Micah 3:3

"Who also eat the flesh of my people, and flay their skin from off them, and break their bones, and chop them in pieces, as for the pot, and as flesh within the cauldron."

In the protests against violent injustice and wickedness, throughout all history, where is there anything else that compares with the shocking and dramatic words of this passage? The impact of this verse is witnessed even today throughout the world by such idiomatic expressions as, "he skinned me," describing a crooked deal. Micah gave mankind a metaphor here which they found it impossible to forget. There are some intimations that the actual practice of cannibalism was found among the ancient Canaanites, as in the book of Wisdom;[4] and Micah's denunciation could therefore have the effect of charging Israel with complete reversion to that status of unqualified paganism for which God had dispossessed the Canaanites in order to make room for Israel. Hailey summarized this whole passage through Micah 3:4 thus:

"In this highly exaggerated figure, Micah expresses the white heat of his indignation at the treatment dealt the common people by the rulers. Therefore when judgment falls on these heartless rulers and they cry to Jehovah His face will be hid from them. Have they sown, so will they reap. They have destroyed the people without mercy, and so without mercy shall their destruction come."[5]

"Of my people ..." It should not be overlooked that the extreme provocation against the Almighty in such uninhibited wickedness of the princes and judges of Israel lay in the fact of the very people of God being the objects of their rapacious evil. Sins against the covenant people were certain to incur the avenging wrath of God Himself.

Instead of protecting and shepherding the people whom it was their sworn duty to honor and guard against every encroachment upon their rights and liberties, those very nobles and justices were themselves their most savage exploiters. Their attitude reminded Ironside of a statement by Pope Leo X, who said to his companion princes in the church, "What a profitable thing this myth about Jesus Christ has been to us!"[6]