Prophecy. Many of us, as believers, are a little ill at ease reading the Old Testament prophets. In truth, so am I. It’s one thing to read stories, say, of Abraham, or Moses, or David. But the whole genre of prophecy can feel alien. It can be challenging, for example, to connect with the metaphors and images the prophets use; even Martin Luther wrote of their “queer way of talking.” And there’s so much doom and gloom, so many dire predictions of coming calamities!

It’s not how most people want to start their day.

We should remember, though, that what we call the “Old” Testament was the only Scripture the characters and authors of the “New” Testament had. For them, prophecy was the word of God. Think of how often Jesus quoted from the prophet Isaiah; he saw himself as fulfilling what Isaiah and other prophets had written several centuries before. That’s not to say that we should read the prophets as if their only or even main purpose was to point forward to the coming of Jesus. It wasn’t. But if we don’t read the New Testament with at least some understanding of its continuity with the Old, our reading will be impoverished. In this post, therefore, we begin a study of Micah, one of the so-called Minor Prophets and a contemporary of Isaiah.

Micah is probably best known for two passages. The first is the one quoted to King Herod by his advisors, when he was trying to locate the child born to be King of the Jews:

But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah,
    though you are small among the clans of Judah,
out of you will come for me
    one who will be ruler over Israel,
whose origins are from of old,
    from ancient times. (Micah 5:2, NIV)

The second is closer to the end of the book, where Micah is condemning the emptiness and hypocrisy of the people’s worship:

He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
    And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
    and to walk humbly with your God. (6:8)

Indeed, this verse does a nice job of summarizing Micah’s main concern as a prophet: the lack of justice among his people. We should probably think of the book as not having been written all at once; it is more likely a collection of oracles given over time. But the theme of injustice carries through, as God thunders at his people at length for their disobedience. And yet, even with all the doom and gloom, the book offers rays of a future hope, a hope that would eventually be fulfilled in Jesus.

Micah’s own origins may help us understand his motives as a prophet. The opening verse identifies him as “Micah of Moresheth.” Micah is a shortened form of the name Micaiah, which means “Who is like Yahweh?” Moresheth was a village that lay in the lowlands southwest of Jerusalem, halfway to the Mediterranean coast.

It is impossible to know Micah’s background with any certainty, but scholars believe he was of humble origins, and may have been a peasant farmer. Even if he was not himself a farmer, being from Moresheth meant that he would have seen firsthand how the farmers around him lived. Jerusalem was rife with corruption, and the rural poor suffered from the selfish, land-grabbing habits of the rich. Micah, therefore, is no passive conduit of divine condemnation; he sees and feels the economic injustice against which he rails.

If it’s not too strange, I like to think of Isaiah and Micah as the Batman and Robin of prophets who cried out to Jerusalem and the kingdom of Judah. Bruce Wayne, you’ll remember, was a prominent millionaire. Similarly, in contrast to Micah, Isaiah seems to have been of noble background. For these two prophets, Jerusalem was their Gotham, and both crusaded against corruption and injustice.

Thus, when we read the prophets, we can’t just treat them as fortune-tellers. “Prophecy,” in the biblical sense, refers primarily to knowledge given from God for the correction or edification of his people — which is precisely why the apostle Paul values the gift of prophecy so highly in 1 Corinthians 14. True, prophecy often contains predictions about the future. But the larger context is that prophecy is a direct word from God for the here and now.

Let’s begin, then, by trying to locate Micah in his own historical time and place. And conveniently, as we’ll see, that’s exactly where the book begins.