For all of his adult life, David had been pursued and persecuted by King Saul. You might think that when he received word that Saul had fallen in battle with the Philistines, David would have felt relieved or vindicated. We might even forgive him if he had said, “Well, it serves him right, that miserable sinner.”

But as we’ve seen, that’s not what he did. He openly lamented the death of Saul and his son Jonathan, David’s friend. “How the mighty have fallen!” (2 Sam 1:19b, 25, 27, NIV) he moaned, not once, but three times, speaking as if Israel had lost a great and admirable king. His lament says nothing of Saul’s injustice toward him. Quite the contrary. He has the Amalekite who brought him the news executed, because the Amalekite had dared to kill the one anointed by God as king — even though the mortally wounded Saul was the one who asked him to do it.

“How the mighty have fallen!” David laments. Likewise, the book of Proverbs teaches that “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall. Better to be lowly in spirit along with the oppressed than to share plunder with the proud” (16:18-19).

Contrast all this with how Micah describes the land barons of Jerusalem, those who lie awake at night arrogantly dreaming up new ways to make money even if it oppresses the poor. What will the judge say? What sentence will be passed for such crimes?

Micah, as the mouthpiece of God, gives Jerusalem the bad news. He opens with “Therefore, the LORD says,” a common way to introduce a divine oracle. And what the LORD says is this:

“I am planning disaster against this people,
    from which you cannot save yourselves.
You will no longer walk proudly,
    for it will be a time of calamity.” (Mic 2:3)

The arrogant aren’t the only ones who make plans; God makes plans, too, and his plan for them is disaster. The Hebrew suggests not only that they won’t be able to save themselves, but that they won’t be able to save their “necks.” Whereas now they’re able to strut and crow about their accomplishments, that time is coming to an end. Indeed, they will become an object of ridicule:

“In that day people will ridicule you;
    they will taunt you with this mournful song:
‘We are utterly ruined;
    my people’s possession is divided up.
He takes it from me!
    He assigns our fields to traitors.'” (vs. 4)

The wording suggests that these formerly proud people will become proverbial in their downfall, as when parents tell their children cautionary tales, wagging their fingers and warning, “Don’t you be like so-and-so. You know what happened to him.” The Hebrew also says that people will, literally, “lament with a bitter lamentation” — but translators take this as a “taunt” in part because of the way it sounds in Hebrew, which would be something like, “Nah-hah, neh-hee, nee-yah.”

English translation? Nyaah, nyaah, nyaah.

People will even mock the way the powerful and arrogant mourn their fate, as if they were to cry out, “Ah, woe is me! We’re ruined, ruined! God has taken away our inheritance, taken away what’s mine! He has taken our fields and given them away to traitors.”

Wait…”our” fields? “Our” inheritance? Wasn’t Micah’s accusation that they were defrauding other people of their inheritance? It may be an indication of how deep the corruption has gone — they have used their power to oppress and cheat others, but when the bill comes due for their wickedness, they believe that they themselves are the ones being wronged.

There’s some difference of opinion regarding who the “traitors” are. Did someone sell them out? Are they referring to the lowly people who will be left in the land while they get deported? Is it the invading Babylonians themselves?

Who knows? But to me, this may just be another indication of how their self-righteous arrogance and moral blindness will be mocked by others after they’ve been dragged away to Babylon.

Micah ends the oracle with a solemn declaration: “Therefore you will have no one in the assembly of the LORD to divide the land by lot” (Mic 2:5). There are different ways to take this. Eugene Peterson, for example, reads it as a reference to the heavenly court where God presides, with the message being, “There will be no one to defend you before God.”

But others take this as a reference to some ceremonial redistribution of the land. If that’s what’s meant, then the message is more like, “You spent so much time and energy grabbing what land you could. And now, when the people gather to redistribute it, no one will be watching out for your interests.”

How the mighty, the powerful, the proud, the arrogant have fallen. Somewhere, somehow, they lost sight of the fact that the land belonged to the LORD, that their true “inheritance” was not a plot of earth but a relationship with the God who called them to be a just and righteous people.

So what Micah would ask us, I think, is “What inheritance do you care about?”