ever dreamed that God will permit harm to come to His own city—the city where His own “house” is located. The First Isaiah, for example, will specifically assure King Hezekiah of this in 701 B.C.E., when the Assyrian king Sennacherib swallows much of Judah and is laying siege to Jerusalem. But Micah has the incredible daring to proclaim that “Therefore shall Zion for your sake be plowed as a field, and Jerusalem shall become heaps, and the mountains of the house as the high places of the forest.”VIII
In measuring how deep an impression Micah’s audacity makes, we have to jump ahead more than a century to another prophet, Jeremiah. His opponents will advocate that Jeremiah be put to death for prophesying that Jerusalem could suffer the same fate as the by then long defunct capital of the Northern Kingdom and that Solomon’s Temple could be destroyed just as the Northern sanctuary of Shiloh had been. But Jeremiah’s defenders will save his life by citing the precedent of Micah:
Then rose up certain of the elders of the land, and spake to all the assembly of the people, saying, Micah the Morasthite prophesied in the days of Hezekiah king of Judah, saying, Thus saith the LORD of hosts; Zion shall be plowed like a field, and Jerusalem shall become heaps, and the mountain of the house as the high places of a forest. Did Hezekiah king of Judah and all Judah put him at all to death? did he not fear the LORD, and besought the LORD, and the LORD repented him of the evil which he had pronounced against them? . . .
Omitted from the quotation in the Book of Jeremiah are the words “for your sake” which appear in Micah as a preliminary to “Zion shall be plowed as a field.” But for whose sake? Whom is Micah talking about? The answer to that question hurls us smack up against one more fascinating aspect of the Book of Micah, and another of its major themes.
I HAVE THUS FAR looked at three of the groups Micah has in mind and whom he has (metaphorically?IX) accused of being cannibals: the thieving rich, the oppressive rulers, and the corrupt judges, who among them conspire to defraud people possessing less land and less power than they themselves own. But there is a fourth group on whom Micah vents his fury at even greater length: the prophets who are his rivals and opponents.
Even though Micah sometimes flings the insult “diviners” at them, these are not prophets of Baal such as Elijah challenged, or devotees of some other pagan god or gods; they are prophets who claim to speak, no less than Micah does, in the name of the God of Israel. His stormy confrontations with them begin when they (or possibly the rulers he has been denouncing) demand, as Amaziah the priest did of Amos, that he stop prophesying:
Prophesy ye not, say they to them that prophesy: they shall not prophesy to them, that they shall not take shame. O thou that art named the house of Jacob, is the spirit of the LORD straitened? are these his doings? . . .
The King James translators are understandably flummoxed by this passage, which is one of those in Micah that Andersen and Freedman pick out as among the most obscure in the entire Hebrew Bible.X The general thrust would seem to be that Micah is being excoriated himself not only for the charges he has been making against the leading citizens of Judah, but also for blasphemously implying that God is no longer with His people. Micah, however, throwing in a few more charges and threats of punishment (no doubt to show that he is not intimidated), then shoots back contemptuously with: “If someone were to go about uttering empty falsehoods, saying, ‘I will preach to you of wine and strong drink,’ such a one would be the preacher for this people!”XI
But Micah is only just warming up. Before going on to develop his attack on these lying and drink-pushing prophets, he again demonstrates that he is not intimidated by escalating his excoriation of the leaders (through those comparisons cited above between them and wild beasts ripping up their prey, or perhaps even as cannibals devouring the humans they have first sacrificed and then chopped “. . . in pieces, as for the pot, and as flesh within the cauldron . . .”).
Having done that, Micah turns his full and virulent attention on the prophets in particular. In rather homey images (Micah is, after all, a country boy), he sneers that they will tell anyone who pays them that all is and will continue to be well, while vilifying those from whom they can extort no such assurances: “Thus saith the LORD concerning the prophets that make my people err, that bite with their teeth, and cry, Peace; and he that putteth not into their mouths, they even prepare war against him.”XII The punishment for this will perfectly fit the crime:
Therefore night shall be unto you, that ye shall not have a vision; and it shall be dark unto you, that ye shall not divine; and the sun shall go down over the prophets, and the day shall be dark over them. Then shall the seers be ashamed, and the diviners confounded: yea, they shall all cover their lips; for there is no answer of God.
That takes care of them. And he himself? “But truly I am full of power by the spirit of the LORD, and of judgment, and of might, to declare unto Jacob his transgression, and to Israel his sin.”
Micah’s absolutely self-assured assertion of his own prophetic legitimacy is not backed up in the book by any indications (like those we are given in Hosea and in Amos, and the much more extensive scenes we will get in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel) of his being called by God. We have only his word for it. But that word is fortified by the authority with which he speaks it—an authority that to his audience must sound more compelling than any exhibited by the rival prophets with whom he exchanges charges of fraud. What else can account for the survival of his preachings when theirs all disappear?
It cannot be proved that the power of Micah’s oracles and sermons and visions is the crucial element behind their preservation. But we can be certain that he does not become part of the prophetic canon by virtue of the accuracy of his predictions, since one of those is that the Assyrians will be defeated in battle if they invade the country. The opposite, of course, will all too soon happen in the North, and the Babylonians will later invade the South, and conquer it.
Still, even if his political judgment is off (in the short run, anyway), Micah does get the main point right when—wielding the word with the force of a lethal sword—he dismisses the principal idea that his rivals are preaching:
Hear this, I pray you, ye heads of the house of Jacob, and the princes of the house of Israel, that abhor judgment, and pervert all equity. They build up Zion with blood, and Jerusalem with iniquity. The heads thereof judge for reward, and the priests thereof teach for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for money: yet will they lean upon the LORD and say, Is not the LORD among us? none evil can come upon us.
What Micah—in the true tradition of classical prophecy—is telling the whole lot of them is that God’s covenant with Israel is not, as they foolishly and complacently assume, unconditional, and that evil can indeed come upon them if they fail to fulfill their obligations under it. And that is when he audaciously carries this fundamental truth all the way by including Jerusalem itself in the coming calamities. (This prophecy, unlike the one about Assyria, does eventually come to pass.)
AND YET —in the true rhythm of classical prophecy, with its leaps from condemnation to consolation without a trace of any logical moral pattern (not even necessarily from repentance to forgiveness)—the immediate sequel to the vision of Jerusalem destroyed is the Isaianic vision of Jerusalem restored and more glorious than ever it was before.
The same rhythm is picked up again, when, following Micah’s vision of the national restoration that will come about with the advent of a new king of the house of David—a kingdom that will be as dominant among the nations in the political realm as the Temple will be in the spiritual—the prophet unleashes another string of curses. In their malignity, these curses are a negative counterpoint—both physical and spiritual—to the balm of the blessings and the hopes he has soothingly uttered. In their physical aspect, they are redolent of Hosea:
Thou shalt eat, but not be satisfied; and thy casting down shall be in the midst of thee; and thou shalt take hold, but shalt not deliver; and that which thou deliverest will I give up to the sword. Thou shalt sow, but thou shalt not reap; thou shalt tread the olives, but thou shalt not anoint thee with oil; and sweet wine, but shalt not drink wine.XIII
But the curses that describe the spiritual accompaniment of these physical sufferings are closer to Amos than to Hosea. Amos, remember (8:11–13), envisions the young men and the virgins of Israel who, faint with thirst for the word of God, wander about in search of it, and never find it. Micah now paints a different scene, but in its stress on the spiritual element of the punishment to come, it has a kind of affinity with the poignant prophecy of Amos. It is a searing picture of radical disorder, an overturning of the conditions that normally govern the closest and most intimate relations of human life:
Trust ye not in a friend, put ye not confidence in a guide: keep the doors of thy mouth from her that lieth in thy bosom. For the son dishonoreth the father, the daughter riseth up against her mother, the daughter in law against her mother in law; a man’s enemies are the men of his own house.
Nor does this exhaust his catalogue of horrors. Yet as with all the classical prophets, evil tidings are not accorded the last word, which is always given (whether by the prophet himself, or by his disciples or redactors) to consolation and hope:
Therefore I will look unto the LORD; I will wait for the God of my salvation: my God will hear me. Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy: when I fall, I shall arise; when I sit in darkness, the LORD shall be a light unto me. I will bear the indignation of the LORD, because I have sinned against him, until he plead my cause and execute judgment for me: he will bring me forth to the light, and I shall behold his righteousness.
It is a hymn (or a psalm) of great sublimity, and in this instance the moral logic of sin, punishment, repentance, and forgiveness is definitely present. And the same note, infused with the same beautiful mixture of humility and exaltation, is struck in another psalm-like hymn a little further on:
Who is a God like unto thee, that pardoneth iniquity, and passeth by the transgression of the remnant of his heritage? he retaineth not his anger for ever, because he delighteth in mercy. He will turn again, he will have compassion upon us; he will subdue our iniquities; and thou wilt cast all their sins into the depths of the seas.
But what the standard view of Micah omits is that for him the public consequences of God’s mercy and forgiveness will be to vindicate His people and take revenge upon the enemy who has been rejoicing at their fall. There is no mention here of “the Day of the LORD,” but the popular conception of it that Amos turns upside down—warning that it will be a day of doom and not of triumph—is turned back by Micah to its original state:
Then she that is mine enemy shall see it, and shame shall cover her which said unto me, Where is the LORD thy God? mine eyes shall behold her: now shall she be trodden down as the mire of the streets . . . . According to the days of thy coming out of the land of Egypt will I shew unto him marvelous things. The nations shall see and be confounded at all their might: they shall lay their hand upon their mouth, their ears shall be deaf. They shall lick the dust like a serpent, they shall move out of their holes like worms of the earth: they shall be afraid of the LORD our God, and shall fear because of thee.XIV
So the question inevitably arises: which is the true Micah? Is he the nationalist (or “particularist”) of the concluding chapter, or the “universalist” who in the name of God addresses “man,” and not the children of Israel alone, in the most famous statement he ever pronounces? And what, correlatively, are we to make of the relation between the eschatological vision with which he leaves the stage and the “Isaianic” one that appears earlier in his book?
One of the reasons Kaufmann believes that Micah is the borrower of the prophecy of the Temple Mount from the First Isaiah is that he thinks the real Micah is the nationalist of the last chapter, and that as such he is unable to rise to the spiritual heights attained by Isaiah. I take a rather dimmer view of those heights than Kaufmann does, and I will have something to say about why in the concluding section of this book. But here I want to enter a speculation of my own into the never-ending dispute over how the Temple Mount prophecy found its way into the Book of Micah.
REVIEWING THAT DISPUTE, I have been persuaded by Kaufmann and the many other scholars who assign the prophecy to the First Isaiah. Yet as against Kaufmann, my (possibly wild) guess is that whoever borrowed and stuck it into the Book of Micah—and it pleases me to think that it was Micah himself—did so precisely because the passage presented a perfect opportunity to assert the compatibility of Isaiah’s eschatological vision with his own.
The point is that for Micah no contradiction exists between Isaiah’s idea that all peoples will some day embrace the faith of Israel, and his own prophetic conviction that a resurgent Israel—unified as in the days before the splintering of the monarchy, and led once again by a scion of King David—will subdue all the mighty nations of the world (epitomized by Assyria) through the force of arms. Far from being in conflict, these two visions are dependent on each other.
Which is to say that the precondition of the First Isaiah’s “universalist” prophecy coming to pass is the fulfillment of Micah’s “particularist” one. This is why Micah can describe the Davidic future as “peace” even as he is dwelling almost lovingly on the fierce and cruel blows the future king will deliver to all the Assyrias of the world. For it is only after the winning of these wars—only after God has executed “. . . vengeance in anger and fury upon the heathen . . .”—that “the remnant of Jacob shall be in the midst of many people as a dew from the LORD, as the showers upon the grass . . . .” Only then, nourished by the purified faith raining upon them from the influence of the religion of Israel, will all peoples come to God “. . . from Assyria, and from the fortified cities, and from the fortress even to the river, and from sea to sea, and from mountain to mountain.”XV
With this verse, Micah, in terms that sound very much like his own, stretches an eschatological hand out to the First Isaiah whom he has earlier been quoting.
The universal peace of the First Isaiah’s vision, in short, emerges from its placement in Micah as a kind of pax Israelitica that has been established by God through the armed conquests of His own people. It is a peace, moreover, that rests on the utter destruction of idolatry. Some, most notably Kaufmann, have said that Micah is relatively indifferent to the issue of idolatry. Yet I hope I have shown that he, like Amos, never doubts that the moral crimes and sins he spends much of his time denouncing are inextricably intertwined with idolatry. To the war against idolatry Micah, like all the classical prophets, brings the mighty weapon of words, leaving the sword to be wielded, when necessary and when possible, by other servants of God.
His job, and the job of the other prophets of the eighth century B.C.E., is to go on uncovering the evils whose extirpation is the aim of the war against idolatry. But simultaneously, and conversely, what Hosea calls “the knowledge of God”—which its priestly custodians are failing to hold dear and pass on—must be kept alive and fresh by the prophet in order to remind the people of the great good that the abolition of idolatry will liberate in all its glorious fullness.