The Expositor's Bible: The Book of the Twelve Prophets,...

Hear ye, peoples[816]all; Hearken, O Earth, and her fulness! That Jehovah may be among you to testify, The Lord from His holy temple! For, lo! Jehovah goeth forth from His place; He descendeth and marcheth on the heights of the earth.[817] Molten are the mountains beneath Him, And the valleys gape open, Like wax in face of the fire, Like water poured over a fall.

For the transgression of Jacob is all this, And for the sins of the house of Israel. What is the transgression of Jacob? is it not Samaria? And what is the sin of the house[818]of Judah? is it not Jerusalem? Therefore do I turn Samaria into a ruin of the field,[819] And into vineyard terraces; And I pour down her stones to the glen, And lay bare her foundations.[820] All her images are shattered, And all her hires are being burned in the fire; And all her idols I lay desolate, For from the hire of a harlot they were gathered,[821] And to a harlot's hire they return.[822]

For this let me mourn, let me wail, Let me go barefoot and stripped (of my robe), Let me make lamentation like the jackals, And mourning like the daughters of the desert.[823] For her stroke[824]is desperate; Yea, it hath come unto Judah! It hath smitten right up to the gate of my people, Up to Jerusalem.

Within the capital itself Isaiah was also recording the extension of the Assyrian invasion to its walls, but in a different temper.[825] He was full of the exulting assurance that, although at the very gate, the Assyrian could not harm the city of Jehovah, but must fall when he lifted his impious hand against it. Micah has no such hope: he is overwhelmed with the thought of Jerusalem's danger. Provincial though he be, and full of wrath at the danger into which the politicians of Jerusalem had dragged the whole country, he profoundly mourns the peril of the capital, the gate of my people, as he fondly calls her. Therefore we must not exaggerate the frequently drawn contrast between Isaiah and himself.[826] To Micah also Jerusalem was dear, and his subsequent prediction of her overthrow[827] ought to be read with the accent of this previous mourning for her peril. Nevertheless his heart clings most to his own home, and while Isaiah pictures the Assyrian entering Judah from the north by Migron, Michmash and Nob, Micah anticipates invasion by the opposite gateway of the land, at the door of his own village. His elegy sweeps across the landscape so dear to him. This obscure province was even more than Jerusalem his world, the world of his heart. It gives us a living interest in the man that the fate of these small villages, many of them vanished, should excite in him more passion than the fortunes of Zion herself. In such a passion we can incarnate his spirit. Micah is no longer a book, or an oration, but flesh and blood upon a home and a countryside of his own.

We see him on his housetop pouring forth his words before the hills and the far-stretching heathen land. In the name of every village within sight he reads a symbol of the curse that is coming upon his country, and of the sins that have earned the curse. So some of the greatest poets have caught their music from the nameless brooklets of their boyhood's fields; and many a prophet has learned to read the tragedy of man and God's verdict upon sin in his experience of village life. But there was more than feeling in Micah's choice of his own country as the scene of the Assyrian invasion. He had better reasons for his fears than Isaiah, who imagined the approach of the Assyrian from the north. For it is remarkable how invaders of Judæa, from Sennacherib to Vespasian and from Vespasian to Saladin and Richard, have shunned the northern access to Jerusalem and endeavoured to reach her by the very gateway at which Micah stood mourning. He had, too, this greater motive for his fear, that Sargon, as we have seen, was actually in the neighbourhood, marching to the defeat of Judah's chosen patron, Egypt. Was it not probable that, when the latter was overthrown, Sargon would turn back upon Judah by Lachish and Mareshah? If we keep this in mind we shall appreciate, not only the fond anxiety, but the political foresight that inspires the following passage, which is to our Western taste so strangely cast in a series of plays upon place-names.

The disappearance of many of these names, and our ignorance of the transactions to which the verses allude, often render both the text and the meaning very uncertain. Micah begins with the well-known play upon the name of Gath; the Acco which he couples with it is either the Phœnician port to the north of Carmel, the modern Acre, or some Philistine town, unknown to us, but in any case the line forms with the previous one an intelligible couplet: Tell it not in Tell-town; Weep not in Weep-town. The following Beth-le-'Aphrah, House of Dust, must be taken with them, for in the phrase roll thyself there is a play upon the name Philistine. So, too, Shaphir, or Beauty, the modern Suafîr, lay in the Philistine region. Sa'anan and Beth-esel and Maroth are unknown; but if Micah, as is probable, begins his list far away on the western horizon and comes gradually inland, they also are to be sought for on the maritime plain. Then he draws nearer by Lachish, on the first hills, and in the leading pass towards Judah, to Moresheth-Gath, Achzib, Mareshah and Adullam, which all lie within Israel's territory and about the prophet's own home. We understand the allusion, at least, to Lachish in ver. 13. As the last Judæan outpost towards Egypt, and on a main road thither, Lachish would receive the Egyptian subsidies of horses and chariots, in which the politicians put their trust instead of in Jehovah. Therefore she was the beginning of sin to the daughter of Zion.

And if we can trust the text of ver. 14, Lachish would pass on the Egyptian ambassadors to Moresheth-Gath, the next stage of their approach to Jerusalem. But this is uncertain. With Moresheth-Gath is coupled Achzib, a town at some distance from Jerome's site for the former, to the neighbourhood of which, Mareshah, we are brought back again in ver. 15. Adullam, with which the list closes, lies some eight or ten miles to the north-east of Mareshah.

Tell it not in Gath, Weep not in Acco,[828] In Beth-le-'Aphrah[829]roll thyself in dust. Pass over, inhabitress of Shaphir,[830]thy shame uncovered! The inhabitress of Sa'anan[831]shall not march forth; The lamentation of Beth-esel[832]taketh from you its standing. The inhabitress of Maroth[833]trembleth for good, For evil hath come down from Jehovah to the gate of Jerusalem. Harness the horse to the chariot, inhabitress of Lachish,[834] That hast been the beginning of sin to the daughter of Zion; Yea, in thee are found the transgressions of Israel. Therefore thou givest ...[835]to Moresheth-Gath:[836] The houses of Achzib[837]shall deceive the kings of Israel. Again shall I bring the Possessor [conqueror] to thee, inhabitress of Mareshah;[838] To Adullam[839]shall come the glory of Israel. Make thee bald, and shave thee for thy darlings; Make broad thy baldness like the vulture, For they go into banishment from thee.