Micah 6-8 in – and out – of context
(image by Cory Driver – The Fringe Church, Hamilton, Ohio)
(a perennial meme and misattributed mashup of Mishnah, Bible and modern commentary. “The TalmudThe Talmud is one of the most important texts of Judaism. More” is six times longer than the Hebrew Bible. It would be like cobbling together a line each from Aristophanes, Shakespeare, and Cormac McCarthy and attributing the combination to “theater.”)
One of the most famous passages of the prophets, and maybe all of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament is Micah 6:8 (and surrounding vs. 6-9). Micah 6:8 figures prominently in memes, tattoos, interior design, vision statements of Christian churches, names of congregations, and false attributions to “the Talmud.”
The context of Micah 6:8 is in a divine lawsuit. God has charged the people with both idolatry and injustice (Micah 5:10-15). God calls nature to witness that the Lord has only done good to the people, and rescued them repeatedly from slavery, and from national calamity, even during times of Israelite perfidy (6:1-5). God then mocks the response of the people, exaggerating the quantities of sacrifices, so as to be comically ludicrous. This hyperbole serves to make what God truly wants sound all the more modest: work justice, love kindness and walk humbly/modestly with God. The assumption in the text is that the people will not do any of these things, but will continue to cultivate cities full of violence and oppression, and will be punished accordingly (6:9-16).
“Do justice, love kindness and walk humbly” serves as a neat summation for a righteousA righteous person is one who is ethical and faithful to God's covenant. Righteousness in the Old Testament is an attitude of God; in the New Testament it is a gift of God through grace. In the New Testament righteousness is a relationship with God... More life, to be sure, and has become incredibly popular in Christian material culture. Ironically, Micah 6:8 is situated as part of a formal indictment against a culture committed to the material culture of religion instead of the deeper interior work of remembering and practicing national liberation from situations of injustice and abuse. The prophet would be horrified by “Micah 6:8” products that are produced by or displayed in places that tolerate or ignore abuse and injustice, but cling to comforting maxims. Happily, across the centuries, many have taken the prophetic charge of Micah 6:8 to heart, and have engaged in their own humble walks.
False Prophets (Micah 3:5-8, 11)
Beatus of Liebana Commentaria in Apocalypsin False ProphetA false prophet is one who illegitimately claims authority for proclaiming and interpreting God's will. In the Old Testament false prophecy meant using signs and wonders to draw people away from the worship of the true God. False prophets appear in Deuteronomy; Jesus, in Matthew's... More [Revelation 16:13]
Queen Mary ApocalypseAt its root, being derived from a Greek word meaning "unveiling," apocalypse refers to a revelation of a divine or previously unseen reality. Some ancient Jewish and Christian literature used the term to describe destruction or cataclysm. Paul describes his encounter with Jesus Christ as... More False prophets
Micah reserves particular opprobrium for prophets whose words are financially driven.
When they [the prophets] have something to bite with their teeth,
They cry out, “Peace!”
But against him who puts nothing in their mouths
They declare holyHoly is a term that originally meant set apart for the worship or service of God. While the term may refer to people, objects, time, or places, holiness in Judaism and Christianity primarily denotes the realm of the divine More war. (Micah 3:5)
In the rest of Scripture, false prophets are frequently linked with selling illusory hopes, ill-gotten gains or greed (1 Kings 22:11-14; NehemiahThe governor of Jerusalem who rebuilt the city walls after the exile. More 6:12-13; IsaiahIsaiah, son of Amoz, who prophesied in Jerusalem, is included among the prophets of the eighth century BCE (along with Amos, Hosea, and Micah)--preachers who boldly proclaimed God's word of judgment against the economic, social, and religious disorders of their time. More 30:10; JeremiahProphet who condemned Judah's infidelity to God, warned of Babylonian conquest, and promised a new covenant. More 14:14, 23:21-23; EzekielEzekiel was a priest and prophet who was raised in Jerusalem and exiled to Babylon in 597 BCE. More 13:1-7; Zechariah 10:2; MatthewA tax collector who became one of Jesus' 12 disciples. More 7:15; 2 PeterPeter (also known as Cephas, Simon Peter) was the disciple who denied Jesus during his trial but later became a leader in proclaiming Jesus. More 2:1-3).
After the Edict of Milan, and legal toleration of the Christian Church in the Roman EmpireThe region we today call Palestine and Israel was under Roman rule during the time of Jesus and the early church. The Roman Empire was in its ascendancy during the first century, making it the most powerful political and military force on earth. More, there have been charges of Christian clergy, or the church more generally, amassing wealth, and functioning as more of a for-profit corporation than being a home for prophets. The sad truth is that just as there have always been clergy and church-workers who loved God and neighbor with material possessions, there have also always been people like Simon the magician (Acts 8:18-24) who viewed sacraments and the work of the Spirit as something to be bought and sold.
One particularly gross example of the accommodation of the Gospel to evil profiteering was the accommodation of various Protestant bodies to the American slave trade. Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians all split because of false prophets who cared more about money and commerce than God’s liberation and Jesus’ Good News for the poor, oppressed, bound, and incarcerated (LukeThe "beloved physician" and companion of Paul. More 4:18).
Even the great revivalist George Whitefield reversed his initial position that slavery was dehumanizing and evil to support slavery and campaigned for its legalization in Georgia (slavery was declared illegal in Georgia in 1735). While Whitefield had once championed Jesus’ emancipatory and salvific work, he saw that his plantation and ministry could benefit economically from acquiring and profiting from enslaved workers, and used his tremendous rhetorical skills to campaign for the legalization of slavery in Georgia in 1751. Whitefield used examples of slavery in the Bible, but avoided commandments to free enslaved/indentured people (Exodus 21:2; Deuteronomy 15:12; Jeremiah 34:9, 11), commandments to refuse to return self-emancipated people (Deuteronmy 23:16-17), and the absolute prohibition on capturing and enslaving people (Exodus 21:16; Deuteronomy 24:7). Whitefield saw how his business and missions could benefit from the forced labor of enslaved humans, and reversed his prophetic voice to support slavery.
Examples abound today of a relatively small group of fabulously wealthy pastors and celebrity preachers who preach and teach whatever will draw a crowd. They give the rest of the clergy who are working at barely subsistence levels a bad name. The majority of pastors and deacons in the U.S. work at small congregations (over 70 percent of congregations in the U.S. are small, with fewer than 100 members. For mainline Protestant churches specifically, that number is closer to 50). The pressure to preach an acceptable message in a congregation supported by so few members may be especially acute.
Micah warns those few who proclaim whatever benefactors want, and threaten those who will not support them, that while they may profit in the short term, they are singled out for particular punishment.
Justification for God’s Justice & Theodicy
Too often, books of the Bible are studied in isolation, as if the whole text was not in a conversation with itself. Micah, and prophetic literature more generally, which repeatedly insists that the people hear the word of the Lord, must be put in conversation with the profoundly human voices in the Bible. Psalms 44, 69, 79, 80 and 137 and Lamentations speak to God about the experiences of judgment and exile. Human pain cries out, “How…?”, “How long?”, and most importantly, “Why…?”
These are precisely the questions that God – through Micah – is seeking to answer in Micah 6:1-5 and 1:1-7. The rulers and leaders – civil and religious – all assumed that God would graciously protect the people forever, irrespective of what they did, because of their understanding of God’s covenantA covenant is a promise or agreement. In the Bible the promises made between God and God's people are known as covenants; they state or imply a relationship of commitment and obedience. More. When “bad things happened to good people” the Israelites were incensed! God, how could you let this happen? The questions of the psalmists are our own when the wicked seem to prosper, and the righteous seem to suffer. When we see suffering, we too ask “why?”
One response is that of the prophet Micah, who turned the inquiry back to the people. How can there be justice in a society built on corruption at every level (3:1-7)? The priests teach falsely. The prophets proclaim falsely. The judges rule falsely. The king leads falsely. They are all corrupt and liable to violently uphold their corruption. That corruption extends to each member of a family unit, Micah famously argues (7:1-7). What is to be done? Micah testifies that God will act to punish, but also to restore. A ruler will come from Bethlehem, and ZionZion originally referred to a mountain near Jerusalem where David conquered a Jebusite stronghold. Later the term came to mean a number of other things like the Temple, Jerusalem, and even the Promised Land. More will be remade. God’s punishment of injustice is, ultimately, an act of love because it gives the possibility of redemption to an injurious society. Rabbi AbrahamGod promised that Abraham would become the father of a great nation, receive a land, and bring blessing to all nations. More JoshuaThe successor of Moses, Joshua led the Israelites into Canaan. More Heschel writes:
God’s concern for justice grows out of His compassion for man [sic]. The prophets do not speak of a divine relationship to an absolute principle or idea, called justice. They are intoxicated with the awareness of God’s relationship to His people and to all men. Justice is not important for its own sake; the motivation for justice, and the validity of its exercise lie in the blessings it brings to man. For justice, as stated above, is not an abstraction, a value. Justice exists in relation to a person, and is something done by a person. An act of injustice is condemned, not because the law is broken, but because a person has been hurt. What is the image of a person? A person is a being whose anguish may reach the heart of God – Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets, p. 276.
Rabbi Heschel points out that God is absolutely devoted to humans because of God’s love. Abuse and injustice are affronts to God not because God is keeping score of infractions against abstract notions of justice, but because God is passionately in love with humans. Thus, systemic injustice that hurts humans, especially those already on the margins of society, deeply affects God’s divine emotions, and God will punish that society in anger – but only so that human thriving, and the justice that enables that thriving, may increase.
In answering the psalmists’ questions of “How?” and “Why?” Micah presents God holding up a mirror to society, and asking the same questions “How can you treat your neighbors this way?” The disruptions that Micah foretells – incredibly violent though they may be – are also opportunities for reflecting and resetting, to make sure that neighbors are loved and justice is upheld.
Believing/Doing (Micah 3:11)
The core of Micah’s argument is not about belief/unbelief. So much of modern religious thought is centered on the vast gulf between those who believe in a higher power and those who do not. However, within religious circles, and especially and somewhat uniquely within Christianity, there is a debate between those who argue that belief/faith is enough, and those who argue that some additional action is required. Too often, both sides caricature the other to the point of absurdity.
Even the Protestant Reformation is cast in terms of belief versus “works righteousness,” but this is far too simplistic. Even a cursory reading of Luther’s and Calvin’s works indicate that they taught that God’s graceGrace is the unmerited gift of God's love and acceptance. In Martin Luther's favorite expression from the Apostle Paul, we are saved by grace through faith, which means that God showers grace upon us even though we do not deserve it. More demands responses in righteous human actions. Lutheran Christians may regard James as an “epistleAn epistle, simply, is a letter or message. As many as twenty-one of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament are epistles, letters written to churches or persons for instruction, pastoral care, or discipline. More of straw,” but James 2:17 reflects Jesus’ teaching in the gospels that faith without works is dead. The prophet Micah is certainly not silent concerning this debate. In a summative evaluation, Micah proclaims:
Her leaders pronounce judgment for a bribe,
Her priests teach for pay,
And her prophets divine for money.
Yet they lean on the Lord, saying,
“Is the Lord not in our midst?
Catastrophe will not come upon us.” (3:11)
The problem, as Micah understands it, is not in lack of belief, but in believing in the wrong theology and theological anthropology. The leaders trust that God will save them, and that God will prevent catastrophe from coming to the land. The leaders see themselves as God’s special possession, beyond reproach or condemnation. But, according to Micah, that’s just not how God works. If humans accept bribes to pervert justice and teach blasphemous theology, the Lord “being in their midst” will be a disaster rather than a boon. If anything, the corrupt leaders believe in a perpetually merciful God too much! Micah says that judgment is coming because belief has not motivated righteous action.
Certainly, reading Martin Luther’s diatribes against the abuses of the Roman Catholic Church reveal an understanding that belief in God is not enough. Luther spent his career directly attacking harmful beliefs about God that lead to pernicious corruption by spiritual and temporal leaders. Luther wanted to correct these beliefs in order to stop corruption, especially in the priestly classes. Believing that God provides only comfort and forgiveness and does not provide justice and correction is as absent from the New Testament and Reformation teaching as it is from Micah.
The Language of Conflict: Scripture, Protest and Social Media – Micah 2
The experience of protest and counter-protest may be deeply familiar to many of us. At the writing of this text, one of the most-discussed issues in the news is about protests on campus, and who has the right to say what, and do students have the right to occupy university spaces and exclude other students, faculty, and staff from those spaces. Words and communication are central to human social experience. But frequently, shouted voices are heard, but not listened to, and words pass each other on their way to unhearing ears on the other side. This is as true in the 2020s as it was in the 1960s and 700s BCE. The poetic language of Micah invites the reader/hearer into a visceral experience of people talking past each other, and words going unheard. In Micah 2, for instance, we hear competing voices:
The Prophet’s Voice of Warning (vs 1-2):
Woe to those who devise wrongdoing,
Who practice evil on their beds!
When morning comes, they do it,
Because it is in the power of their hands.
They covet fields, so they seize them;
And houses, so they take them.
They exploit a man and his house,
A person and his inheritance.
God Speaks (vs 3-5):
Therefore this is what the Lord says:
“Behold, I am planning against this family a catastrophe
From which you cannot remove your necks;
And you will not walk haughtily,
For it will be an evil time.
On that day they will take up against you a song of mocking
And utter a song of mourning and say,
‘We are completely destroyed!
He exchanges the share of my people;
How He removes it from me!
To the apostate He apportions our fields.
Therefore you will have no one applying a measuring line
For you by lotNephew of Abraham and Sarah. More in the assembly of the Lord.
The People Being Judged Respond (vs 6-7a):
‘Do not prophesy,’ they prophesy.
They do not prophesy about these things,
Insults will not be turned back.
Is it being said, house of JacobThe son of Isaac and Rebekah, renamed Israel, became the father of the twelve tribal families. More:
‘Is the Spirit of the Lord impatient?
Are these His works?’
God Responds (vs 7b-10):
Do My words not do good
For the one walking rightly?
Recently My people have arisen as an enemy—
You strip the robe off the garment
From unsuspecting passers-by,
From those returned from war.
You evict the women of My people,
Each one from her pleasant house.
From her children you take My splendor forever.
Arise and go,
For this is no place of rest
Because of the uncleanness that brings on destruction,
A painful destruction.
The confusing tumult of language, as in a protest or a heated argument, is meant to be felt in this passage. Words are flying so quickly that we are not even sure who said what! What seems clear is that Micah testifies about “them,” pointing out the people who waste no time preparing and planning ways to disinherit and disconnect people from their land. However, when God takes over the prophetic microphone, as it were, God speaks to “you” in the second person, describing how the proud will be humiliated and the abuser will be mocked and abused.
The people being accused respond to the prophet and God with a critique of their theology! God is patient and kind, long-suffering, and passionately merciful. The judgment and destruction that the prophet and God speak of is outside of God’s character, they argue. God agrees, in part. For the one who walks rightly, of course God does good. But if the people choose to make themselves into God’s enemies by abusing foreigners, women, and children, God will honor that decision and respond accordingly.
This ancient argument about justice, abuse, theology, victims’ rights, and punishment could have been ripped from modern headlines. Moreover, the demonstration in Micah of how a multitude of voices speak at once and miss each other could be replayed in X threads or Facebook. Comparative theologies, arguing about what is most central to God’s heart, are flung about on every side of arguments and protests, and that is nothing new. In a time of mixed messages and rhetorical shouting-matches, Micah – and God – argue here that righteousness in care of neighbor – and refraining from abuse of neighbor – are the things that please God.
