Woe to the Oppressors
2:1 Woe to those who devise wickedness
and work evil on their beds!
When the morning dawns, they perform it,
because it is in the power of their hand.
2 They covet fields and seize them,
and houses, and take them away;
they oppress a man and his house,
a man and his inheritance.
3 Therefore thus says the Lord:
behold, against this family I am devising disaster, [1]
from which you cannot remove your necks,
and you shall not walk haughtily,
for it will be a time of disaster.
4 In that day they shall take up a taunt song against you
and moan bitterly,
and say, “We are utterly ruined;
he changes the portion of my people;
how he removes it from me!
To an apostate he allots our fields.”
5 Therefore you will have none to cast the line by lot
in the assembly of the Lord.
6 “Do not preach”—thus they preach—and work evil on their beds!
When the morning dawns, they perform it,
because it is in the power of their hand.
2 They covet fields and seize them,
and houses, and take them away;
they oppress a man and his house,
a man and his inheritance.
3 Therefore thus says the Lord:
behold, against this family I am devising disaster, [1]
from which you cannot remove your necks,
and you shall not walk haughtily,
for it will be a time of disaster.
4 In that day they shall take up a taunt song against you
and moan bitterly,
and say, “We are utterly ruined;
he changes the portion of my people;
how he removes it from me!
To an apostate he allots our fields.”
5 Therefore you will have none to cast the line by lot
in the assembly of the Lord.
“one should not preach of such things;
disgrace will not overtake us.”
7 Should this be said, O house of Jacob?
Has the Lord grown impatient? [2]
Are these his deeds?
Do not my words do good
to him who walks uprightly?
8 But lately my people have risen up as an enemy;
you strip the rich robe from those who pass by trustingly
with no thought of war. [3]
9 The women of my people you drive out
from their delightful houses;
from their young children you take away
my splendor forever.
10 Arise and go,
for this is no place to rest,
because of uncleanness that destroys
with a grievous destruction.
11 If a man should go about and utter wind and lies,
saying, “I will preach to you of wine and strong drink,”
he would be the preacher for this people!
2:1-11 Woe to the oppressors
The reproach oracles against Jerusalem’s greedy landowners who loved money (1-5) and its equally greedy false prophets (6-11) are linked by accusing them of greed and of plundering the middle–class (2, 8-9).
2:1-5 Woe to the greedy landowners
The rich had wrested fields from Judah’s ordinary people (1-2), therefore, the LORD will send a hostile army to wrest the promised land from them (3-5). The accused, who plot [plan] evil, are linked to the accuser who is planning disaster and by the repetition of the word fields (2, 4).
1 Micah introduces this doom oracle with prophetic thunder, Woe to. On their beds at night they plan their black deeds, at morning’s light (the time when court met) these legal sharks carry it out, probably by perverting the courts (cf. 7:3) and then forcing their victims off their lands. Ironically, at the time when the oppressed middle–class (see 2:8-9) expected justice, they found fraud and foreclosures from the officials and military elite who had the power to do it. 2 These powerful men covet fields. ‘You shall not covet’ is the only command repeated twice in the Decalogue (Ex. 20:17) and is at the root of the other wrongs against one’s neighbour. The law carefully safeguarded a man’s fields, his permanent inheritance, for in a farming society a man’s freedom and life depend on them.
3-4 As the powerful elite plotted evil against their victim’s fields (2a) and home (2b), so the LORD is planning disaster against this people (3) and their fields (4).
3 As a master enslaves an animal with a yoke, so God, through the Assyrian captors, will overpower the greedy upperclasses so that they cannot save themselves.
4 Their punishment is phrased as a satirical dirge put in the mouth of their enemies: ‘We (i.e wicked landowners) are utterly ruined’. As they ravaged others by taking their fields, so others, using the same ethic that might makes right, take theirs (cf. Mt 26:52). They hypocritically refer to the land as my (i.e. God’s) people’s possession. As they had redistributed plundered fields among themselves, so now [p. 824] their fields are divided up by the enemy (cf. Am. 7:17). V 4b would be better translated ‘How they [the enemies] take away [what] belongs to me [the wealthy landowner]. They assign our fields to rebels [Assyrians].’ God gave the Israelites the land as a trust (Lv. 25:23) to be enjoyed as long as they used it according to the covenant’s designs, but he retained the right to take it away from them if they failed to keep the covenant and give it to their enemies (Lv. 26:33; Dt. 28:49-68).
5 Therefore links the landowners’ immediate loss of land (4) with their future and eternal loss of land, the severest judgment of all. When God returns the remnant to the land (4:7), these greedy traitors will have no–one in the assembly of the LORD to represent them when he again divides the land by the sacred lot as he did in the beginning through priests (Nu. 26:55).
2:6-11 False prophets support the greedy landowners. 6 Do not prophesy is plural. The false prophets, the liberal theologians of Micah’s day, address him and other true prophets, telling them not to predict these things, i.e. the judgment foretold in vs 3-5.
7 The LORD rebukes the house of Jacob by quoting their doubly false theology that ‘the LORD never grows impatient’ (NIV, angry) and never does such things (i.e. bring judgment). On the contrary, God’s words do good only to those who are upright.
8-9 God elaborates upon Micah’s accusation in v 2. Israel’s free farmers should have felt as secure as men returning from battle. Instead, these defenceless farmers, says the Lord, find my people (an ironic reference to the powerful, as the rest of the verse shows) have risen up like an enemy against them. You, presumably referring to the wealthy landowners supported by the false prophets, destroy Israel’s formerly prosperous families, men, women and children. You strip off the rich robe from the unsuspecting men (8), drive the women... from their pleasant homes and take away God’s rich blessing from their children (9). The Lord’s wealth, once spread across the breadth of the nation, is now concentrated in the hands of the rich predators.
10 God now hands down the sentence against the rich landowners, probably using the very words they used to drive the innocent off their lands: Get up, go away! They must leave their resting place, the place of their physical and spiritual well–being. The reason is now given. By their idolatry and immorality the land is defiled and so it spits them out (cf. Lv. 18:25), it has become a sickening ruin beyond all remedy. 11 In response to the Lord’s sentence, Micah scathingly and sarcastically taunts the land–owners. They are willing to accept as a prophet anyone who joins them in their greed. Such a false prophet is not merely deluded, he is a liar and deceiver. Wine and beer were favourite themes of these carnal rulers, who indulge their swollen appetites with a greed condemned by true prophets (Is. 5:11-12; 28:7-8; cf. Am. 4:1) and warned against by the wise (Pr. 20:1; 23:20-21; 31:4-7). A false prophet who preaches a ‘wealth and prosperity’ gospel, not holiness, is just the prophet for this people. The very prophet they deserve!
Consider:-
Ask God's Spirit to search you. Are you willing to hear the truth even if it is painful?
How can you be better at hearing the truth even when it is painful?
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