But even these three divisions, which hitherto we have proved to be the only divisions that do exist,[2] can be considered as such, in so far only as in them the discourse takes a fresh start, and enters upon a new sphere. They cannot be considered as complete in themselves, and separated from one another by the difference of the periods of their composition; for even in them there are found traces of a close connection. Even the uniform beginning by "Hear" may be considered as such. The second discourse in iii. 1 begins with ואמר; but the Fut. with Vav convers. always, and without exception, connects a new action with a preceding one, and can never be used where there is an absolutely new commencement. Its significance here, where it is used in the transition from the promise to a new reproof and threatening, has been very strikingly brought out thus, by Ch. Bened. Michaelis: "But while we are yet but too far away from those longed-for times, which have just been promised, I say in the meanwhile, viz., in order to complete the list of the iniquities of evil princes and teachers, begun in chap. ii." The words of iii. 1, "Hear, I pray you, ye heads of Jacob, and ye princes of the house of Israel," have an evident reference to ii. 12: "I will assemble Jacob all of thee, I will gather the remnant of Israel." In the new threatening, the prophet chooses quite the same designation as in the preceding promise, in order to prevent the latter from giving support to false security. It is not by any means Samaria alone, but all Israel, which is the object of divine punishment. It is only a remnant of Israel that shall be gathered. But the reference to the preceding discourse is still more obvious in ver. 4: "Then they shall cry unto the Lord, and He will not answer; and may He hide[3] His face from them at this time, as they have behaved themselves ill towards Him in their doings." Now, as in vers. 1-3 divine judgments had not yet been spoken of, the terms "then," and "at this time," can refer only to the threatenings of punishment in ii. 3 ff., which have a special reference to the ungodly nobles.
Thus the result presented at the beginning, is confirmed to us by internal reasons. The inscription[4] announces the oracles of God which came to Micah under the reign of three kings; while the examination of the contents proves that the collection forms a connected whole, written uno tenore. How, now, can these two facts be reconciled in any other way than by supposing that we have here before us a comprehensive picture of the prophetic ministry of Micah, the single component parts of which are at once contemporaneous, and yet belonging to different periods? This supposition, moreover, affords us the advantage of being allowed to maintain all the historical references in their fullest import, without being led to disregard the one, while we give attention to the other; for nothing is, in this case, more natural, than that the prophet connects with one another different prophecies uttered at different times.
The weight of these internal reasons is increased, however, by external reasons which are equally strong. When Jeremiah was called to account for his prophecy concerning the destruction of the city, the elders, for his justification, appealed to the entirely similar prophecy of Micah in iii. 12: "Therefore shall Zion for your sake be ploughed as a field, and Jerusalem shall become heaps of ruins, and the mountain of the house as the high places of the forest." In Jer. xxvi. 18, 19, it is said, "Micah prophesied in the days of Hezekiah, king of Judah, and spake to all the people of Judah, etc. Did Hezekiah, king of Judah, and all Judah, put him 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?" All interpreters admit that this passage forms an authority for the composition of the discourse in iii.-v. under Hezekiah; but we cannot well limit it in this way, we must extend it to the whole collection. For, even apart from the reasons by which we proved that the entire book forms one closely connected whole, it is most improbable that the elders should have known, by an oral tradition, the exact time of the composition of one single discourse, which has no special date at the head of it. Is it not a far more natural supposition, that they considered the collection as a whole, of which the component parts had, indeed, been delivered by the prophet at a former period, but had been repeated, and united into one description under Hezekiah; and that they mentioned Hezekiah, partly because it could not be determined with certainty whether this special prediction had already been uttered under one of his predecessors, and, if so, under which of them; and partly, because among the three kings mentioned in the inscription, Hezekiah alone formed an ecclesiastical authority?
But just as that quotation in Jeremiah furnishes us with a proof that all the prophecies of Micah, which have been preserved to us, were committed to writing under Hezekiah, so we can, in a similar manner, prove from Isaiah, chap. ii., that they were, at least in part, uttered at a previous period. The problem of the relation of Is. ii. 2-4 to Micah iv. 1-3, cannot be solved in any other way than by supposing, that this portion of a prophecy which, in Jeremiah, is assigned to the reign of Hezekiah, was uttered by Micah as early as under the reign of Jotham, and that soon after it Isaiah, by placing the words of Micah at the head of his own prophecies, expressed that which had come to him also in inward vision; for, being already known to the people, they could not fail to produce their impression. Every other solution can be proved to be untenable. 1. Least of all is there any refutation needed of the hypothesis which is now generally abandoned, viz., that the passage in Isaiah is the original one; compare, against this hypothesis, Kleinert, Aechtheit des Jes. S. 356; Caspari, S. 444. 2. Equally objectionable is another supposition, that both the prophets had made use of some older prophecy—one uttered by Joel, as Hitzig and Ewald have maintained. The connection in which these verses stand in Micah, is by far too close for such a supposition. We could not, indeed, so confidently advance this argument, if the connection consisted only in what is commonly brought forward, viz., that upon the monitory announcement of punishment in chap. iii., there follows, in chap. iv. 1 ff., the consolatory promise of a glorious future for the godly, and that the ו in ver. 1 evidently connects it with what immediately precedes. But the reference and connection are far more close. The promise in iv. 1, 2, is, throughout, contrasted with the threatening in iii. 12. "The mountain of the house shall become as the high places of the forest,"—hence, despised, solitary, and desolate. In iv. 1, there is opposed to it, "The mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established on the top of the mountains, and it shall be exalted above the hills, and upon it people shall flee together." "Zion shall be ploughed as a field, and Jerusalem become a heap of ruins." Contrasted with this, there is in iv. 2 the declaration: "For the law shall go forth of Zion, and the word of the Lord of Jerusalem." The desolate and despised place now becomes the residence of the Lord, from which He sends His commands over the whole earth, and of which the brilliant centre now is Jerusalem. In order to make this contrast so much the more obvious, the prophet begins, in the promise, with just the mountain of the temple, which, in the threatening, had occupied the last place; so that the opposites are brought into immediate connection. Nor is it certainly merely accidental that, in the threatening, he speaks of the mountain of the house only, while, in the promise, he speaks of the mountain of the house of the Lord; compare Matt. xxiii. 38, where "your house," according to Bengel, "is the house which, in other passages, is called the house of the Lord," just as the Lord, in Exod. xxxii. 7, says to Moses, "Thy people." The temple must have ceased to be the house of the Lord, before it would be destroyed; for which reason, as we are told In Ezekiel, the Shechinah removed from it before the Babylonish destruction. And in point of form, the יהיה in iv. 1 so much the more corresponds with the תהיה in iii. 12, as from the latter יהיה must be supplied for the last clause of the verse; compare Caspari, S. 445. That ver. 5 must not be separated from the prophecy which Isaiah had before him, is seen from a comparison of Is. ii. 5: "O house of Jacob, come ye and let us walk in the light of the Lord." According to the true interpretation, "the light of the Lord" signifies His grace, and the blessings which, according to what precedes, are to be bestowed by it; and "to walk in the light of the Lord," means to participate in the enjoyment of grace. These words, accordingly, are closely related to those in Mic. iv. 5: "For all the people shall 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:" i.e., the fate of the people in the heathen world corresponds to the nature of their gods; because these are nothing, they too shall sink down into nothingness, while Israel shall partake in the glory of his God. There is the same thought, and in essentially the same dress, both in Isaiah and Micah,—only that the words which in Micah embody a pure promise, are transformed by Isaiah into an exhortation that Israel should not, by their own fault, forfeit this preference over the heathen nations, that they should not wantonly wander away into dark solitudes, from the path of light which the Lord had opened up before them. This transformation in Isaiah, however, may be accounted for by the consideration, that he was anxious to prepare the way for the reproofs which now follow from ver. 6; whilst Micah, who had already premised them, could continue in the promise. It is also in favour of the originality of the passage in Micah, that the text which, in Isaiah, appears as a variation, appears as original in Micah; so that both cannot be equally dependent upon a third writer. 3. There now remains only the view of Kleinert, according to which the prophecy of Micah, in chap. iii.-v., was first uttered under the reign of Hezekiah; and, under the reign of the same king, but somewhat later, the prophecy, in chap. ii.-iv. of Isaiah, who avails himself of it. But, upon a closer examination, this view also proves untenable. Isaiah's description of the condition of the people in a moral point of view, the general spread of idolatry and vice, exclude every other period in the reign of Hezekiah except the first beginning of it, when the effect and influence of the time of Ahaz were still felt; so that even Kleinert (p. 364) is obliged to assume, that not only the prophecy of Micah, but also that of Isaiah, were uttered in the first months of the reign of this king. But other difficulties—and these altogether insuperable—stand in the way of this assumption. In the whole section of Isaiah, the nation appears as rich, flourishing, and powerful. This is most strongly expressed in chap. ii. 7: "His land is full of silver and gold, there is no end to his treasure; his land is full of horses, and there is no end to his chariots." To this may be added the description of the consequences of wealth, and of the unbounded luxury, in iii. 16 ff.; and the threatening of the withdrawal of all power, and all riches, as a strong contrast with their present condition, upon which they, in their blindness, rested the hope of their security, and hence imagined that they stood in no need of the assistance of the Lord, iii. 1 ff. Now this description is so inapplicable to the commencement of Hezekiah's reign, that the very opposite of it should rather be expected. The invasion by the allied Syrians and Israelites, the oppression by the Assyrians, and the tribute which they had to pay to them, the internal administration, which was bad beyond example, and the curse of God resting on all their enterprises and efforts, had exhausted, during the reign of the ungodly Ahaz, the treasures which had been collected under Uzziah and Jotham, and had dried up the sources of prosperity. He had left the kingdom to his successors in a condition of utter decay. To these, other reasons still may be added, which are in favour of the composition of it under Jotham, while they are against its composition under Hezekiah; especially the circumstance of their standing at the beginning of the collection of the first twelve chapters (a circumstance which is of great weight, inasmuch as these chapters are, beyond any doubt, arranged chronologically), but still more, the indefiniteness and generality in the threatening of the divine judgments, which the prophecy of Micah has in common with the nearly contemporaneous chapters i. and v. of Isaiah, whilst the threatenings out of the first period of the reign of Ahaz have at once a far more definite character. By these considerations we are involuntarily led back to a period when Isaiah still pre-eminently exercised the office of exhorting and reproving, and had not yet been favoured with special revelations concerning the events of a future which, at that time, was as yet rather distant,—perhaps as far as the time when Jotham administered the government for his father, who was at that time still alive; compare 2 Kings xv. 5. By this hypothesis. Is. iii. 12 is more satisfactorily explained than by any other; and we are no longer under the necessity of asserting, that the chronological order is interrupted by chap. vi.; for this certainly could not have been intended by the collector. The solemn call and consecration of the prophet to his office, accompanied by an increased bestowal of grace, must be carefully distinguished from the ordinary ones which were common to him with all the other prophets. But if the prophecy of Isaiah was uttered as early as under Jotham (which has lately been most satisfactorily proved by Caspari in his Beiträge zur Einl. in das Buch Jesaias, S. 234 ff.), that of Micah also must have existed at that time, and must have been in the mouths of the people. And since its composition is assigned to the reign of Hezekiah, it follows that the prophet delivered anew, under the reign of this king, the revelations which he had already received at an earlier period.
It will not be possible to infer with certainty from vers. 6, 7, as Caspari does, that the book was committed to writing before the destruction of Samaria, and hence, before the sixth year of Hezekiah. Since the book gives the sum and substance of what was prophesied under three kings, all that is implied in vers. 6, 7, is, that the destruction of Samaria was foretold by Micah; but the prophecy itself may have been committed to writing even after the fulfilment had taken place. But, on the other hand, according to the analogy of Is. xxxix., and xiii. and xiv., we are led by iv. 9, 10, to the time of Sennacherib's invasion of Judea, in which the prophetic spirit of Isaiah likewise most richly displayed itself, and in which he was privileged with a glance into the far distant future.
The exordium in chap. i. and ii., and the close in vi. and vii., are distinguished by the generality of the threatening and promise which prevails in them. They have this in common with the first five chapters of Isaiah, and thus certainly afford us pre-eminently an image of the prophetic ministry of Micah, in the time previous to the Assyrian invasion; whilst the main body (especially from iv. 8) represents to us particularly the character of the prophecy during the Assyrian period.
We shall now attempt to give a survey of the contents of Micah's prophecy.
Upon Samaria and Jerusalem—the kingdom of the ten tribes, and Judah—a judgment by foreign enemies is to come. Total destruction, and the carrying away of the inhabitants, will be the issue of this judgment, and, as regards Judah more particularly, the total overthrow of the dominion of the Davidic dynasty.
Samaria is first visited by this judgment. This is indicated by the fact that it is first mentioned in the inscription, and that in i. 6, 7, the judgment upon Samaria is, first of all, described; but especially by the circumstance that Samaria, in i. 5, appears as the chief seat of corruption for the whole people, whence it flowed upon Judah also, i. 14, and particularly, vi. 16. We expect that where the carcases first were, there the eagles would first be gathered together.
As the first, and principal instrument of the destructive judgment upon Judah, Babylon is mentioned in iv. 10.