Verses 1-12

Wickedness in High Places

Micah returns to his indictment against the people's leaders. Their power was given for the sake of justice, and they have abused it for extortion (Micah 3:1-3). Their time shall be short (Micah 3:4). The prophets have abused their trust in order, by flattery of the rich, to make a good living for themselves. To them Micah prophesies judicial darkness (Micah 3:5-7). He declares his own ideal of the prophetic office (Micah 3:8). Finally, he accuses all the leaders of the nation of having followed their own appetites. and trusted in their being necessary to God. God will prove by the ruin of Jerusalem that He loves righteousness more than' Jerusalem (Micah 3:9-12).

1. Is it not for you, etc.] i.e. is it not the reason for your holding power, to declare right to the people?

2. From off them] i.e. the common people.

4. When God comes to judgment, they will find no mercy.

5. That bite with their teeth, and cry. Peace] i.e. any one who fills the prophet's mouth secures his silence about his patron's sins.

6. Judicial darkness shall fall on these prophets. When men play fast and loose with principle for the sake of money, they lose all sense of principle. Right and duty become empty words.

7. Cover their lips] a sign of mourning: cp. Leviticus 13:45; Ezekiel 24:17, Ezekiel 24:22.

8. Micah's ideal of the prophet's function, viz. to call sin by its right name.

10. i.e. they make the common people sweat blood to build their mansions in the capital.

11. Is not the Lord among us?] the same mechanical faith in the presence of the Temple as in Jeremiah 7:4 : cp. 1 Samuel 4:3.

12. Cp. Jeremiah 26:17-19. The people of Jeremiah's time, angered by his prophecies of disaster, wished to put him to death. Some of the elders reminded them that, when Micah denounced a like judgment, Hezekiah, instead of killing him, repented at his words, and so averted the disaster. This implies that the religious minds of that time recognised how true prophecy is always conditional, and how the fulfilment of its predictions is conditional on the attitude men take to them. High places of the forest] better, 'heights in a wood.' The slopes of the ravines shall be overgrown with brushwood, out of which the bare scalp of the Temple-hill will rise.