Leaders and prophets oppress the people
1 Then I said, “You rulers of the house of Israel, is it not your duty to know what is right?
2 Yet you hate good and love evil, you tear the skin from my people and the flesh from their bones.
3 Those who eat my people’s flesh and break their bones to pieces, who chop them up like meat for the pan and share them like flesh for the pot,
4 when they cry, Yahweh will not answer. He will hide his face from them because of their evil deeds.”
5 This is what Yahweh says of the prophets who lead my people astray:
5 You cry: “Peace” when you have something to eat, but to anyone with nothing for your mouths, it is “War” that you declare.
6 So night will come to you without vision, and darkness without divination. Then sun will set for the prophets and the day will be dark for them.
7 Then the seers will be disgraced and the diviners put to shame. They will all cover their faces because no answer will come from God.
8 But as for me, I am filled with might, with the spirit of Yahweh, with justice and courage, to declare to Jacob his transgressions, to Israel his sins.
9 Hear this, leaders of the nation of Jacob, rulers of the house of Israel, you who despise justice and pervert what is right,
10 you who build Zion with blood and Jerusalem with crime.
11 Her leaders judge for a bribe, her priests prophesy for money, and yet they rely on Yahweh and say, “Is Yahweh not in our midst? No evil, then, will come upon us.”
12 Therefore, because of you, Zion will become a field, Jeru salem will be a heap of ruins and the temple mount a forest with sacred stones.
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Comments Micah, Chapter 3
• 3.1 He denounces those who are mainly responsible: the civil and the religious authorities.
There were prophets everywhere; they became prophets in the way some one is elected to a parti cular po sition. They practiced private consultation regarding a person’s future and good luck. The role of a true prophet does not consist in getting people, who pay him for his visions and his dreams, out of trouble, but rather in denouncing evil.
Verses 9-11 again accuse the leaders and the civil servants who feel sheltered from the misery and from the disasters scourging the country. The long-standing confidence in Jeru salem, a city protected by Yahweh, reassures them in their false peace: for this reason Jerusalem will be destroyed. Eighty years after this curse, Jeremiah’s contemporaries had not forgotten it (Jer 26:18).