When my daughter was young, many of her friends only knew me from church. Their image of me was of someone who preached with emotional intensity and stared the congregation down during long dramatic pauses. “What’s it like living with him?” they’d ask. “He’s so serious!” But my daughter would just scoff at the question; they had no idea what a goofball I could be at home.

Dad jokes, I think, are wired into my DNA (not that I remember my own dad ever cracking one). My brain seems to be ever on the alert for another opportunity for puns and wordplay. Even as I write this, I am snacking from a dish of roasted cashews. My wife passed me in the hallway as I walked toward the study, dish in hand. As she passed, I held the cashews up to my face and glared at them, saying, “Are you nuts?”

Wise woman that she is, she just kept walking.

But wordplay is not always in the service of humor. Micah’s prophecy against Judah is littered with puns, as he plays on the names of cities and towns to predict their downfall. Someone of his time, hearing the prophecy in Hebrew, would have understood this. But to us, reading the prophecy in English, the predictions seem random and strange.

That’s because we suffer from two disadvantages. First, we don’t know Hebrew, and don’t have the Hebrew text in front of us. And second, we don’t typically think of place names as having much meaning or significance in their own right. To get a sense of what Micah is doing, then, imagine someone prophesying the destruction of Los Angeles saying, “Those living in Los Angeles will go to be with the angels,” and doing it with full seriousness. Or imagine this prophecy against my hometown of Oakland: “Oakland will be felled.”

In a similar vein, Micah takes the names of cities, and uses a Hebrew word that sounds like it to foretell their doom. It’s not meant as a joke; far from it. In a culture in which names have meaning and are taken seriously, such a prophecy would sound doubly ominous, as if the fate of a place was already baked into its name and therefore unavoidable.

Here, then, is the first part of the prophecy:

Tell it not in Gath;
    weep not at all.
In Beth Ophrah
    roll in the dust.
Pass by naked and in shame,
    you who live in Shaphir.
Those who live in Zaanan
    will not come out.
Beth Ezel is in mourning;
    it no longer protects you.
Those who live in Maroth writhe in pain,
    waiting for relief,
because disaster has come from the Lord,
    even to the gate of Jerusalem. (Mic 1:10-12, NIV)

Gath sounds like a Hebrew word for “tell.” Ophrah sounds like the word for “dust”; the inhabitants there will roll in the dust in their anguish and sorrow. Shaphir sounds like “beautiful,” but the people there will go naked. Zaanan sounds like “go out,” but its people will be trapped or killed, and may never go out of the city again. Maroth sounds like “bitter”; so their existence will be.

Significantly, this part of the prophecy ends with a reference to Jerusalem, the capital of Judah. Disaster has come even there, even though the very name of the city refers to peace or wholeness (shalom). There will be no peace in the City of Peace.

Eugene Peterson’s translation of the passage in The Message captures the tone of Micah’s wordplay:

Don’t gossip about this in Telltown. Don’t waste your tears.
In Dustville, roll in the dust.
In Alarmtown, the alarm is sounded.
The citizens of Exitburgh will never get out alive.
Lament, Last-Stand City: there’s nothing in you left standing.
The villagers of Bittertown wait in vain for sweet peace.
Harsh judgment has come from God and entered Peace City.

The prophecies needn’t be taken literally, as if people would go naked in Shaphir but not in Maroth, or be trapped in Zaanan but not in Beth Ezel. That would be to miss the point, which is to say with poetic gravity, Disaster is coming; it’s coming for you, and there’s nothing you can do about it. His primary audience is Jerusalem, where he foretells their exile. But as we’ll see in the next post, he’s not done cataloguing the cities that will fall. There’s more ominous wordplay to come.