Micah 1

The TorahRooted Bible (TRB), translated directly from the Hebrew and Greek.

Yahweh comes against Samaria and Jerusalem

¹ The word of Yahweh that came to Micah of Moresheth in the days of Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, which he saw concerning Samaria and Jerusalem.

² Hear, all you peoples; listen, O earth, and all that is in it; and let Adonai Yahweh be a witness against you, Adonai from His holy temple. ³ For see, Yahweh is coming out of His place; He will come down and tread on the high places of the earth. ⁴ The mountains will melt under Him, and the valleys will split open, like wax before the fire, like waters poured down a steep place. ⁵ All 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 Samaria? And what are the high places of Judah? Are they not Jerusalem? ⁶ Therefore I will make Samaria a heap of ruins in the field, a place for planting vineyards; I will pour down her stones into the valley, and lay bare her foundations. ⁷ All her carved 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.

Mourning for the towns of Judah

⁸ For this I will lament and wail; I will go stripped and naked; I will make a lament like the jackals, and a mourning like the ostriches. ⁹ For her wounds are incurable; for it has come to Judah; it has reached the gate of my people, to Jerusalem. ¹⁰ Tell it not in Gath; do not weep at all. In Beth-leaphrah roll yourself in the dust. ¹¹ Pass on your way, O inhabitant of Shaphir, in naked shame; the inhabitant of Zaanan does not come out; the lament of Beth-ezel will take from you its support. ¹² For the inhabitant of Maroth waits anxiously for good, because disaster has come down from Yahweh to the gate of Jerusalem. ¹³ Harness the chariot to the swift steeds, O inhabitant of Lachish; she was the beginning of sin to the daughter of Zion, for in you were found the transgressions of Israel. ¹⁴ Therefore you shall give parting gifts to Moresheth-gath; the houses of Achzib shall be a deception to the kings of Israel. ¹⁵ I will yet bring a conqueror to you, O inhabitant of Mareshah; the glory of Israel shall come to Adullam. ¹⁶ Make yourself bald and cut off your hair for the children of your delight; make your baldness as broad as the eagle's, for they have gone from you into exile.

Notes

• 1:1 Micah (Mikhah) is a short form of Mikhayahu, "Who is like Yah?", and the book closes with the same question: "Who is an El like You?" (7:18). He came from Moresheth-gath (1:14), a country town in the lowland of Judah southwest of Jerusalem, and spoke in the days of Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah, roughly from about 740 to about 700 BC, a contemporary of Isaiah and Hosea; Samaria fell to Assyria in 722 BC. A century later the elders of Judah still remembered his words and that Hezekiah had heeded them (Jeremiah 26:18-19).
• 1:5 "High places" (bamot) is the same word twice: Yahweh comes to "tread on the high places of the earth" (verse 3), and Judah has its own high places, the hilltop shrines of forbidden worship. Micah names the two capitals themselves as the source of the sin: the rot started at the top, in Samaria and Jerusalem, and spread to the rest of the land.
• 1:10 Verses 10-15 are a lament built on wordplays with town names, most of them in the lowland near Micah's home. "Tell it not in Gath" repeats David's lament over Saul (2 Samuel 1:20), and Gath sounds like "tell" (taggidu); Beth-leaphrah means "house of dust," so it must roll in the dust; Shaphir ("beautiful") goes away in shameful nakedness; the people of Zaanan (which sounds like "go out") do not go out; Maroth ("bitterness") waits in vain for good. Several of these towns lay on the road of the Assyrian army that invaded Judah in 701 BC (2 Kings 18:13), and many link the lament with that campaign.
• 1:13 Lachish, the strongest fortress of Judah after Jerusalem, sounds like rekhesh, "swift steeds": the city of chariots must now harness them to flee. Calling it "the beginning of sin to the daughter of Zion" may mean that trust in horses and chariots, which the Torah warned the king against (Deuteronomy 17:16), took root there first. Sennacherib besieged Lachish in 701 BC (2 Kings 18:14), and he had the siege carved on the walls of his palace at Nineveh.
• 1:14 The wordplays go on: Moresheth sounds like me'orasah, "betrothed," so Judah must give her "parting gifts" like a father sending a daughter away in marriage, here into the hands of the conqueror. Achzib sounds like akhzav, "deception," a brook that dries up when it is needed (Jeremiah 15:18 uses the word). Mareshah sounds like "conqueror" (verse 15), and Adullam recalls the cave where David hid from Saul (1 Samuel 22:1): "the glory of Israel," its nobles, will have to hide there as David once did.

Jonah 4 · Micah 2

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