The Literature of the Old Testament

by George Foot Moore

Then the unexpected follows, in the prophecy that Jerusalem shall become the religious centre of the earth, to which all nations flow, and the law of God the universal arbiter in an age of universal peace (Mic. iv. 1-5). Verses 1-3 are found also, in no more suitable context, in Isa. ii. 2-4. They belong to neither Isaiah nor Micah. For the rest, Mic. 4-5 and cc. 6-7 contain a number of pieces of diverse age and origin. Chapters iv. 6-v. 1 are as a whole of good omen, yet after the promise of restoration in iv. 8, Jerusalem is suddenly in desperate straits; exile awaits its people, and only beyond the exile (the words "thou shalt come even unto Babylon" may be a gloss, but the meaning is not essentially changed) redemption waits (iv. 9 f.). In iv. 11-13, again, many nations gather against Zion, but it crushes them like sheaves on the threshing floor. There follows (v. 2-9, 10-15) a messianic prophecy, in which an allusion to Isa. vii. 14 appears.

No less strangely assorted are the oracles in Mic. 6-7, of which there are four: vi. 1-8; vi. 9-16; vii. 1-6; vii. 7-20. The first of these contains the quintessence of the prophetic conception of religion: God does not demand holocausts and costly offerings in expiation of sin; nor the supreme expiation which the prophets and the laws of the seventh century so often reject and condemn: "Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He hath showed thee, O man. What is good and what doth God require of thee, but to do justice and love mercy and walk humbly with thy God?"

Trenchant condemnations of the sins of the times fill vi. 9-16 and vii. 1-6, the former of which, at least, is pre-exilic; while the book closes in the situation and spirit of Isa. 40 ff. Thus the Book of Micah, like that of his contemporary Isaiah, has been a depository for prophecies differing in age by several centuries. Perhaps the book once stood at the end of a roll, and was therefore the natural place to add stray and nameless pieces, as happened later to the Book of Zechariah at the end of the volume of the Minor Prophets.

Nahum.—In the three larger prophetic books we have found groups of oracles against foreign nations, some relatively old, many late and literary variations on given motives—it was evidently a grateful theme. In Nahum we have a whole book occupied with the impending fall of Nineveh and the Assyrian empire, which had so long and so brutally tyrannized over all western Asia. Now its hour has struck, and the prophet triumphs over the fate of the old lion, who "rent in pieces to satisfy his whelps and strangled for his lionesses, and filled his dens with prey and his lairs with ravin." His imagination revels in the terrors of the onslaught, the horrors of the sack, which he depicts with unsurpassed vividness and great poetic power. It is the judgment of the Lord, long deferred, but sure and final (Nah. 1).

In Nah. iii. 8-10 the fate of the Egyptian Thebes is adduced as an historic example: all her power could not save her, and it shall fare no better with Nineveh. The reference is probably to the capture of Thebes by Assurbanipal in 661 B.C. Nineveh itself fell about 606 B.C. under an attack of enemies from the north (Medes or Scythians), and was destroyed never to be restored. With it the Assyrians disappear from history. The prophecy of Nahum was probably delivered shortly before this event, though a date twenty years earlier, when, according to Herodotus, Nineveh barely escaped from a similar onset by Cyaxares, is not strictly impossible.

It is thought by many scholars that the first chapter (with which ii. 2 must go) is a later composition, a poem, much deranged, originally in acrostic form.

Habakkuk.—The Book of Habakkuk predicts that Jehovah is about to raise up the fierce Chaldæan nation, which marches through the breadth of the earth to occupy habitations not belonging to it, which scoffs at kings and has dynasts in derision, laughing at all fortresses, against which it casts up a mound and takes them (Hab. i. 5-11). Such a prophecy would be timely in the last years of the seventh century: the Chaldæan, or New Babylonian, kingdom dates its independence from 625, and is hardly likely to have attracted much attention in the West before the fall of Nineveh in 606 B.C. and the defeat of Pharaoh Necho on the Euphrates in 605 B.C.

The prophecy, which does not specifically threaten Judah, intrudes between i. 4 and i. 12 ff., where the plaint of vss. 2-4 is continued, so that vss. 5-11 are at least misplaced. This complaint is of the oppression of "the righteous" (Judah) by "the wicked" (heathen, i. 13-17). From his watch tower the prophet sees a vision of a distant time, which he is bidden record, and of whose ultimate fulfilment he is assured (ii. 1-3). What follows is a series of invectives which the nations he has gathered under his robber rule shall heap upon the fallen oppressor, "the man who was greedy as hell, insatiable as death."

The date of the prophecy depends on the identification of this tyrant of the nations. If it is Babylon, the oracle must be considered later than i. 5-11, which greets the rise of the Babylonian power to execute God's judgment on the world. An ingenious solution of the difficulty has been proposed, viz., to transfer i. 5-11 from c. 1 to a place after ii. 4, and see in it the contents of the vision spoken of in ii. 3: the Babylonians would then be the ministers of God's avenging justice on the Assyrian robbers of the world, and the whole might have been uttered about 615 B.C. All parts of these chapters abound in reminiscences of the eighth-century prophets; the resemblances to Jeremiah may be explained by the contemporaneousness of the authors.

Habakkuk 3, entitled "A Prayer by Habakkuk the Prophet," with a musical direction following, as in the Psalms, is in fact a psalm, and the presence of the musical directions, implying liturgical use, suggests that it once stood in a hymn book like the Psalter. It is a fine ode, by an author well read in the classic literature of his nation. The theophany (iii. 2 ff.) is indebted to Exod. xxxiii. 2 ff. and Judg. v. 4 ff. The ode belongs with the Psalms of the Persian period. It is imitated in Ps. 77. The title ascribing it to Habakkuk the prophet is of no greater authority than the ascription Pss. 146-148 in the Greek Bible to Haggai and Zechariah.