February 2014

The Prophecy of Micah, Part 2

In Micah chapter 1, we saw that the prophet had been chastising Israel for their sins, among which were their intercourse with other nations and their oppression of the poor of their people. We saw parallel prophecies in the writings of the contemporary prophets Isaiah, Hosea and Amos, all of whom were announcing different aspects of the same basic messages. By the many different ways in which their prophecies corroborate one another, as well as by all of the clear fulfillments of these prophecies, we see that these men were truly prophets of God, while at the same time there were many false prophets among the people whose works have not endured. We shall see more of that here in Micah chapters 2 and 3.

Furthermore, in the opening chapter of Micah the prophet uttered oracles against Israel and Samaria and against certain cities of Judah, and then he warned that the judgment of God would come “unto the gate of Jerusalem.” It may be ascertained from the historical portions of Scripture, and from history itself, that the Assyrians who were about to invade Israel in fulfillment of these oracles would indeed take captive all but some small scattered remnants of the Northern kingdom of Israel, and also much of Judah – especially those northern towns of Judah which Micah explicitly mentioned – but that the Assyrians would indeed be stopped at the gate of the Jerusalem, and not take the city itself. Most notable, however, is that the names of the towns of Judah which Micah prophesied against also have meanings, and an understanding of those meanings adds a much greater depth to his message, because they are pertinent to the purpose of his prophecy. Here we shall repeat this portion of Micah chapter 1, from verses 10 through 15, and offer some interpretation. However we will not repeat many of the things which we offered from the Septuagint in our full presentation, although they should not be ignored if one truly wants to study the prophecy in depth:

The Prophecy of Micah - Part 1

The prophecy of Micah parallels those of Isaiah, Hosea, and Amos, who were all prophets of the 8th century BC. The ministries of all four of these prophets were focused on forecasting God's impending judgment of the ancient northern Kingdom of Israel, although they all also prophesied of other things, such as the sin and impending judgment of Judah and Jerusalem, of Christ, and of Israel's eventual restoration. The prophet Jonah is earlier than any of these, but he was not concerned with the destruction of Israel. Rather, Jonah sought the preservation of Israel, imagining that Yahweh would destroy the encroaching Assyrians instead. It was demonstrated in our presentation of Amos that Assyria and Israel had been struggling back-and-forth for over a hundred years before the final destruction of Samaria. For instance, we had demonstrated from correlating the Bible with certain ancient Assyrian inscriptions that the restoration to Israel of Hamath, Damascus and the northern plain by Jeroboam II which is mentioned in 2 Kings chapter 14 was in response to earlier Assyrian subjugation of that area. Even earlier than that, we saw in Assyrian inscriptions that the Israelite king Ahab had sent a force of 10,000 foot-soldiers to join a mostly Syrian coalition army against Assyrian expansion into the Levant, something which is not mentioned in the Bible. Ahab was over a hundred years before Jotham, the king of Judah when Micah began his ministry. The lesson of the gourd in Jonah is that Yahweh was indeed going to use Assyria's expanding empire to preserve Israel by taking Israel into captivity. Jonah recorded the lesson of the gourd, but he evidently did not understand it.

The next prophet after Micah is Nahum, a prophet of the 7th century who was indeed focused on Yahweh's revenge against the Assyrians, something which Isaiah also prophesied about at length. The prophet Joel, usually and incorrectly dated to an earlier period, was also a prophet of the 7th century BC, as the third chapter of his book demonstrates. Obadiah is also usually dated to have been written at an early time, but his prophecy could not have been written until after the fall of Jerusalem (verses 10-14). Scholars who dispute the prophecies concerning Edom do not understand who Edom is in the world today, and therefore they cannot understand Obadiah. Aside from these and a few other less significant questions, the King James translators were fair in estimating the proper order of the minor prophets.