Micah 1–3

‘To the Edge of Doom’

Commentaries by Allen Dwight Callahan

Works of art by Gustave Doré, Unknown Assyrian artist and Unknown Franco-Flemish artist

Cite Share

Gustave Doré

Micah Exhorting the Israelites to Repent, from Dore Bible, 1866, Engraving; Internet Archive

‘This Portentous Figure’

Commentary by Allen Dwight Callahan

Cite Share

This work by the French painter, illustrator, engraver, caricaturist, and lithographer Gustave Doré appears in Doré’s illustrated Bible, published in 1865. Its representation of the prophet is the visual antithesis of the silent, bedridden Micah in the medieval manuscript illumination elsewhere in this exhibition: here, Micah has forsaken the boudoir for the public square. He speaks, standing up, fully clothed, both arms extended upward, imploring the people’s attention.

This is indeed how the Bible remembers Micah being remembered in the prophet Jeremiah’s day.

And some of the elders of the land arose and said to all the assembled people, ‘Micah of Moresheth, who prophesied during the days of King Hezekiah of Judah, said to all the people of Judah: “Thus says the Lord of hosts, Zion shall be plowed as a field; Jerusalem shall become a heap of ruins, and the mountain of the house a wooded height”’.(Jeremiah 26:17–18)

Micah is a prophet against prophets. The figure of the prophet, along with that of the prince and the priest, comprise the troika of corrupt elites that Micah vehemently indicts (Micah 3:11). Like Jeremiah a generation later, Micah decried prophecy at a time when the motive of the prophet had become fatally corrupted by the profit motive.

And, like Jeremiah, Micah prophesies to mixed reviews. The audience in Doré’s engraving suggests a varied reception: some in the crowd appear to be pensive; others, anguished; yet others, annoyed. At lower right, a man attends to Micah’s rant, but his body language speaks of his ambivalence: though he glances back in the prophet’s direction, his torso is turned forward, and, in mid-stride with staff in hand, he appears to have other places to go and other things to do.


Unknown Franco-Flemish artist

Initial V: An Angel before Micah, c.1270, Tempera colours, black ink, and gold leaf on parchment, Leaf: 47 x 32.2 cm, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Ms. Ludwig I 8, v2 (83.MA.57.2), fol. 183, Digital image courtesy of the Getty's Open Content Program

‘When the Sun Sets, Who Doth Not Look for Night?’

Commentary by Allen Dwight Callahan

Cite Share

In this illumination from a magisterial thirteenth-century Vulgate Bible, the initial moment of prophetic vocation is framed by an enlarged ‘V’. It is the first letter of verbum, the first word of Micah 1:1 in the Latin translation: Verbum Domini quod factum est ad Micham Morasthiten (‘The Word of the LORD that came to Micah the Morasthite’).

The scene features a bedside revelation: apparently, the Word has come unbidden, disturbing Micah’s peace. The prophet has turned in for the evening; his posture suggests he was sleeping, or at least trying to sleep. At left, he reclines, naked to the waist, partially covered in blue bedclothes, a white sheet across his torso, his forearms buried in his blanket.

The prophet is mute: his mouth is shut. But his eyes are open. Though he is poised for slumber, Micah’s expression nevertheless shows that he is quite awake. His body is covered, but his face—the window of the mind—is wide open.

At right, a winged angel, standing and slightly bent in Micah’s direction, beckons with the upturned index finger of his right hand. In his left hand, a scroll unfurls its full length in the curved shape of an inverted ‘S’ that bisects the space between him and the prophet. The scroll is unmarked, a roll of blank vellum: not a letter is written upon it.

Though biblical prophecy has become Scripture, in the beginning it was not so: we can read the bare scroll here as signifying that revelation comes to the prophet as something unscripted. The scroll serves as the sign that prophecy ‘happens’, that revelation is not ‘content’ but event, translating into sounds and signs those flashes of divine insight that the Bible calls ‘the Word of the LORD’.


Unknown Assyrian artist

Sennacherib Watches the Capture of Lachish, 700–692 BCE, Gypsum wall panel, 251.46 x 177.80 cm, The British Museum, London; 1856,0909.14, Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY

‘Doomsday with Eclipse’

Commentary by Allen Dwight Callahan

Cite Share

This wall relief from the South-West Palace at Nineveh, the imperial capital of the ancient Assyrians, depicts the procession of prisoners after the capture of the Judahite city of Lachish by the Assyrian army in 701 BCE. Two Assyrian soldiers, marked by their characteristic conical helmets, force several hapless Lachishite prisoners forward, some of whom are prostrating themselves before the Assyrian king, Sennacherib, at centre, flanked by two royal servants bearing feather fans.

The reliefs on these slabs originally formed a single, continuous work, measuring 2.4 metres high and 24.4 metres wide, that covered the inner walls of the royal chamber. They vividly depict Sennacherib’s victory over the fortified city. This crushing invasion of the Assyrian army is only suggested in 2 Kings 18:13–15, the Bible’s sketchy account of the event.

These monumental stone portraits of mayhem, abject humiliation, and mass destruction covered the inner walls of the imperial court, serving as the grisly, oversized decorations of an Assyrian-style royal interior that literally surrounded the monarch as he sat on his throne. The reliefs were an indoor billboard advertising the bloodlust and cruelty of Assyria’s imperial military might.

According to Micah, this very bloodlust and cruelty would soon strike Jerusalem as a divine rod of reproof to chasten Judah’s venal, greedy elites: ‘Therefore because of you [rulers of the house of Jacob and chiefs of the house of Israel], Zion shall be plowed as a field; Jerusalem shall become a heap of ruins’ (3:12).

But it wouldn’t. And it wasn’t. And it didn’t. The books of Chronicles recap Sennacherib’s threat to attack Jerusalem: but pace Micah, the city was miraculously spared the fate of Lachish, and was left, for the moment at least, in peace (2 Chronicles 32:9–11).


Gustave Doré :

Micah Exhorting the Israelites to Repent, from Dore Bible, 1866 , Engraving

Unknown Franco-Flemish artist :

Initial V: An Angel before Micah, c.1270 , Tempera colours, black ink, and gold leaf on parchment

Unknown Assyrian artist :

Sennacherib Watches the Capture of Lachish, 700–692 BCE , Gypsum wall panel

‘Warnings, and portents, and evils imminent’

Comparative commentary by Allen Dwight Callahan

Cite Share

The Word of the LORD that came to Micah the Morasthite…

That’s it. No mention of Micah’s father, clan, or profession. We are merely told that he is from Moresheth, a town in the Judean lowlands, the rural periphery for which Jerusalem was the urban centre. The only thing the book of Micah tells us about its namesake is that he is from the countryside. He is a peasant, a rustic. A hick.

This Morasthite hick, who appears at the source and origin of classical Hebrew prophecy, never refers to himself as writing anything, nor is he remembered as having written the oracles that now constitute the book that bears his name. Micah is imagined in the book of that accomplished litterateur, the prophet Jeremiah, as every bit the plaintive principal of Gustave Doré’s engraving—haranguing his audience, but not writing to them.

Though his words have come down to us written on a scroll, Micah expressed himself in the spoken word. His métier is that of Orpheus and Muhammad. Micah is not a writer. He is a rapper, albeit quite ‘old school’. He does not write lines: he ‘spits rhymes’, as it were.

Yet Micah the man comes to be effaced by Micah the book. It is only in the first three chapters of that book that we come close to Micah the man, depicted in the Vulgate illumination as an insomniac to whom the Word of the LORD comes in the night, delivered by a winged angel.

The Latin Vulgate has captured the force of the original Hebrew: Verbum Domini quod factum est ad Micham = Yahweh ašer hāyāh el Mîkāh; literally, ‘The Word of the LORD, which happened to Micah’. The Word is uncanny, unpredictable, an event that Lloyds of London would have formally referred to as an ‘Act of God’. The prophet’s vocation is not his volition; it is not something that he has sought, but something that has sought, and found, him. It invades his privacy—that still, small voice that comes to rob him of his rest.

Prophecy, the message of the prophet, is not his own. Or at least, that disclaimer must be his claim: the prophet’s lips move, but it is God who speaks—God, that Great Ventriloquist in the Sky. As the hand puppet of the LORD, whatever the prophet says is what the LORD says (Micah 2:3; 3:5).

Later ages would remember Micah’s prophecy as both repudiated and vindicated.

Repudiated, because the books of Chronicles would claim that God answered the prayers of King Hezekiah and his court prophet, Isaiah, by restraining Sennacherib from doing to Jerusalem what he did to Lachish (2 Chronicles 32:20–22). The Chronicler thus suggests that the tardy piety of a couple of contrite elites could forestall the justice due a society that allowed its ruling class to eat its impoverished masses alive (Micah 3:3).

Vindicated, because the Babylonians, the imperial successors to the Assyrians, would ultimately wreak upon Jerusalem the catastrophe gruesomely depicted in the Lachish Relief, consigning its princes, priests, and prophets to the dustbin of history.

But the elites would exact a posthumous revenge. Micah’s oracles would come to be curated by the descendants of the very class they came into existence to condemn, and the book of Micah would thereby become an heirloom of its despised heirs.

Modern scholars argue that later revanchist redactors have interpolated the following prophecy of divine restoration— so incongruous with his outrage — into Micah’s oracles of judgement:

I will surely gather all of you, O Jacob, I will gather the survivors of Israel; I will set them together like sheep in a fold, like a flock in its pasture; it will resound with people. The one who breaks out will go up before them; they will break through and pass the gate, going out by it. Their king will pass on before them, the Lord at their head. (Micah 2:12–13)

It is those ancient, anonymous custodians of Micah’s oracles—oracles written on a long scroll, along with other oracles that he could not have spoken let alone written—who have written into Micah’s denunciations this grandiose post-exilic promise to Make Israel Great Again.

 

References

Cuffey, Kenneth H. 2015. The Literary Coherence of the Book of Micah: Remnant, Restoration, and Promise, LHBOTS (London: T&T Clark)

Jacobs, Mignon R. 2006. ‘Bridging the Times: Trends in Micah Studies since 1985’, Currents in Biblical Research 4.3: 293–329

Wagenaar, Jan A. 2001. Judgement and Salvation: The Composition and Redaction of Micah 2–5, Vetus Testamentum, Supplements, vol. 85 (Leiden: Brill)

Next exhibition: Habakkuk 1

Micah 1–3

Revised Standard Version

Micah 1

1 The word of the Lord that came to Micah of Moʹresheth in the days of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiʹah, kings of Judah, which he saw concerning Samarʹia and Jerusalem.

2Hear, you peoples, all of you;

hearken, O earth, and all that is in it;

and let the Lord God be a witness against you,

the Lord from his holy temple.

3For behold, the Lord is coming forth out of his place,

and will come down and tread upon the high places of the earth.

4And the mountains will melt under him

and the valleys will be cleft,

like wax before the fire,

like waters poured down a steep place.

5All this is for the transgression of Jacob

and for the sins of the house of Israel.

What is the transgression of Jacob?

Is it not Samarʹia?

And what is the sin of the house of Judah?

Is it not Jerusalem?

6Therefore I will make Samarʹia a heap in the open country,

a place for planting vineyards;

and I will pour down her stones into the valley,

and uncover her foundations.

7All her images shall be beaten to pieces,

all her hires shall be burned with fire,

and all her idols I will lay waste;

for from the hire of a harlot she gathered them,

and to the hire of a harlot they shall return.

8For this I will lament and wail;

I will go stripped and naked;

I will make lamentation like the jackals,

and mourning like the ostriches.

9For her wound is incurable;

and it has come to Judah,

it has reached to the gate of my people,

to Jerusalem.

10Tell it not in Gath,

weep not at all;

in Beth-le-aphʹrah

roll yourselves in the dust.

11Pass on your way,

inhabitants of Shaphir,

in nakedness and shame;

the inhabitants of Zaʹanan

do not come forth;

the wailing of Beth-eʹzel

shall take away from you its standing place.

12For the inhabitants of Maroth

wait anxiously for good,

because evil has come down from the Lord

to the gate of Jerusalem.

13Harness the steeds to the chariots,

inhabitants of Lachish;

you were the beginning of sin

to the daughter of Zion,

for in you were found

the transgressions of Israel.

14Therefore you shall give parting gifts

to Moʹresheth-gath;

the houses of Achzib shall be a deceitful thing

to the kings of Israel.

15I will again bring a conqueror upon you,

inhabitants of Mareʹshah;

the glory of Israel

shall come to Adullam.

16Make yourselves bald and cut off your hair,

for the children of your delight;

make yourselves as bald as the eagle,

for they shall go from you into exile.

2Woe to those who devise wickedness

and work evil upon their beds!

When the morning dawns, they perform it,

because it is in the power of their hand.

2They covet fields, and seize them;

and houses, and take them away;

they oppress a man and his house,

a man and his inheritance.

3Therefore thus says the Lord:

Behold, against this family I am devising evil,

from which you cannot remove your necks;

and you shall not walk haughtily,

for it will be an evil time.

4In that day they shall take up a taunt song against you,

and wail with bitter lamentation,

and say, “We are utterly ruined;

he changes the portion of my people;

how he removes it from me!

Among our captors he divides our fields.”

5Therefore you will have none to cast the line by lot

in the assembly of the Lord.

6“Do not preach”—thus they preach—

“one should not preach of such things;

disgrace will not overtake us.”

7Should this be said, O house of Jacob?

Is the Spirit of the Lord impatient?

Are these his doings?

Do not my words do good

to him who walks uprightly?

8But you rise against my people as an enemy;

you strip the robe from the peaceful,

from those who pass by trustingly

with no thought of war.

9The women of my people you drive out

from their pleasant houses;

from their young children you take away

my glory for ever.

10Arise and go,

for this is no place to rest;

because of uncleanness that destroys

with a grievous destruction.

11If a man should go about and utter wind and lies,

saying, “I will preach to you of wine and strong drink,”

he would be the preacher for this people!

12I will surely gather all of you, O Jacob,

I will gather the remnant of Israel;

I will set them together

like a sheep in a fold,

like a flock in its pasture,

a noisy multitude of men.

13He who opens the breach will go up before them;

they will break through and pass the gate,

going out by it.

Their king will pass on before them,

the Lord at their head.

3And I said:

Hear, you heads of Jacob

and rulers of the house of Israel!

Is it not for you to know justice?—

2you who hate the good and love the evil,

who tear the skin from off my people,

and their flesh from off their bones;

3who eat the flesh of my people,

and flay their skin from off them,

and break their bones in pieces,

and chop them up like meat in a kettle,

like flesh in a caldron.

4Then they will cry to the Lord,

but he will not answer them;

he will hide his face from them at that time,

because they have made their deeds evil.

5Thus says the Lord concerning the prophets

who lead my people astray,

who cry “Peace”

when they have something to eat,

but declare war against him

who puts nothing into their mouths.

6Therefore it shall be night to you, without vision,

and darkness to you, without divination.

The sun shall go down upon the prophets,

and the day shall be black over them;

7the seers shall be disgraced,

and the diviners put to shame;

they shall all cover their lips,

for there is no answer from God.

8But as for me, I am filled with power,

with the Spirit of the Lord,

and with justice and might,

to declare to Jacob his transgression

and to Israel his sin.

9Hear this, you heads of the house of Jacob

and rulers of the house of Israel,

who abhor justice

and pervert all equity,

10who build Zion with blood

and Jerusalem with wrong.

11Its heads give judgment for a bribe,

its priests teach for hire,

its prophets divine for money;

yet they lean upon the Lord and say,

“Is not the Lord in the midst of us?

No evil shall come upon us.”

12Therefore because of you

Zion shall be plowed as a field;

Jerusalem shall become a heap of ruins,

and the mountain of the house a wooded height.