I. Authorship And Date, Historical Setting

A. Authorship and Date

Micah has been called “the defender of the poor,” “the prophet of the coming Deliverer,” and “the common man’s prophet.” We know nothing of Micah’s parents or of his family. We can only conclude that he lived close to his people in a small country village. His “fearless and courageous spirit is of one who is indignant over the corruption and heartlessness of inhuman rulers and time-serving religionists” (Hailey, 186).

The name Micah means “Who is like Jehovah” (also spelled Micaiah, with the same meaning). His home was at Moresheth (1:1, 14), a town on the border between Judah and Philistia, twenty to twenty-five miles southwest of Jerusalem. Beit-Jebrin now occupies the site of the ancient village. Ashdod and Gaza were more than twenty miles away; Bethlehem was nineteen; Hebron thirteen; and Tekoa, the home of Amos in the wilderness of Judea, was seventeen miles east. Both Tekoa and Moresheth produced men of deep conviction, compassion, courage, and independence.

Micah may have been a tiller of the soil, for Moresheth Gath (1:14) is in the Shephelah, which lies between the hill country of Judah and the Philistine plain. This is a fertile low range of hills adorned with streams of water, cornfields, olive groves, and grassland for cattle. Shepherds and farmers still call to each other across the valleys or call to their livestock. The men in Jerusalem could not possibly know the mind of men who were in love with the soil. Micah was so detached from city life that he could objectively predict for Jehovah the ruin and doom of his nation (Smith, 1:403).

Micah is the sixth of twelve minor prophets in the Hebrew canon but third in the Septuagint (LXX), following Amos and Hosea. “This LXX arrangement may have been by size, but in Micah’s case it is also chronologically in third place as a younger contemporary of Hosea and Amos” (Smith, 1:383).

Micah dates his ministry during the days of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, or roughly the forty-year period from 740-700 b.c. Jotham succeeded his father, Uzziah, who had reigned for fifty-two years in Jerusalem (2Ch 26:3). Jotham’s reign was from 739 to 731 B.C., then Ahaz his son was king from 731 to 715 b.c. Ahaz was followed by his son Hezekiah.

Amos had been silent for about thirty years, Hosea for about fifteen, and Isaiah was halfway through his career. Micah had a passion for justice like Amos plus a heart of love like Hosea. His concern was not for politics but for spiritual and moral problems. In contrast Isaiah was in close contact with the city and world affairs, an associate of kings and princes. Both Micah and Isaiah saw the absolute holiness and majesty of God. They saw him as the infinite ruler of nations and men. To violate God’s sovereignty and holiness would surely bring down his wrath and inevitable doom.

When Jeremiah was in danger of being put to death for his faithful words of prophecy, he wrote that some of the elders of the land stepped forward and cited Micah’s prophecy made during the days of Hezekiah. Then the elders asked whether Hezekiah or anyone else in Judah put Micah to death because of his prediction of Zion’s fall (26:18-19). The answer was obvious, so Jeremiah’s life was spared (v.24). This reference substantiates the date of Micah, for the reign of Hezekiah extended from 715 to 687 B.C., during which at least part of his prophecy would have been written (Hailey, 187).

Although critics insist that interpolations have been made in the text, there is no conclusive reason why Micah cannot be the total work of the man whose name it bears. Gray and Adams state that “Micah’s style is forceful, pointed and concise, frequently animated and sublime. The abrupt transitions with which the book abounds suggest that Micah, like most of the prophets, was founded mainly on discourse or notes of discourse composed on various occasions” (3:797).

B. Historical Setting

Some time just after Samaria’s doom had occurred (722 b.c.), while it was still going on, or while its destruction was imminent, Micah cried out that Judah, too, was doomed. The feeling seems to be too intense, the emotion too vividly portrayed for the opening words of Micah to have been made late in Hezekiah’s reign. The Assyrian attacks under Shalmaneser or Sargon on Samaria and on the fortified cities of Judah were occasions when Micah could well have mourned the eventful fall of Jerusalem. When Judah was still intact in the reign of Hezekiah but shaking in the aftershock of Samaria’s defeat, this fearless prophet stood in sight of the Assyrian armies and attacked the sins of his people. He said they would suffer the same fate as Samaria as a judgment of God.

Micah gave no hope for Jerusalem. He was overwhelmed with a sense of danger and mourned over what the leaders had done to bring on the doom of the capital. Social problems had been felt by people in rural areas even before those in the cities, because wealthy, land-hungry men had descended on country districts. They made the poor their debtors and robbed or bought their land for a small price. These reckless plutocrats inflicted injustice and economic plunder in the country with no one to cry out in their defense until God gave voice to Micah. The rich were quick to tell the prophet that his sentence on the nation and on themselves was absurd and impossible (Smith, 407, 415, 418).