Micahchapter 3
12 verses · BSBMicah book hub →
Speaks with:Isaiah 1×3Ezekiel 11×2Jeremiah 6×21 Corinthians 2×2Jeremiah 5×1Hosea 5×1
Summary
Chapter summary
The leadership chapter, and the language is butchery: rulers who hate the good and love the evil, who pluck the skin off God's people and their flesh from off their bones and chop them up as for the pot. Then they will cry to Jehovah and he will not answer. Prophets who cry 'Peace' when they are fed, and declare war on whoever fails to fill their mouths, will get night without vision. Over against them Micah plants his flag: 'as for me, I am full of power by the Spirit of Jehovah… to declare unto Jacob his transgression' (3:8). So 'Zion for your sake shall be plowed as a field', quoted a century later at Jeremiah's trial.
Context
Prophecy · Micah — Micah overview
- A. 1–4 Rulers who tear the skin off my people
- B. 5–8 Prophets who cry peace when fed — but I am full of power
- C. 9–12 Zion plowed like a field on their account
The outline
A.Rulers who tear the skin off my peoplevv. 1 to 4
Read vv. 1 to 4 →B.Prophets who cry peace when fed — but I am full of powervv. 5 to 8
Read vv. 5 to 8 →C.Zion plowed like a field on their accountvv. 9 to 12
Read vv. 9 to 12 →
The world behind this chapter
Micah 3The history
The butchery image in the opening is deliberately unbearable, and it is drawn from a kitchen. Tearing the skin off, stripping flesh from the bones, breaking the bones in pieces, and chopping them up like meat for the pot describes preparing a carcass for a stew. Micah says this is what the leaders are doing to the people they govern.
Paid prophecy was an ordinary profession across the region. A seer was consulted for a fee, and Micah's charge is that the fee decided the message: they cry peace when they have something to eat, and declare war against whoever puts nothing in their mouths. The market was setting the oracle.
The three offices named — rulers who judge for a bribe, priests who teach for a price, prophets who divine for money — cover the whole leadership of the nation. And each of them leaned on the same sentence: is not the LORD among us? No disaster shall come upon us. The temple's presence was being used as an insurance policy.
Micah's own credential is stated in contrast: I am filled with power, with the Spirit of the LORD, and with justice and might, to declare to Jacob his transgression. He is not claiming a technique. He is claiming a source.
What it meant to them
The final sentence — Zion shall be plowed as a field, Jerusalem shall become heaps, and the temple mount a wooded height — was unthinkable to hearers who believed the city could not fall while the house of God stood in it.
This is one of the few Old Testament sermons whose effect is recorded. A century later, when Jeremiah was on trial for his life for saying the same thing, elders stood up and quoted this verse, naming Micah and Hezekiah, and argued that Hezekiah had feared the LORD and God relented. The quotation saved Jeremiah's life.
Sources cited
- John H. Walton, Victor H. Matthews, Mark W. Chavalas, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament
- Carl Friedrich Keil and Franz Delitzsch, Commentary on the Old Testament: The Minor Prophets
The text of this chapter
This page carries no textual note on Micah 3. Where this site has examined a place the manuscripts differ, the examination is in the manuscripts room. Every place this site examines →
This page draws on Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory; John Calvin, Commentaries; John Wesley, Notes on the Old Testament and Matthew Henry, Complete Commentary.