Micah: Act Justly, Love Mercy

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Micah, from the farming village of Moresheth in the Judean foothills. Some of the later chapters may come from his followers after the exile.

When: About 740 to 700 BC, at the same time as Isaiah.

Where it fits: Micah preached in Judah under Kings Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah (2 Kings 15:32–20:21), in the years when Assyria destroyed the northern kingdom (722 BC) and then invaded Judah (701 BC).

Where I quote it: “A man’s foes will be those of his own household” (Matthew 10:35–36; Micah 7:6). In Matthew, the chief priests quote Micah’s Bethlehem prophecy to Herod (Matthew 2:5–6; Micah 5:2).

If you only read three chapters: Micah 2, Micah 4 and Micah 6.

Words to Know

Moresheth — Micah’s village, out in the countryside southwest of Jerusalem.

Heritage — the family land each household was supposed to keep for good.

Ephrathah — the clan around Bethlehem, David’s hometown.

Mercy — in Hebrew hesed, loyal, faithful love.

The Book in Brief

The heading names Micah of Moresheth, who spoke in the days of Kings Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah of Judah, about the two capitals, Samaria and Jerusalem. The book swings back and forth between doom and hope.

Chapters 1 to 3 are mostly warnings. God comes down to judge, and Samaria will become a heap of rubble. Micah mourns as the disaster spreads through the towns of his own countryside to the gate of Jerusalem. He condemns the men who lie awake planning to seize fields and houses, and the rulers who devour the people like meat in a pot. Judges take bribes, priests teach for pay and prophets tell fortunes for money. So Jerusalem will be plowed like a field.

Chapters 4 and 5 turn to hope. In days to come, the nations will stream to the LORD’s mountain to learn his ways. They will beat their swords into plowshares, and everyone will sit under his own vine and fig tree with no one to make him afraid. The daughter of Zion will go into exile in Babylon and be rescued there. A ruler will come from little Bethlehem to shepherd his people, and God will cut off the horses, chariots and idols they trusted.

Chapters 6 and 7 open like a trial. God calls on the mountains to hear his case against his people and reminds them how he brought them out of Egypt. Someone asks what sacrifice would please God, and the answer is to act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with God. Then come the dishonest scales and the violent rich, and a lament that no one can be trusted, not even in one’s own household. The book ends with a prayer of trust in a God like no other, who pardons sin and will throw it into the depths of the sea.

Isaiah was a man of Jerusalem who spoke to kings. Micah, preaching at the same time, was from a village out in the country. He saw the same things from the other end.

Woe to those who devise iniquity and work evil on their beds! When the morning is light, they practice it, because it is in the power of their hand. They covet fields, and seize them; and houses, and take them away: and they oppress a man and his house, even a man and his heritage (Micah 2:1–2).

The rich lay awake at night planning how to take the small farms. In the morning they did it, legally, because they had the power. You drive the women of my people out from their pleasant houses (Micah 2:9).

Go deeperMicah’s home country and the Assyrian army

Micah’s village lay in the Shephelah, the low rolling hills between the mountains of Judah and the coastal plain. It was good farming country, and it was the road into Judah for any army coming up from the coast.

In 701 BC the Assyrian king Sennacherib came that way. His own annals boast that he besieged and took forty-six of Hezekiah’s walled cities, with countless villages around them, and carried off 200,150 people.¹ His greatest prize in the region was the fortress city of Lachish, not far from Micah’s home, and he made it his headquarters (2 Kings 18:13–14). Back in Nineveh he had the siege carved in stone panels for his palace walls: the ramps, the battering rams, the families led away, the prisoners impaled. The panels are now in the British Museum.¹

Now read Micah 1:10–16. It is a lament over a string of towns in that same country, and nearly every line is a pun on a town’s name, most of them lost in translation. Beth Ophrah means house of dust, so its people roll in the dust. Shaphir means beautiful, and it must go out naked and ashamed. Lachish sounds like the word for a swift horse, so it is told to harness its chariots. Achzib sounds like the word for deception, and it will deceive the kings of Israel. Micah’s own town, whose name sounds like a bride promised in marriage, is to be sent off with a parting gift (Micah 1:14), like a daughter leaving home.²

Many scholars link this lament with Sennacherib’s march of 701 BC. Others link it with an earlier Assyrian campaign. Either way, Micah was watching an empire roll through his own fields.²

Eating the people

Micah’s language about the rulers is the most violent in the prophets.

Please listen, you heads of Jacob, and rulers of the house of Israel: Isn’t it for you to know justice? You who hate the good, and love the evil; who tear off their skin, and their flesh from off their bones; who also eat the flesh of my people … and chop them in pieces, as for the pot, and as meat within the cauldron (Micah 3:1–3).

Then he names the whole system. Her leaders judge for bribes, and her priests teach for a price, and her prophets of it tell fortunes for money: yet they lean on the LORD, and say, “Isn’t the LORD among us? No disaster will come on us” (Micah 3:11).

And then the verdict: Therefore Zion for your sake will be plowed like a field, and Jerusalem will become heaps of rubble (Micah 3:12).

The prophecy that helped save a life

A hundred years later, Jeremiah stood in the Temple and said the same thing, and the priests wanted him killed. Some of the elders stood up and quoted Micah, by name: Micah the Morashtite prophesied in the days of Hezekiah king of Judah; and he spoke to all the people of Judah, saying … “Zion will be plowed as a field” (Jeremiah 26:18). King Hezekiah had not killed Micah for it. He had listened.

A country prophet’s words from a century before helped save Jeremiah’s life. It is one of the very few places in my scriptures where one prophet quotes another by name.

Vine and fig tree

Micah has the same promise as Isaiah, that nations will beat their swords into plowshares. Then he adds a line Isaiah does not have:

But they will sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and no one will make them afraid (Micah 4:4).

Not a palace. A family on its own land, with a vine and a fig tree, and nobody coming to take it. That was the dream of a farmer from Moresheth.

George Washington loved that verse. He quoted it again and again in his letters, including a famous one to the Jewish congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1790, hoping that in America everyone would sit safely under his own vine and fig tree.³ The musical Hamilton gave his words a song.

Go deeperThe same prophecy in Micah and Isaiah

Micah 4:1–3 and Isaiah 2:2–4 are almost word for word the same: the mountain of the LORD’s house raised above the hills, the nations streaming to it to learn God’s ways, the swords beaten into plowshares. The two prophets lived in Judah at the same time. So who said it first?

Scholars have given three answers. Some think Micah took it from Isaiah, the great prophet of the capital. Some think Isaiah took it from Micah. Many now think that neither wrote it, and that it was an older song about Zion, or a later prophecy, placed in both books by the people who collected and edited them.⁴

That question belongs to a larger one. Most scholars agree that chapters 1 to 3 are, for the most part, Micah’s own words from the late 700s BC. Chapters 4 to 7 are harder to place. They contain lines that seem to look back on the fall of Jerusalem, such as the promise that the daughter of Zion will come even to Babylon. There you will be rescued (Micah 4:10). In Micah’s day the enemy was Assyria, not Babylon. So many scholars think these chapters were added or expanded by Micah’s followers during or after the exile. Others argue that much more of the book comes from Micah himself.⁴

Whoever arranged the book did something worth noticing. Micah 3 ends with the Temple mountain overgrown like a wooded hill. Micah 4 begins with the same mountain raised above every mountain on earth. The worst warning and the greatest hope sit side by side.

Little Bethlehem

But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, being small among the clans of Judah, out of you one will come out to me that is to be ruler in Israel (Micah 5:2).

Micah was not looking to Jerusalem, the royal city, for the next ruler. He was looking to Bethlehem, the small town where David had been a shepherd boy. A ruler from the countryside, like Micah.

Matthew tells how the chief priests quoted this verse to Herod when the wise men came asking where the king was to be born (Matthew 2:4–6). John remembers people doubting me because I came from Galilee and the scriptures said the Messiah would come from Bethlehem (John 7:41–42).

Matthew and Luke both say I was born in Bethlehem, but they tell very different stories of how I came to be born there. Mark and John do not mention it.⁵

Go deeperLittle Bethlehem in Matthew and the Targum

Put Micah’s words beside Matthew’s and you will see that they do not match. Micah says Bethlehem is small among the clans of Judah (Micah 5:2). In Matthew the priests say, You Bethlehem, land of Judah, are in no way least among the princes of Judah (Matthew 2:6). Micah calls the town small. Matthew says it is not small at all, because of the ruler who comes from it.

Two other changes are worth seeing. Micah’s word for clans is, in Hebrew, thousands, the units a tribe was divided into. The Hebrew word for chiefs is written with the same consonants, and Matthew’s princes follows that reading. And Matthew ends with words that are not in Micah 5:2: who shall shepherd my people, Israel (Matthew 2:6). They come from God’s promise to David, You will be shepherd of my people Israel (2 Samuel 5:2). Matthew joined the two passages, so that the ruler from Bethlehem is a new David.⁶

Matthew was not the only one to read Micah as a promise of the Messiah. The Targum, the Aramaic translation of the Prophets used in the synagogues, says it outright. Where the Hebrew has one will come out to me that is to be ruler (Micah 5:2), the Targum says that the Messiah will come forth. The Targum was put into its final form after my time, but it gathers up older ways of reading the scriptures.⁷

What does the LORD require?

Then comes Micah 6:8, perhaps the most famous single verse in the prophets.

It starts with a person asking how to make things right with God. How shall I come before the LORD, and bow myself before the exalted God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams? … Shall I give my firstborn for my disobedience? (Micah 6:6–7).

More sacrifices. Bigger sacrifices. Even a child.

And the answer:

He has shown you, O man, what is good. What does the LORD require of you, but to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:8).

Three things. No ritual in any of them. An American president read that verse aloud when he took his oath of office.⁸

The next verses go right back to the market: Shall I be pure with dishonest scales, and with a bag of deceitful weights? Her rich men are full of violence (Micah 6:11–12). Acting justly meant honest weights.

The sword in the family

Micah also saw a time when society would come apart: For the son dishonors the father, the daughter rises up against her mother … a man’s enemies are the men of his own house (Micah 7:6).

I used this verse in one of the hardest things I said. Don’t think that I came to send peace on the earth. I didn’t come to send peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man at odds against his father, and a daughter against her mother … A man’s foes will be those of his own household (Matthew 10:34–36).

I was not telling people to fight their families. I was warning them that following me would divide families, as it did. Micah had already described what a household looks like when truth comes into it.

Who is a God like you?

Micah’s name means Who is like the LORD? The book ends by asking that question:

Who is a God like you, who pardons iniquity, and passes over the disobedience of the remnant of his heritage? … you will cast all their sins into the depths of the sea (Micah 7:18–19).

To this day, on the Jewish New Year, many of my people go to a river or the sea and throw in crumbs, as a sign of their sins being cast away, with these words.⁹

Check It Yourself

Look up: Micah 6:6–8.

You will find: every kind of sacrifice offered, and three things required instead.

Then read Micah 3:12 and Jeremiah 26:16–19. See a prophet’s words help save another prophet’s life.

The Short Version

• Micah was a country prophet who watched the powerful seize farms and houses.
• His warning that Zion would be plowed was quoted a century later and helped save Jeremiah’s life.
• He dreamed of everyone under their own vine and fig tree, with no one to make them afraid.
• “Act justly, love mercy, walk humbly with your God” is the answer to how to please God.
• He named Bethlehem, and gave me the words about enemies in one’s own household.