MICAH THE MORASTHITE
Micah 1
SOME time in the reign of Hezekiah, when the
kingdom of Judah was still inviolate, but shivering to the shock of
the fall of Samaria, and probably while Sargon the destroyer was
pushing his way past Judah to meet Egypt at Raphia, a Judean prophet
of the name of Micah, standing in sight of the Assyrian march,
attacked the sins of his people and prophesied their speedy
overthrow beneath the same flood of war. If we be correct in our
surmise, the exact year was 720-719 B.C. Amos had been silent thirty
years. Hoses hardly fifteen; Isaiah was in the midway of his career.
The title of Micah’s book asserts that he had previously prophesied
under Jotham and Ahaz, and though we have seen it to be possible, it
is by no means proved, that certain passages of the book date from
these reigns.
Micah is called the Morasthite. {Mic 1:1, Jer 26:18} For this
designation there appears to be no other meaning than that of a
native of Moresheth-Gath, a village mentioned by himself. {Mic 1:14}
It signifies Property or Territory of Gath, and after the fall of
the latter, which from this time no more appears in history,
Moresheth may have been used alone. Compare the analogous cases of
Helkath (portion of-) Galilee, Ataroth, Chesulloth, and Iim.
In our ignorance of Gath’s position, we should be equally at fault
about Moresheth, for the name has vanished, were it not for one or
two plausible pieces of evidence. Belonging to Gath, Moresheth must
have lain near the Philistine border: the towns among which Micah
includes it are situated in that region; and Jerome declares that
the name-though the form, Morasthi, in which he cites it is
suspicious-was in his time still extant in a small village to the
east of Eleutheropolis or Beit-Jibrin. Jerome cites Morasthi as
distinct from the neighboring Mareshah, which is also quoted by
Micah beside Moresheth-Gath.
Moresheth was, therefore, a place in the Shephelah, or range of low
hills which lie between the hill country of Judah and the Philistine
plain. It is the opposite exposure from the wilderness of Tekoa,
some seventeen miles away across the watershed. As the home of Amos
is bare and desert, so the home of Micah is fair and fertile. The
irregular chalk hills are separated by broad glens, in which the
soil is alluvial and red, with room for cornfields on either side of
the perennial or almost perennial streams. The olive groves on the
braes are finer than either those of the plain below or of the
Judean tableland above. There is herbage for cattle. Bees murmur
everywhere, larks are singing, and although today you may wander in
the maze of hills for hours without meeting a man or seeing a house,
you are never out of sight of the traces of ancient habitation, and
seldom beyond sound of the human voice-shepherds and ploughmen
calling to their flocks and to each other across the glens. There
are none of the conditions or of the occasions of a large town. But,
like the south of England, the country is one of villages and
homesteads, breeding good yeomen-men satisfied and in love with
their soil, yet borderers with a far outlook and a keen vigilance
and sensibility. The Shephelah is sufficiently detached from the
capital and body of the land to beget in her sons an independence of
mind and feeling, but so much upon the edge of the open world as to
endue them at the same time with that sense of the responsibilities
of warfare, which the national statesmen, aloof and at ease in Zion,
could not possibly have shared.
Upon one of the west-most terraces of this Shephelah, nearly a
thousand feet above the sea, lay Moresheth itself. There is a great
view across the undulating plain with its towns and fortresses,
Lachish, Eglon, Shaphir, and others, beyond which runs the coast
road, the famous war-path between Asia and Africa. Ashdod and Gaza
are hardly discernible against the glitter of the sea, twenty-two
miles away. Behind roll the round bush-covered hills of the
Shephelah, with David’s hold at Adullam, the field where he fought
Goliath, and many another scene of border warfare; while over them
rises the high wall of the Judean plateau, with the defiles breaking
through it to Hebron and Bethlehem.
The valley-mouth near which Moresheth stands has always formed the
southwestern gateway of Judea, the Philistine or Egyptian gate, as
it might be called, with its outpost at Lachish, twelve miles across
the plain. Roads converge upon this valley-mouth from all points of
the compass. Beit-Jibrin, which lies in it, is midway between
Jerusalem and Gaza, about twenty-five miles from either, nineteen
miles from Bethlehem, and thirteen from Hebron. Visit the place at
any point of the long history of Palestine, and you find it either
full of passengers or a center of campaign. Asa defeated the
Ethiopians here. The Maccabees and John Hyrcanus contested Mareshah,
two miles off, with the Idumeans. Gabinius fortified Mare-shah.
Vespasian and Saladin both deemed the occupation of the valley
necessary before they marched upon Jerusalem. Septimius Severus made
Beit-Jibrin the capital of the Shephelah, and laid out military
roads, whose pavements still radiate from it in all directions. The
Onomasticon measures distances in the Shephelah from Beit-Jibrin.
Most of the early pilgrims from Jerusalem by Gaza to Sinai or Egypt
passed through it, and it was a center of Crusading operations,
whether against Egypt during the Latin kingdom or against Jerusalem
during the Third Crusade. Not different was the place in the time of
Micah. Micah must have seen pass by his door the frequent embassies
which Isaiah tells us went down to Egypt from Hezekiah’s court, and
seen return those Egyptian subsidies in which a foolish people put
their trust instead of in their God.
In touch, then, with the capital, feeling every throb of its folly
and its panic, but standing on that border which must, as he
believed, bear the brunt of the invasion that its crimes were
attracting, Micah lifted up his voice. They were days of great
excitement. The words of Amos and Hosea had been fulfilled upon
Northern Israel. Should Judah escape, whose injustice and impurity
were as flagrant as her sister’s? It were vain to think so. The
Assyrians had come up to her northern border. Isaiah was expecting
their assault upon Mount Zion. The Lord’s Controversy was not
closed. Micah will summon the whole earth to hear the old indictment
and the still unexhausted sentence.
The prophet speaks:-
"Hear ye, peoples all; Hearken, O Earth, and her fullness! 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."
"Molten are the mountains beneath Him, And the valleys gape open,
Like wax in face of the fire Like water poured over a fall."
God speaks:-
"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
Sarnaria? And what is the sin of the house of Judah? is it not
Jerusalem? Therefore do I turn Samaria into a ruin of the field, And
into vineyard terraces; And I pour down her stones to the glen And
lay hare her foundations. 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, And to a
harlot’s hire they return."
The prophet speaks:-
"For this let me mourn, let me wail. Let me go barefoot and stripped
(of my robe), Let me make lamentations like the jackals, And
mourning like the daughters of the desert, For her stroke 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. {Isa
10:28} 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. To Micah also
Jerusalem was dear, and his subsequent prediction of her overthrow {Mic
3:12} 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 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 Judea,
from Sennacherib to Vespasian and from Vespasian to Saladin and
Richard, have shunned the northern access to Jerusalem and
endeavored 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 neighborhood, 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 Garb; the Acco which he couples with it is
either the Phoenician 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 Suafir, lay on the Philistine Region. Sa’anan
and Bethesel 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 Mic 1:13.
As the last Judean 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 Mic 1:14, 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 Ach-zib, a town at some distance from
Jerome’s site for the former, to the neighborhood of which, Mareshah,
we are brought back again in Mic 1:15. Adullam, with which the list
closes, lies some eight or ten miles to the northeast of Mareshah.
The prophet speaks:-
"Tell it not in Gath, Weep not in Aeco. In Beth-le-’Aphrah roll
thyself in dust. Pass over, inhabitress of Shaphir, thy shame
uncovered! The inhabitress of Sa’anan shall not march forth The
lamentation of Beth-esel taketh from you its standing. The
inhabitress of Maroth trembleth for good, For evil hath come down
from Jehovah to the gate of Jerusalem. Harness the horse to the
chariot, inhabitress of Lachish, That hast been the beginning of sin
to the daughter of Zion";
"Yea, in thee are found the transgressions of Israel Therefore thou
givest to Moresheth-Gath The houses of Aehzib shall deceive the
kings of Israel. Again shall I bring the Possessor [conqueror] to
thee inhabitress of Mareshah; To Adullam 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."
This was the terrible fate which the Assyrian kept before the
peoples with whom he was at war. Other foes raided, burned, and
slew: he carried off whole populations into exile.
Having thus pictured the doom which threatened his people, Micah
turns to declare the sins for which it has been sent upon them.
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