Micah 4:9-10

Distress and subsequent redemption, Micah 4:9-10.

The distant future, the prophet is convinced, will be all brightness and glory, but in the immediate future he can see nothing but gloom and despair. This new section opens with a vision of the agony and despair soon to be felt by the people. The prophet already beholds the destruction and hears the lamentation.

Why dost thou cry out aloud? Addressed is the “daughter of Zion” (Micah 4:10), that is, Jerusalem and its inhabitants. The capital is filled with lamentation over the present or rapidly approaching judgment.

A woman in travail This and similar expressions are used not infrequently in the Old Testament, as expressive of extreme pain and anguish. The questions of Micah 4:9 are meant to be more or less ironical. The prophet knows well enough the reason for the lamentation and the helplessness of king and nobles in such a crisis.

King… counselor There is a king and there are counselors; but in the time of calamity, when they are needed the most, they can do nothing, because one greater than they has caused the distress (see on Hosea 13:10).

Be in pain… Jerusalem may well continue the lamentation, for there can be no immediate relief; and the wail is justified, because the city is desolate; homeless and without protection the inhabitants will camp in the fields, until finally they are carried away into exile. Only after these calamities have been suffered will Jehovah manifest his redemptive powers. The tertium comparationis in the picture is only the pain and anguish; there is no thought of Zion actually bringing forth a child, that is, the Messianic king.

If Micah 4:9-10 were standing by themselves their interpretation would be a very simple matter; but when they are studied with due regard for their context difficulties seem to arise. Micah 4:11-12 picture the enemy gathered around Jerusalem, determined to defile and to destroy the holy city; but the scheme will not succeed; the enemy will be “beaten to pieces,” and Jerusalem will triumph gloriously; and all this will happen without a capture of the city or an exile. Such outlook seems to be in hopeless contradiction with the statements in Micah 4:10, which imply a conquest and an exile, and promise deliverance only after the people have been deported to Babylon. To remove this difficulty the words “and shall come even unto Babylon” are commonly rejected as a later interpolation. But the omission of these words by no means removes the whole difficulty, for the fate foretold in Micah 4:10 still remains very different from that announced in Micah 4:11; in the former there is an expectation of great affliction and suffering, in the latter all is triumph and glory. A more satisfactory solution of the difficulty, and one that requires no textual changes, is to separate Micah 4:9-10 entirely from Micah 4:11 ff., and to consider the oracles as two distinct utterances coming from entirely different periods of Micah’s ministry. At one time, near the fall of Samaria, he expected that Judah, including Jerusalem, would suffer the same fate as Israel (Micah 1:8 ff.; Micah 3:12), but it is not necessary to suppose that he adhered to this view throughout his entire ministry. It is at least possible that in his later years he was influenced by the conviction of his greater contemporary Isaiah that Jerusalem was inviolable (Isaiah 37:33 ff.). That conviction is reflected in 11ff., verses which fit admirably in the period of Sennacherib’s invasion in 701 B.C. (compare Isaiah 36, 37); Micah 4:9-10 would reflect the earlier conviction, expressed so forcibly in chapter 1. These words, then, may have been spoken either before or, better, soon after the fall of Samaria, while that calamity was still fresh in the memory of the prophet, or, perhaps, as late as 711 B.C. (compare Isaiah 20:0), when Sargon sent an expedition against Philistia. The mention of Babylon does not militate against the view that Micah is the author of the words, for the reference does not imply that at the time the words were spoken, Babylon had already displaced Assyria as the great Eastern world power. Babylon is mentioned simply as a place to which the people would be deported. According to 2 Kings 17:24, Sargon settled in the territory of Israel men from Babylon, and this statement is corroborated by Sargon’s own inscription ( Records of the Past, 7: 29). It is only natural to suppose and this would be in perfect accord with Assyrian practice that the depleted territory in the east was filled with exiles from the land of Israel. If this was done we can readily understand how Micah, who expected the people of the south to suffer a fate similar to that of the north, might represent the people of Jerusalem as following their brethren from Samaria to the same place of exile.