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INTRODUCTION TO MICAH.

Or the two contemporary Prophets, Isaiah and Micah, Isaiah would deserve the first place by priority of commencement; while the later date to which his works extend, and the multifariousness of their subject matter, render it natural to place him second. I judged that Micah would be conveniently read first, because he most resembles the smaller Prophets which have been given in order of time, and in his work their works appear to find completion; although we have hardly such certainty of dates as to be able to say, that in him is fulfilled as description, what in them had been sketched as foreboding.

During the hard three years of Samaria's siege by Shalmaneser, in the reign of Hosea, B.C. 724 to B.C. 721, (or according to another chronology 711 to 709), anxiety must have reigned at Jerusalem. Light-armed marauders, whether horse or foot, may have swept the country to the gate of the city. It would be strange, if the smaller towns did not suffer at least in their suburbs from incursions. Within twenty years, the young king's father, and now but recently defunct king, Ahaz, had pacified Tiglath-pileser, and welcomed him at Damascus as a deliverer from the league of Syria and Samaria. Yet five years hardly elapsed from Samaria's fall, before Sennacherib appears laying waste the cities of Judah. Comp. Isaiah vii. viii. with 2 Kings xvi. xviii. Whether this invasion was gratuitous, or provoked by the defiance with which Hezekiah seems to have begun his reign, it might be foreseen by observers, and (as the mention of Lachish will suggest, 2 Kings

xviii. 14, Micah i. 13,) the recollection of it may tinge a subsequent record. When the news came that the breaker had gone up through walls and gate, and the foundations of Omri's city had been laid bare, the next question for all men's hearts would turn on the fate of Jerusalem. The timid would counsel timely submission, and care little, if the pattern of Assyrian altars accompanied peace. The more fervent and less questioning faith, which, not to use the word offensively, might border on fanaticism, would see no impossibility in repelling the hosts of Assyria, provided the city which they fondly deemed the favourite of Heaven were restored to its sanctity, and policy exchanged for reliance on an Almighty ally. All the analogies of history suggest that on these questions the Prophets, like other men, would be divided; and the express affirmations of Scripture assure us that they were so. Nothing has been better established on scriptural grounds, than that the policy of Hezekiah, as of subsequent kings, varied according to the varying estimation in which particular counsellors were held. Even Samaria must have had, up to the last moment, successors of Zedekiah son of Chenaanah to encourage resistance; hardly perhaps, a Jeremiah to dissuade it. Jerusalem, though her king could not equip two thousand horsemen, had fairer prospects of resistance; she had seen Pekah and Rezin fail in their aggression; she was destined, some ten or twelve years hence, to profit by the disaster which befell Sennacherib's army in the desert; already she had on the throne a young prince, sprung from the ancient line of David at Bethlehem, who, if his faith in Jehovah equalled that of his ancestors, might recover their entire kingdom, and not weakly throw away its remnant. What, then, if the destruction of Samaria, instead of being a calamity to Israel, should turn out the means of its reunion, with Jerusalem as its capital?

Not that the counsels of politicians, or of such advisers as had assured Samaria the evil day would never come, could avail to good. If such men prevailed, they would ruin Jerusalem. Possibly they might; yet a brighter future would supervene, when their counsels had run their course; the old promise to the line of the shepherd of Bethlehem was not exhausted: Jehovah would not give Jerusalem the faithful city, though he had given the faithless Samaria, to the Assyrian.

If such is, as it appears, a tolerable conception of the struggles and aspirations which agitated the prophetic or popular mind in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem, in the period between Samaria's fall and Sennacherib's disaster, (whether from B.C. 721 to 711, or 709 to 689,) our next business is to examine more nearly, whether their reflexion in the book of Micah is distinct enough for the Prophet and his period to be set down as mutually corresponding.

The titular superscription, for which we are indebted to some unknown Rabbinical editor, makes Micah, (more fully Micaiah,) a native of Maresha a city near Eleutheropolis, or of Moresheth, a village belonging to Gath; but also near Eleutheropolis, so that the variation of name need not preclude identity of site. Comp. Robinson's Palestine, vol. ii. pp. 422, 423. Jerome believed the Prophet's tomb to be at Morasthi, i.e. Moresheth. The superscription proceeds to make Micah preach in the reigns of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah. The far higher authority of the Prophet Jeremiah, (xxvi. 18) places him definitely under Hezekiah, within whose reign fall the various occurrences which we shall find the book dwell upon as contemporaneous.

The first chapter commences with the word, or counsel, of Jehovah as the unseen cause of visible events, and describes first the fall of Samaria, then the march of the enemy, or the progress of alarm, through the cities of Judah to the

gate of Jerusalem. Our western ears require indulgence for the alliteration of word-play which pervades the description. The unfortunate loss of nearly all the priestly, as distinct from the secular, literature of ancient Italy may leave it doubtful, whether a Latin or Cisalpine Gaul would have made his Litany ran Capitur Capua, Crematur Cremona; but such is the distinctive property of Micah's style, which if we forget, we cannot estimate him aright. Whether Lachish was, as is conjectured, one of the cities of the king's chariots, or whether horses were there dedi cated to the Sun, it was one of the first places attacked in Sennacherib's invasion, if not before. Either a sense of fitness, or some circumstance which can now only be guessed, made the Prophet conceive of Israel's sin, as her punishment, commencing there. Each place in turn has some word-play on its misfortune.

Even the philosophical historian endeavours to trace events in connexion with their causes. Still more the Hebrew Prophet would see the Divine design in every disaster. The more strongly the Hebrew mind subordinated all things to a Supreme Will, the more naturally it would overlook earthly links, absorbed in mental contemplation of the unseen upholder of the chain. Micah, after his description in the first chapter, proceeds in the second to dilate on the wickedness which provoked the judgment. It seems a mistranslation to find in the eighth verse the cruelty of Judah to Ephraimite fugitives given amongst the causes. My interpretation at least understands the whole of the second chapter as referring to the Ephraimite kingdom. I understand the 12th verse as not a promise of restoration, whether genuine from Micah, or feigned from the contrary prophets, (though both these views have eminent defenders,) but as a threat, or rather a description, of Jehovah's collecting the offenders in the evil day for the

evil which he had devised against the whole family. My reasons lie partly in the connexion of thought; partly in the striking illustration in what our Authorised Version makes the xxxivth chapter of Isaiah, where the sword of Jehovah is described as having its full of massacre of the flocks of Bozrah; to which a parallel may be found in the 68th Psalm. The 13th verse will thus proceed naturally as a description of the fatal breach in Samaria's wall. I anticipate greater doubt from the critical reader, when I proceed to connect closely in the same enunciation the first four verses of the third chapter, and (supported by the Septuagint kal ip,) conceive the Prophet to represent no one less than Jehovah himself as dismissing the exiles with a judicial enumeration of the crimes which provoked Him. Before any one blames this innovating construction, let him weigh well the connexion of thought throughout, observing in other cases, how capable the Hebrew Prophets were of continuous unity of thought.

It is manifest that the third chapter, (or the fifth verse of the third, as commonly arranged,) contains vigorous denunciations of the contrary prophets, who (like Amaziah the high-priest of Bethel, and others rebuked by Amos, iv. 7—10, v. 3) put the evil day afar from Samaria, and whose counsels would bring like on Jerusalem. It may be instructive to reflect, in what terms the plain-spoken Prophet would have described the absorption of Church property by Anglican Bishops in the critical reigns of Edward VI., Charles II. and Victoria. Refinement may have carried us too far from truth, in dreading no sin so much as its name. Yet something of personal passion (as we are apt to judge things) appears in the Prophet's contrast of his own better spirit with that which spake on the other side. He is full of power to declare the eternal truths by which nations stand: he traces, as John Baptist after

VOL. I.

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