Micah

Micah is a countryman and a prophet, and his home is at Moresheth, a green and fertile region. He delivers his message and speaks for the poor, speaking in fact as one of them. He is horrified at what he sees of the luxurious and degenerate life of the city, and he realizes that he and his fellow peasants are paying for this lifestyle. His concern is for justice, justice between men and a right attitude towards God. Micah does not offer political advice but instead offers a message that is religious and ethical. He paints a terrible picture of the way ordinary justice has disintegrated from the abuse of power by the judges and because of the prevalence of bribery of officials. He also describes how the needy and the poor are being exploited by the rich landowners who squeeze out those unable to meet their exorbitant demands. The land is beset as a result by misery and degradation. The lust for money has invaded the religious sphere as well, and even the priest and the prophet are accustomed to favoring the rich and browbeating the poor. Micah is angry with righteous indignation, and he sees the evils of society in the heartless exploitation of the weak by the strong and in a general failure to grasp the meaning of true religion. After all, obedience to the laws of God is a necessity for rich and poor alike.

Micah contains some of the earliest writing we have from the Old Testament. Micah was a contemporary of Isaiah, but unlike Isaiah, who is associated with Jerus

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he past, some critics were skeptical about the Mican authorship of one passage, 6:1-8, and this was largely because they believed that the literary qualities of the passage were somewhat above what the rustic Judahite could have accomplished on his own. Today we recognize that the passage has made use of set formulas and traditional liturgical language that would have been at Micah's disposal and that the content of this passage is appropriate to the era of Micah and not to a later period as previously believed. One of the chief problems with the text has been the issue of how much of the content is by the prophet and how much wa added by later generations. The original view was that the entire work was by Micah, but since 1850 there has been a tendency to challenge this assumption. However, there is little agreement on which sections have been added by other hands. The period of growth for the manuscript covered some 500 years, from the time some collector edited what was available of the addresses into a manuscript shortly after 700 B.C. until the collection became regarded as sacred scripture somewhere around 200 B.C. After that date, it was considered unalterable text, and no further additions were permissible. Micah is

Category: Philosophy - M