Overview
Micah condemns Israel's civil leaders for devouring the people they were meant to protect, exposes prophets who tailor their oracles to whoever pays them — promising each a silence from God in return — and then, declaring his own authority rooted solely in the Spirit of Yahweh, delivers the chapter's thunderous climax: that Jerusalem itself, built on bloodshed and injustice by princes, priests, and false prophets alike, will be plowed into rubble.
Passages
Study Resources
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Micah 3
1I said, “Please listen, you heads of Jacob, and rulers of the house of Israel: Isn’t it for you to know justice?
2You who hate the good, and love the evil; who tear off their skin, and their flesh from off their bones;
3who also eat the flesh of my people, and peel their skin from off them, and break their bones, and chop them in pieces, as for the pot, and as meat within the cauldron.
4Then they will cry to Yahweh, but he will not answer them. Yes, he will hide his face from them at that time, because they made their deeds evil.”
5Yahweh says concerning the prophets who lead my people astray—for those who feed their teeth, they proclaim, “Peace!” and whoever doesn’t provide for their mouths, they prepare war against him:
6“Therefore night is over you, with no vision, and it is dark to you, that you may not divine; and the sun will go down on the prophets, and the day will be black over them.
7The seers shall be disappointed, and the diviners confounded. Yes, they shall all cover their lips, for there is no answer from God.”
8But as for me, I am full of power by Yahweh’s Spirit, and of judgment, and of might, to declare to Jacob his disobedience, and to Israel his sin.
9Please listen to this, you heads of the house of Jacob, and rulers of the house of Israel, who abhor justice, and pervert all equity,
10who build up Zion with blood, and Jerusalem with iniquity.
11Her leaders judge for bribes, and her priests teach for a price, and her prophets of it tell fortunes for money; yet they lean on Yahweh, and say, “Isn’t Yahweh among us? No disaster will come on us.”
12Therefore Zion for your sake will be plowed like a field, and Jerusalem will become heaps of rubble, and the mountain of the temple like the high places of a forest.